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Many readers from the West have never been to Tibet, and yet they have an idealized vision in their minds of what it contains: lamas clad in crimson robes, herds of yaks peacefully roaming the land, and colorful temples shrouded in mist. Degraded grasslands and fenced-off grazing zones don’t usually fit into that vision. In a feature article for Nature, “Trouble in Tibet,” Jane Qiu challenges such romanticized notions, explaining how Chinese government policies have led to nomads being relocated and steel meshes being erected along grassland slopes. Scientists now contend that such policies, while ostensibly aimed at restoring the health of the grasslands, have instead hurt the area.
The logistical issues with reporting a story like this cannot be overemphasized. Writing about the Tibetan Plateau presents an array of practical challenges—starting with altitude sickness. Beginning her journey in Qinghai province, Qiu hired a driver and embarked on a 4,700-kilometer (2,900-mile) trek over difficult terrain. (Be sure to read the Q&A, where Qiu details how she set up this piece, along with some of the hurdles she encountered along the way.) En route to her final destination of Lhasa, Qiu interviewed nomads, local researchers, government officials, and scientists with a broader global perspective.
This journey becomes an effective framing device for the article, guiding the reader through pertinent research on the area. Qiu’s trip also mirrors the intellectual arc of the story; she helpfully switches from one topic to the next as she covers geographical ground. The result is a piece that packs a great deal of dense research into an engaging framework.
Ultimately, Qiu makes a strong argument for why readers outside the area should care about environmental degradation in Tibet. As a climate change hotspot and the site of the headwaters for three of Asia’s major rivers, Tibet is a bellwether for environmental conditions elsewhere.
Story Annotation
“Trouble in Tibet”
Rapid changes in Tibetan grasslands are threatening Asia’s main water supply and the livelihood of nomads.
By Jane Qiu, Nature
Published January 13, 2016
(Text and graphic reprinted with permission. Special thanks to Jane Qiu for the use of photos published with this Storygram.)
In the northern reaches of the Tibetan Plateau, dozens of yaks graze on grasslands that look like a threadbare carpet. The pasture has been munched down to bare soil in places, and deep cracks run across the snow-dusted landscape. The animals’ owner, a herder named Dodra, emerges from his home wearing a black robe, a cowboy hat and a gentle smile tinged with worry.After nicely setting the scene with the first two sentences of this paragraph, Qiu zooms in to the micro level with Dodra, who helps guide us into the issue of grasslands health. The phrase “smile tinged with worry” hints at the tension to come.
“The pastures are in a bad state and lack the kind of plants that make livestock strong and grow fat,” says Dodra. “The yaks are skinny and produce little milk.”
His family of eight relies on the yaks for most of its livelihood — milk, butter, meat and fuel. Dodra was forced to give up half of his animals a decade ago,Qiu seamlessly works in these spare, telling details, but they likely required an extensive interview and time spent with the source—a good reminder to gather as much detail as possible when reporting, even when you don’t think you’ll need it. when the Chinese government imposed strict limits on livestock numbers. Although his family receives financial compensation, nobody knows how long it will last.This short phrase neatly builds the tension in the piece. All is not well on the plateau, and the precarious arrangement that has been reached with herders—financial compensation—may not endure.
“We barely survive these days,” he says. “It’s a hand-to-mouth existence.” If the grasslands continue to deteriorate, he says, “we will lose our only lifeline”.
The challenges that face Dodra and other Tibetan herders are at odds with glowing reports from Chinese state media about the health of Tibetan grasslandsThis paragraph helps build tension in the piece. Qiu could have skipped directly to the research showing that policies are harming the environment, but by first explaining the narrative promoted by Chinese state media, she sets up an argument that the reader can assume will be dissected in the story that follows. — an area of 1.5 million square kilometres — and the experiences of the millions of nomads there. Since the 1990s, the government has carried out a series of policies that moved once-mobile herders into settlements and sharply limited livestock grazing. According to the official account, these policies have helped to restore the grasslands and to improve standards of living for the nomads.
But many researchers argue that available evidence shows the opposite: that the policies are harming the environment and the herders. “Tibetan grasslands are far from safe,” says Wang Shiping, an ecologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ (CAS) Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research (ITPR) in Beijing. “A big part of the problem is that the policies are not guided by science, and fail to take account of climate change and regional variations.”Claims like “researchers argue that available evidence shows the opposite” need to be followed with quotes from specific researchers, and this particular quote is excellent. It can be hard to get scientists in China to make such bold statements on the record, but Qiu proves that it’s not impossible.
