Abstract
Eurasia contains the world's largest contiguous rangelands, grazed for millennia by mobile pastoralists' livestock. This paper reviews evidence from one Eurasian country, Kazakhstan, on how nomadic pastoralism developed from some 5,000 years ago to the present. We consider a timespan covering pre-industrial, socialist and capitalist periods, during which pastoral social formations were organized in terms of kinship, collective state farms, and private farms and ranches. The aim is to understand how events over the last 100 years have led to the sequential dissolution and re-formation of the social units necessary to manage livestock across a wide expanse of spatially heterogenous and seasonally variable rangeland ecosystems. It is argued that the social scale of extensive livestock management must be tailored to the geographical scale of biotic and abiotic conditions. The paper starts by pointing out the long duration of mobile pastoralism in the Kazakh rangelands and provides an overview of how events from the late 17th C onwards unraveled the relationships between Kazakh nomads' socio-economic units of livestock management and the rangeland environment. At present, mobile animal husbandry is not feasible for the majority of Kazakh livestock owners, who operate solely within small family units without state support. These reformulated post-Soviet livestock grazing patterns are still undergoing rapid change, influencing the composition of rangeland vegetation, wildlife biodiversity, and rates of carbon sequestration. By concentrating capital and landed resources, a minority of large-scale pastoralists have been able to re-extensify by combining mobility with selective intensification, including an increased reliance on cultivated feed. Current state and international efforts are leaving out the majority of small-scale livestock owners and their livestock who are unable to either intensify or extensify at sufficient scale, increasing environmental damage, and social inequality.
Highlights
The Eurasian rangelands contain spatially heterogenous, seasonally variable and climatically unstable natural resources extending over large geographical scales (Matley, 1994a)
The floral and faunal biodiversity and landscape conditions present in the Eurasian rangelands is an outcome of millennia of human use through mobile livestock husbandry (Spengler, 2014), in combination with climate change, the adoption of new technologies, and changing socio-political institutions
This paper examines the historical record over the last two centuries and outlines how pastoralist livestock management and land use systems in Kazakhstan have been altered by changes in socio-political institutions and economies
Summary
The Eurasian rangelands contain spatially heterogenous, seasonally variable and climatically unstable natural resources extending over large geographical scales (Matley, 1994a). Humans have been able to exploit these resources by matching the geographical scale of environmental variability with appropriate socio-political institutions for herding domesticated grazing animals on an extensive basis. These rangelands comprise the world’s largest contiguous. The floral and faunal biodiversity and landscape conditions present in the Eurasian rangelands is an outcome of millennia of human use through mobile livestock husbandry (Spengler, 2014), in combination with climate change, the adoption of new technologies, and changing socio-political institutions. Sustaining the rangeland heterogeneity will require livestock-keepers to continue operating at scale, as documented by the environmental impacts of current declines in livestock mobility
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
