By Ruth Padel
Ancient Chinese tradition and modern scientific thinking both respect the tiger’s role in protecting wild nature. Farming the big cat, writes poet Ruth Padel, ruins China’s reputation abroad.
One of China’s oldest traditions is its respect for wild nature. Love for nature shines from the early Chinese art, which my grandfather, Sir Alan Barlow, an expert on Chinese pottery, taught me to love. And the tiger, which originated in China, is the emblem of wild nature. Only Chinese art has, from the beginning, painted tigers without reference to people. Not tigers as hunted by men, but tigers alone in the wild. As in the motif of “happy tiger in bamboo.” The tiger enjoying its forest solitude.
From 2000 to 2004, I walked in every type of forest where tigers still live – in India, Bangladesh, Laos, Sumatra, Nepal, Bhutan, Russia and China. In the snowy mountains of Hunchun Tiger Reserve, China, I followed with scientists and conservationists the footprints of dongbei hu, the north-east tiger. I also met local people whose cows are eaten by dongbei hu. These people pray to Shanshen, protector of the mountains, often represented with a tiger companion. I stood with a farmer who pours wine to Shanshen in his backyard altar.
There are many ways of being civilised. People who live in cities need to respect people like this farmer who live close to the wild and who, in their turn, respect the tiger as guardian and protector of wild nature. Their beliefs agree with the most developed modern scientific understanding: that human beings need a healthy environment, that forests are the best guarantee of a country’s physical health, protecting the country’s water, soil and air supplies, and that if the tigers which evolved in those forests still live in them, these are healthy forests, which mean a healthy human environment.
In Shanghai, giving a poetry reading, I learned from my audience about the Chinese writer Lu Xun, who promoted the works of Charles Darwin in the 1920s. I realised that China is one of the very few major powers in the world whose population has total respect for Darwin. Nobody in China questions that evolution is the foundation of biology. Thanks to Darwin, modern biologists know that tigers belong in the forest where they evolved as solitary forest animals. Conserving them properly means conserving wild tigers in their natural environment, the forest.
Conserving tigers in their wild environment helps to conserve human spiritual as well as physical health. “If enjoyment of nature should end, who would understand what all this means?” said Xie Lingyun (385–433), one of China’s first nature poets, in his Mountain Poems. By “all this,” Xie meant human life as well as the world: ourselves-in-our-environment. In philosophy and poetry, as well as in art, Chinese civilisation understood, earlier than anybody, that human beings need wild nature to exist for itself, even if we do never actually enter the wild ourselves: that civilised human life depends on a balance of wild and tame.
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