The implications of that argument stretch far beyond the Tibetan Plateau, which spans 2.5 million square kilometres — an area bigger than GreenlandThis sort of relatable comparison is crucial when writing about an area to which most readers have never visited. Though most have never visited Greenland, either, the analogy works because many Westerners can picture the territory as a vast expanse of land in a mental map. — and is mostly controlled by China. The grasslands, which make up nearly two-thirds of the plateau, store water that feeds into Asia’s largest rivers. Those same pastures also serve as a gigantic reservoir of carbon, some of which could escape into the atmosphere if current trends continue. Degradation of the grasslands “will exacerbate global warming, threaten water resources for over 1.4 billion people and affect Asian monsoons”,In this paragraph, Qiu moves from the immediate effects of degraded grasslands on nomads to the bigger picture, showing in a quick quote what implications environmental degradation in Tibet has for the rest of the world.says David Molden, director general of the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) in Kathmandu, Nepal.
Such concerns propelled me to make a 4,700-kilometre journey last year from Xining, on the northeastern fringe of the plateau, to Lhasa in the Tibetan heartland (see ‘Trek across Tibet’). Meeting with herders and scientists along the way, I traversed diverse landscapes and traced the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers to their sources.Qiu’s trip essentially becomes a framing device through which to structure a complex story of environmental degradation. Nature has a high bar for first-person stories, but here a first-person telling seems essential, as it helps orient the reader and lends the piece a momentum that it wouldn’t have otherwise. The trip revealed that Tibetan grasslands are far less healthy than official government reports suggest, and scientists are struggling to understand how and why the pastures are changing.This is both the nut graf for the piece and a relatively straightforward clincher for the section: a simple summation of what will follow, with few narrative flourishes. In some stories, such direct signaling about the topic of the piece would detract from the tension and spoil the punchline, but because this story deals with an array of complex research, a summary like this works here. It’s also an indication that while nomads like Dodra will figure in the narrative, the takeaway should be the research done on the conditions that are shaping their lives.
Fenced in
It began to drizzle soon after we set off from the city of Xining on a stretch of newly built highway along the Yellow River. As our Land Cruiser climbed onto a 3,800-metre-high part of the plateau, the vista opened to reveal rolling hillsDetails like this underscore the drama of the setting; again, the use of first person makes such scene-setting possible. blanketed by a thick layer of alpine meadow, resembling a gigantic golf course.This unlikely image works well for me. Having been to this area myself, it strikes me as an accurate description. We passed herds of sheep and yaks, white tents and nomads in colourful robes — along with barbed-wired fences that cut the rangeland into small blocks.Ending with the fences is a calculated decision that contributes tension to the piece, signaling that there’s trouble in paradise.
This part of the Tibetan Plateau, in a region known as Henan county, is blessed with abundant monsoonal rains every summer. The herders who live here are able to maintain healthy livestock and can make a decent living. “We have plenty to go around, and the livestock are well taken care of,” says herder Gongbu Dondrup.
But life has been different since the government began to fence up grasslands around a decade ago, says Dondrup. Before that, he took his herd to the best pastures at high elevations in the summer, and then came back down in the winter. Now, he must keep the yaks in an 80-hectare plot that the government assigned to his family. The pasture looks worn, and he is being pressed by the government to further downsize his herd. “I don’t know how long it can keep us going,” he says.
The fencing initiative is the latest of a string of Chinese grassland policies. After annexing Tibet in 1950, the young revolutionary Chinese republic turned all livestock and land into state properties. Large state farms competed with each other to maximize production, and livestock numbers on the plateau doubled over two decades, reaching nearly 100 million by the late 1970s.This is good, narrow context. Instead of telling us about the history of Tibet, Qiu zeros in on changes in the livestock population over time, slipping in a quick phrase (“after annexing Tibet in 1950”) that educates the unaware reader about how this fits into Tibet’s larger history. But in the 1980s, as China moved towards a market-based economy, Beijing swung to the other extreme: it privatized the pastures and gave yaks back to individual households, hoping that the move would push Tibetans to better manage their land and so boost its productivity.
Despite the privatization, nomads continued to use the rangeland communally — often in groups led by village elders. Then the government began to limit herds, and it built fences to separate households and villages. “This has totally changed the way livestock are traditionally raised on the plateau, turning a mobile lifestyle into a sedentary existence,” says Yang Xiaosheng, director of Henan county’s rangeland-management office.
