Promised land
As the push to resettle the nomads of the Tibetan plateau intensifies, their ancient culture looks as fragile as the terrain it once ruled. Words and pictures by Kieran Dodds
''Education will ruin our culture," laments Dorje, a Tibetan teacher describing how compulsory education is driving the resettlement of nomads. "These lifestyles are endangered. You rarely see people on horseback nowadays."
The Tibetan plateau - covering most of the Tibet Autonomous Region and Qinghai province, as well as part of Ladakh, in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir - is the planet's third pole, its waters affecting the lives of 40 per cent of the world's population.
The Sanjiangyuan (or "Three Rivers Headwaters") Nature Reserve acts as China's water tower. Covering 363,000 square kilometres at an average elevation of 4,000 metres, it is also home to the last Tibetan nomads.
"The waters from Sanjiangyuan sustain life for 600 million people downstream but in recent years this vast water tower has been under threat," says Marc Foggin, a conservation biologist at the NGO Plateau Perspectives, who has studied life on the plateau for 15 years. "And what affects China, affects the world."
That threat is environmental degradation. In 2000, officials panicked when they found dried-up lakebeds and grasslands turning to desert near the source of the Yellow River, in Guoluo county, Qinghai. The Yellow and Yangtze rivers function as China's two major arteries, flowing through its industrial heartland. The third of the "three rivers", the Mekong, also flows through Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. The future of China and Southeast Asia depends on how this water source is managed.
Climate change is thought to be the main cause of rangeland degradation, with the plateau warming at twice the world average, helped in part by China having overtaken the United States as the world's largest polluter in 2007. Officials, however, also blame a burrowing mammal called a pika - and the overgrazing of nomadic herds.