Open range: Traditional knowledge of Inner Asian nomadic pastoralists and its contribution to bio-cultural conservation

This dissertation provides a geographical investigation of the bio-cultural sustainability of the nomadic pastoralist, agricultural, and urban-industrial cultural complexes on Inner Asian temperate grasslands. The practical purpose of this dissertation is to advance an epistemological and geographical argument that the resident nomadic pastoral cultures and the grasslands of Inner Asia need to be conserved simultaneously as a landscape in order to achieve the goal of bio-culturally sustainable conservation in this region of Eurasia. Specifically, I outline a new approach to temperate grassland conservation through an investigation of how the tradition of Inner Asian nomadic pastoralism actually has fostered, and should continue to foster, the bio-culturally sustainable occupation of this grassland landscape by humans. I argue that the Inner Asian nomadic pastoralists have developed, and have consciously implemented, a way of life that has allowed them to inhabit their grassland landscape for millennia without any significant negative biocultural impacts on landscape processes or inhabitants. Further, I argue that this nomadic pastoral tradition can, and should, provide us with a theory and practice of conservation whose implementation would result in the protection and/or re-creation of bio-culturally sustainable landscapes and landscape processes on temperate grasslands in Inner Asia and elsewhere, i.e., on the temperate grasslands of North and South America. I conclude this dissertation with an outline for future research in the theory and practice of the conservation of temperate grasslands. In particular, I suggest how this Inner Asian tradition of nomadic pastoralism provides a social and cultural basis for supporting and supplementing new scientific understandings (at least, new for the agricultural and urban traditions) of the role of complexity on temperate grassland landscapes.