If you’re enjoying this Storygram, also check out two resources that partly inspired this project: the Nieman Storyboard‘s Annotation Tuesday! series and Holly Stocking’s The New York Times Reader: Science & Technology.
The fencing policy does have merits when applied in moderation, says Yönten Nyima, a Tibetan policy researcher at Sichuan University in Chengdu. Because an increasing number of nomads now lead a settled life — at least for parts of the year — it helps to control the level of grazing in heavily populated areas, he says. “Fencing is an effective way to keep animals out of a patch of meadow.” Many herders also say that it makes life much easier: they do not have to spend all day walking the hills to herd their yaks and sheep, and if they go away for a few days, they don’t worry about the animals running off.This is important, as it shows why fencing and attendant policies originally struck government planners as a good idea. Even disastrous decisions appeared logical at one point in time—and still hold some appeal for herders, as Qiu shows.
But the convenience comes at a cost, says Cao Jianjun, an ecologist at Northwest Normal University in Lanzhou. Fenced pastures often show signs of wear after a few years. In a 2013 study, Cao and his colleagues measured growth of the sedge species preferred by livestock in two scenarios: enclosed pastures and much larger patches of land jointly managed by up to 30 households. Despite similar livestock densities in both cases, the sedge grew twice as fast in the larger pastures, where animals could roam and plants had more opportunity to recover1.Research is the meat of any Nature story, and Qiu does a good job of including it here. Instead of simply alluding to Cao’s study (e.g., “Cao and colleagues found that enclosed pastures inhibited sedge growth”), she describes the design of the study and what conclusions he reached with his colleagues. That matches the experience of Henan county herders, who say that their land sustains fewer animals than it has in the past.
Water worries
The future of the grasslands looked even bleaker as we left relatively well-to-do Henan county and ventured into the much higher, arid territory to the west.))Another structural trick: in changing geographical zones, Qiu also shifts to a different topic, which helps keep the reader oriented. After 700 kilometres, we reached Madoi county, also known as qianhu xian (‘county of a thousand lakes’),How much Chinese—or any foreign language—to include in a story can be a thorny question, but one or two carefully chosen phrases can help the narrative rather than distract. In this case, the selected phrase is evocative and directly ties to the issue of wetlands drying up. where the Yellow River begins. Although this region gets only 328 millimetres of rain on average each yearIt probably goes without saying that Madoi no longer has a thousand lakes, but I almost want it said. about half of what Henan receives, Madoi was once one of the richest counties on the plateau — famous for its fish, high-quality livestock and gold mines.
Now, the wetlands are drying up and sand dunes are replacing the prairies, which means that less water flows into the Yellow River. Such changes on the plateau have contributed to recurring water shortages downstream: the Yellow River often dries up well before it reaches the sea, an event not recorded before 1970.This quick detail nicely illustrates the magnitude of the problem.
In 2000, China sought to protect this region, along with adjacent areas that give rise to the Yangtze and Mekong Rivers, by establishing the Sanjiangyuan (or Three-Rivers’ Headwaters) National Nature Reserve, an area nearly two-thirds the size of the United Kingdom.Another recognizable size comparison for readers that helps underscore the sheer enormity of the nature reserve. Qiu uses the U.K., I assume, because Nature is headquartered in London.
Nearly one-tenth of the reserve area falls into core zones in which all activities, including herding, are prohibited. The government spends hundreds of millions of US dollars each year on moving nomads out of those core areas, constructing steel meshes to stabilize the slopes and planting artificially bred grass species to restore the eroded land. Outside the core regions, officials have banned grazing on ‘severely degraded grasslands’, where vegetation typically covers less than 25% of the ground. Land that is ‘moderately degraded’, where vegetation coverage measures 25–50%, can be grazed for half of the year.
Such policies — and related initiatives to limit livestock numbers and fence off areas of pasture — have not been easy on the herders, says Guo Hongbao, director of the livestock-husbandry bureau in Nagchu county in the southern Tibetan Plateau.I am impressed at the range of interview subjects Qiu sought out. In addition to scientists who see the big picture and nomads who can explain what’s happening at the ground level, she found local administrators to give yet another perspective—not an easy task in an area like Tibet, where government controls can make officials press-shy. “The nomads have made sacrifices for protecting the grasslands,” he says. But he also says that the strategies have paid off. Guo and other officials point to satellite studies showing that the plateau has grown greener in the past three decades2. This increase in vegetation growth, possibly the result of a combination of grazing restrictions and climate change, “has had a surprisingly beneficial effect on climate by dampening surface warming”, says Piao Shilong, a climate modeller at Peking University.
