The Space-time Comparison Of Environmental Impacts For Different Lifestyles In Northwest China Ethnic Areas

Along with the shift of western humanities and social sciences, the research of environmental impact for different lifestyles is becoming an important field of environmental sociology and ecological economics. This article took Dingxi, Gannan and Linxia as examples of China's northwest areas which relate to the whole country's ecological safety and ethnic unity steady, and analyzed the environmental impact of different lifestyles in these areas.These three areas are located in the upstream of the Yellow River and the Yangtze River. From the view of natural conditions, they belong to Loess Plateau, Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, and their transition zone,From the view of culture background, they belong to Han Confucian culture, Tibetan Buddhist culture, and Hui Islamic culture,From the view of lifestyle, they belong to agricultural lifestyle, Tibetan farming-grazing lifestyle, and a lifestyle in between. No matter which view we analyzed, these three areas are typically representative of the Northwest China.So far, the relevant studies of environmental impacts for different lifestyles in northwest ethnic area are mostly focused on a single national area, using qualitative, as well as few quantitative methods. However, the field of combining time series analysis and contrast studies is still blank. This article started with an analysis of different cultures in the three ethnic areas, and combined with theory and methods of environmental economics, ecological economics, and environmental sociology to do the research. Observation and interview methods are used to do qualitative research, ecological footprint methods are used to do quantitative research. Besides, neural network are used to do combined qualitative and quantitative researches. With these above methods, the environmental impact was studied on a multiple spatial and temporal scales, which may provide scientific evidence for promoting excellent traditional culture and constructing the harmonious society, give advices to decision-makers, and fill the blank of theory research for relevant fields.This paper is divided into nine chapters. Chapter 1 introduced the research background, proposed research methods, ideas and technical route. Chapter 2 gave a literature review of related previous studies, based on the analysis of strengths and weakness of others'work, the author defined the aims and specificity of the work for this article.Chapter 3 gave some basic information about the three ethnic areas, and compared their different lifestyles. In Chapter4, chapter 5 and chapter 6, the author used ecological footprint theory, combined with time series data, analyzed environmental impact of different lifestyles in Dingxi, Gannan, and Linxia respectively, from micro to macro scale.Chapter 7 compared the ecological footprint of the three ethnic areas from multiple perspectives, and used neural network GNN model to predict their future development trend. Chapter 8 summarized the regularity of environmental impact for different lifestyles based on the previous analysis, and put forward the measures to build an environment-friendly society in nationalities regions of west China. Also, prospect of next study for this work is proposed.Results and findings for this work are listed as following. Firstly, local residents impact environment through substance factors such as dress, diet, habitation, energy-using etc, and spiritual factors such as taboo, attitude etc. The stronger substance factors are, the bigger negative impact on environment, but however, the greater the spiritual factors, the greater protection impact on environment. For the impact on environment for substance factors, diet accounted for more than 80%, which implies that as meat in the dietary structure is increasing, the impact of diet on environment is increasing too.Secondly, environmental impacts for different life styles are concerned with geography positions for these three areas. Dingxi is located on the ancient Silk Road in Loess plateau area, and it has fused in the Han agriculture culture very early, which shows that agriculture life style has little impacts on the environment. Gannan is located on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, broadly and isolated from the outside world. And the farming-grazing lifestyle is just like in the primitive society, has no big change for a long time, which impacted the environment greatly. Linxia is located at the intermediate belt of the Loess plateau and the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, where the Han agriculture culture and the Tibetan farming-grazing culture blends into each other, and the environmental impact for different life styles is between the above two.Thirdly, the production mode has great influence on lifestyle, and the lifestyle under agriculture production mode has less effect on the environment than the farming-grazing production mode. Dingxi has formed a special dietary structure in which cooked wheaten food is the main components, implies that environment has greater capacity to carry a larger population. The farming-grazing production mode in Gannan formed a carnivorous dietary structure, which made Gannan bear the smallest population with the relatively largest land area. Linxia has chose trade as an approach to relieve the local environmental pressure, because of the limited environmental capacity and a big population. Fourthly, environmental impacts for different life styles are related to their development phases for the three areas. Since the three areas entered into their industrial time from nearly 1980, they has experienced not only great improvements on their social, economic aspects, but also experienced great pressure for their impact on the environment. During 1980 to 1990, this trend continued. However, after 1991, things changed a lot, and 1991-2000 can be seen as a stable time for environmental impact. During this time period, many environment problems happened and people began to pay attention to their actions.2001 was a problem-breaking-out time. At this time, the hysteresis effects of human actions on environment for the past twenty years came out, and the pressure for environment increased suddenly. Linxia was facing to a large scale of zoology deficit, Dingxi was closed to the environment renovating capability, and Gannan's affection on environment increase again.