But ecologists say that such measurements look only at surface biomass and thus are not a good indicator of grassland health. “Not all vegetation species are equal,” says Wang. “And satellites can’t see what’s going on underground.”
This is particularly important in the case of the sedge species that dominate much of the Tibetan Plateau, and that are the preferred food of livestock. These species, part of the Kobresia genus, grow only 2 centimetres above the surface and have a dense, extensive root mat that contains 80% of the total biomass.
Studies of pollen in lake sediments show that Kobresia and other dominant sedges emerged about 8,000 years ago, when early Tibetans began burning forests to convert them to grasslands for livestock3. The prehistoric grazing helped to create the thick root mat that blankets the vast plateau and that has stored 18.1 billion tonnes of organic carbon.
But Kobresia plants are being driven out by other types of vegetation, and there is a risk that the locked-up carbon could be released and contribute to global warming. Every now and then on the trip to Lhasa, we passed fields blooming with the beautiful red and white flowers of Stellera chamaejasme, also known as wolf poison.This nice little detail brings the reader back to the framing device, grounding some of the dense research that precedes it in reality. “It’s one of a dozen poisonous species that have increasingly plagued China’s grasslands,” says Zhao Baoyu, an ecologist at the Northwest Agriculture and Forestry University in Yangling. Zhao and his colleagues estimated that poisonous weeds have infested more than 160,000 square kilometres of the Tibetan grasslands, killing tens of thousands of animals a year4.
Herders also report seeing new grass species and weeds emerge in recent years. Although most are not toxic, they are much less nutritious than Kobresia pastures, says Karma Phuntsho, a specialist on natural-resource management at ICIMOD. “Some parts of the plateau may seem lush to an untrained eye,” he says. “But it’s a kind of ‘green desertification’ that has little value.”This is a great quote that gets the point across succinctly and vividly.
In one unpublished study of the northeastern Tibetan Plateau,Typically science articles are built on papers published in reputable journals, but when none are available unpublished studies can be useful stand-ins—as long as the writer notes, as Qiu does here, that the research is unpublished. researchers found that Kobresia pastures that had gone ungrazed for more than a decade had been taken over by toxic weeds and much taller, non-palatable grasses: the abundance of the sedge species had dropped from 40% to as low as 1%. “Kobresia simply doesn’t stand a chance when ungrazed,” says Elke Seeber, a PhD student at the Senckenberg Natural History Museum in Görlitz, Germany, who conducted the field experiment for a project supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG).
The changes in vegetation composition have important implications for long-term carbon storage, says project member Georg Guggenberger, a soil scientist at Leibniz University of Hanover in Germany. In moderately grazed Kobresia pastures, up to 60% of the carbon that is fixed by photosynthesis went into the roots and soil instead of the above-ground vegetation — three times the amount seen in ungrazed plots5. This underground organic carbon is much more stable than surface biomass, which normally decomposes within a couple of years and releases its stored carbon into the air. So a shift from Kobresia sedge to taller grasses on the plateau will ultimately release a carbon sink that has remained buried for thousands of years, says Guggenberger.
Critics of the grazing restrictions in Tibet say that the government has applied them in a blanket way, without proper study and without taking on board scientific findings. In some cases, they make sense, says Tsechoe Dorji, an ecologist at the ITPR’s Lhasa branch, who grew up in a herder family in western Tibet. “A total grazing ban can be justified in regions that are severely degraded”, he says, but he objects to the simple system used by the government to classify the health of the grasslands. It only considers the percentage of land covered by vegetation and uses the same threshold for all areas, without adjusting for elevation or natural moisture levels.Here Qiu unpacks the statistics, helping the reader understand which ones can be trusted and which ones can’t.
“Pastures with 20% vegetation cover, for instance, could be severely degraded at one place but totally normal at another,” says Dorji. This means that some of the grasslands that are classified as severely degraded are actually doing fine — and the grazing ban is actually hurting the ecosystem. “Having a sweeping grazing policy regardless of geographical variations is a recipe for disasters,” he says.
Fast forward
China’s grazing policy is only one of several factors responsible for such damaging changes, say the researchers. Pollution, global warming and a rash of road-building and other infrastructure-construction projects have all taken a toll on the grasslands.
Ten days after leaving Xining, we caught a glimpse of Tibet’s future when we arrived at Nam Tso, a massive glacial lake in the southern part of the plateau.Qiu returns to the framing device, which helps restore the story’s momentum. Here Dorji and Kelly Hopping, a graduate student at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, have been turning the clock forward by surrounding small patches of grassland with open-topped plastic chambers that artificially raise the temperature.As Qiu reveals in the Q&A, she visited the site of Dorji and Hopping’s experiment, but the researchers didn’t accompany her on her trip across Tibet and weren’t with her when she visited the site. The way this is set up, the narrative flows seamlessly without getting bogged down in the details of who is present at that very moment, allowing her to weave the researchers’ work into the structure of the trip. These experiments are important because Tibet is a hotspot in terms of climate change; the average temperature on the plateau has soared by 0.3–0.4 °C per decade since 1960 — about twice the global average.For readers who are not well-versed in climate change, this figure is crucial to understanding the magnitude of warming on the plateau.
In trials over the past six years, they found that Kobresia pygmaea, the dominant sedge species, develops fewer flowers and blooms much later under warming conditions6. Such changes, says Dorji, “may compromise its reproductive success and long-term competitiveness”.
At the experimental site, the artificially warmed pastures have been taken over by shrubs, lichens, toxic weeds and non-palatable grass species, says Hopping. But when the researchers added snow to some heated plots, Kobresia did not lose out to the other plants, which suggests that the loss of soil moisture might be driving the shift in species. Higher temperatures increase evaporation, which can be especially potent at high elevations. “This is not good news for species with shallow roots”, such as the Kobresia favoured by livestock, she says.
Piao says that “this interplay between temperature and precipitation illustrates the complexity of ecosystem responses to climate change”. But researchers have too little information at this point to build models that can reliably predict how global warming will affect the grasslands, he says. To fill that gap, Wang and his colleagues started a decade-long experiment in 2013 at Nagchu, where they are using heat lamps to warm patches of grassland by precise amounts, ranging from 0.5 °C to 4 °C. They are also varying the amount of rainfall on the plots, and they are measuring a host of factors, such as plant growth, vegetation composition, nutrient cycling and soil carbon content. They hope to improve projections for how the grasslands will change — and also to determine whether there is a tipping point that would lead to an irreversible collapse of the ecosystem, says Piao.A bit of dire forecasting helps lend the story some suspense and underscores the severity of the degradation. Note that Qiu steers clear of sweeping conclusions that may not be backed up by future research, instead discussing what the researchers hope to accomplish.
Plateau prognosis
A fortnight into the trip, we finally arrived at the outskirts of Lhasa. At the end of the day, herders were rounding up their sheep and yaks in the shadows cast by snow-capped peaks. They and the other pastoralists across the plateau will have a difficult time in coming decades, says Nyima. Climate change was not a consideration when grassland polices were conceived over a decade ago, and so “many pastoralists are ill prepared for a changing environment”, he says. “There is a pressing need to take this into account and identify sound adaptation strategies.”
As a start, researchers would like to conduct a comprehensive survey of plant cover and vegetation composition at key locations across different climate regimes.One nice way to end an article summarizing research on a topic, as this one does, is by looking toward the future and giving a sense of what questions scientists would like to tackle in coming years. “The information would form the baseline against which future changes can be measured,” says Wang. Many scientists would also support changes to the grazing ban and fencing policies that have harmed the grasslands. Dorji says that the government should drop the simplistic practice of ‘one policy fits all’ across the plateauThe end of the story is also a good place for policy recommendations like this one and re-evaluate whether individual regions are degraded enough to merit a ban on grazing. “Unless the pastures are severely degraded, moderate grazing will help to restore the ecosystems,” he says.
But scientists are not banking on such reforms happening soon. Policies in Tibet are driven less by scientific evidence than by bureaucrats’ quest for power and funds, says a Lhasa-based researcher who requests anonymity for fear of political repercussions.Editors tend to have a high bar for using anonymous sources, but this is one case where use of such a source seems justified. Getting someone to speak on the record about this topic would be difficult, and simply omitting concerns about government control would have given readers an incomplete understanding of the issue. Local officials often lobby Beijing for big investments and expensive projects in the name of weiwen (meaning ‘maintaining stability’). Because resistance to Chinese control over Tibet continues to flare up, the government is mostly concerned with maintaining political stability, and it does not require local officials to back up plans with scientific support, says the researcher. “As long as it’s for weiwen,This is another nice, sparing use of a Chinese phrase. The repetition of weiwen underscores its importance—maintaining stability is so paramount that the phrase has taken on a life of its own—and thus has a greater impact than simply subbing in its English translation. And, of course, if you’re going to use a foreign word in a quote, it needs to be defined in quick succession. anything goes.”
But officials such as Guo say that their policies are intended to help Tibet. “Although there is certainly room for improvement in some of the policies, our primary goals are to promote economic development and protect the environment,” he says.This is a useful counterpoint. Although I suspect that Qiu’s sympathies lie with the anonymous researcher in Lhasa, she nonetheless provides balance. At the same time, this isn’t an empty defense of government policies. The selected quote is telling, as promoting economic development and protecting the environment are often at odds with each other. One is left wondering how both can be achieved simultaneously.
Far away from Lhasa, herders such as DodraStarting and ending a story with the same person is a classic tactic. Sometimes it’s overdone, but it works here because Dodra and his family are among the people most directly affected by environmental degradation on the plateau say that they are not seeing the benefits of government policies. After we finish our visit at his home, Dodra’s entire family walks us into the courtyard — his mother in-law spinning a prayer wheel and his children trailing behindIn a few simple strokes, Qiu paints a clear picture here. It has stopped snowing, and the sky has turned a crystal-clear, cobalt blue.This idyllic image contrasts nicely with the ominous tone that follows, raising the question of how long paradise can endure. “The land has served us well for generations,” says Dodra as he looks uneasily over his pasture. “Now things are falling apart — but we don’t get a say about how best to safeguard our land and future.”This is a golden quote. I can see why Qiu saved it for the kicker.
A Conversation with Jane Qiu
Mara Hvistendahl: How did you get the idea for this story?
Jane Qiu: I had come across different assessments of the health of Tibetan grasslands. China’s state media said the pastures were improving and Tibetan herders were happy, but some locals didn’t agree. There also seemed to be different opinions within the scientific community. I was really intrigued and wondered why that was the case.
Grasslands health is an important issue because the Tibetan Plateau is where Asia’s major rivers are born. Those rivers feed more than 1.4 billion people. The plateau is also a critical carbon-storage zone and can affect regional and global climate. Understanding what happens there can help us assess policies that affect this precious natural resource.
MH: Did you pitch the piece to Nature before you left? Or did you first approach SciDev.Net about taking a trip across the plateau?
JQ: I had been interested in looking into the story but didn’t have the funds to do the trip, which I knew would be very expensive. When I saw that the SciDev.Net Investigative Science Journalism Fellowship for the Global South was offering to support work that reporters wouldn’t otherwise be able to carry out, I thought the grassland story would fit the bill pretty well. To apply for the fellowship, I had to get a firm commission from a media outlet, so I approached Nature about the story idea and was really pleased that my editors there really liked it.
MH: What sort of setup did you do before you left for the plateau?
JQ: I did tons of preparation before setting off. I read papers and reports, talked to scientists, policy researchers, and NGOs, and studied the geography in great detail. I had to know the area well enough to decide where to go and which route to take—especially if I wanted to make the most out of this very rare opportunity. (In addition to the Nature story, I produced a feature and a photo story for SciDev.Net.) The fellowship assigned me three highly accomplished British journalists as mentors. They were instrumental in helping me tackle the project and prepare for the trip. Finally, I had to fill in a risk-assessment form, which, in a way, forced me to consider all the worst possible scenarios—like what I would do to ensure that all my reporting materials would be safe if the car rolled off the mountain. This actually got me really worried. But I think it’s always good to hope for the best and prepare for the worst.
MH: How did you travel from Xining to Lhasa? Did you rent a car?
JQ: I hired a Lhasa-based driver who came to pick us up at Xining in his Land Cruiser. There were three of us: a leading grassland ecologist, Wang Shiping, who is quoted in the piece; a Tibetan who spoke good Chinese and would serve as translator for the trip; and myself. The driver had been working in Tibet for over a decade. He was very careful and extremely experienced. The reason we set off from Xining was because it’s relatively low—just over 2,200 meters (7,200 feet) above sea level. So we were traveling from low to high elevations. This helped us acclimatize to the altitude gradually.
MH: I know from reporting in the area myself that there are a lot of logistical obstacles to overcome—language barriers, poor roads, and even altitude sickness. What were the biggest hurdles that you faced in reporting?
JQ: The language barrier wasn’t a big issue, actually, thanks to the great translator I had, though I wished I could talk to the Tibetans directly. The shifts in altitude were quite a challenge, on the other hand. The highest place we visited was close to 5,000 meters (16,400 feet) above sea level. I had this creeping headache that tightened its grip as we rose higher and higher. Some of the roads were really bad, and we had to take detours. And then the weather. I remember it was pouring rain one day, and we were on this winding mountain road that seemed to go around and around forever. The visibility was very poor and we had to drive very slowly. It was a long, long day and we didn’t get to the hotel until after midnight. Finally arriving was quite a relief!
MH: How did the nomads you met on your trip react when you explained what you were writing about?
JQ: They were very warm and friendly people. They offered us their best food—milk tea, tsampa (Tibetan barley bread), and dried yak meat—even though they probably didn’t have enough for themselves. They wanted to show us how they lived and the challenges they faced. Some were more opinionated and articulate than others. I still remember vividly how one Tibetan family was really struggling with their identity after giving up their livestock and moving to a newly constructed urban center. Another was certain that the grassland was in a bad state because the spirit of the mountain had been disturbed by gold mining.
MH: What about the scientists you met with? Toward the end of the piece, you allude to how the health of the grasslands is very much a political issue. Did politics intrude on many of your conversations with scientists?
JQ: The vast majority of scientists I came across felt strongly that China’s grassland policies in Tibet ought to incorporate the latest scientific understanding and take into account a variety of situations across the vast geographical range. Some of them had issues with increasingly tightened political and media control in Tibet, which is not conducive to good policymaking or accountability. Meanwhile, they stressed that this was not a challenge unique to Tibet. Grasslands in many parts of the world are under increasing pressure from human activities and climate change.
MH: I like how you framed a series of dense studies with your trip across Tibet. I’m wondering how much of the piece describes what you saw along the way. In the section “Fast forward,” for example, you describe research by Dorji and Hopping. Did you actually visit the site of the experiment?
JQ: The journey was indeed used as a narrative device to weave together several components of the story: the predicament of Tibetan herders, different grassland conditions across a wide geographical range, as well as a series of studies trying to understand how and why pastures are changing. I was extremely privileged to have the opportunity to take the trip and I wanted to share the experience with my readers by conveying a strong sense of place. This is important also because geography is an integral part of the story. I went to all the places described in the story, including the research station in the “Fast forward” section.
MH: After extensive reporting on this issue, what do you see as the best hope for restoring the health of the grasslands?
JQ: China recognizes the ecological importance of the Tibetan Plateau, and so a strong, balanced, and evidence-based feature could help persuade officials to change the policies for the better. The article has also generated a lot of discussions in institutions outside of China, including the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development in Kathmandu, Nepal—because officials charged with grassland management in other parts of the Himalayas face similar challenges. I hope the story will help generate meaningful improvements in the situation in all Himalayan countries and beyond. But it may be a slow process.
Jane Qiu is a globetrotting science writer based in Beijing, regularly contributing to publications such as Nature, Science, Scientific American, and The Economist. A recipient of many prestigious fellowships and travel grants, she has covered wide-ranging topics from the Arctic, the Antarctic, and the peaks of the Himalayas. Qiu is passionate about the Tibetan Plateau and surrounding mountain ranges, and strives to highlight their increasing fragility and pressing environmental issues. Her Nature story “Trouble in Tibet” won the Silver 2016 AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) Kavli Science Journalism Awards in the Magazine category and the 2017 ABSW (Association of British Science Writers) Science Writers’ Awards for Great Britain and Ireland in the Best Feature category. Her work has also been recognized by the Asian Environmental Journalism Awards and the South Asia Journalists Association Journalism Awards. She will spend the 2017–2018 academic year as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.
Mara Hvistendahl is a contributing correspondent at Science and a National Fellow at New America. Her first book, Unnatural Selection, a chronicle of the sex trafficking, instability, and other consequences that have resulted from prenatal sex selection around the world, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, The New York Times, Popular Science, Scientific American, Slate, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications. For eight years, she covered science and technology from China for Science and other publications. She is a founding member of the writers’ cooperative Deca. Follow her on Twitter @MaraHvistendahl.
