Daniel Miller: "Hunting the Wild Yak" in Cafe Amsterdam

Wednesday August 20 at 19.30h in Cafe Amsterdam, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Free entrance "Hunting the Wild Yak and Chasing Wild Ass: Sport and Adventure on the Tibetan Frontier" is a photo-illustrated lecture about Tibet's wildlife and nomads.  Daniel Miller first went to Tibet 20 years ago to conduct research on wild yaks.  Since then he's made over 30 trips to Tibet, investigating wildlife, rangelands and nomads and working on biodiversity conservation and pastoral development projects.  Miller discusses the challenges facing the conservation of Tibet's wildlife and issues related to the future of nomadic pastoralists on the Tibetan Plateau.  Few other Westerners have as much experience and insight as Miller has on the Tibetan Plateau.   With stunning photographs and interesting commentary, Miller will take us on a remarkable journey to a little known part of Asia -- the Tibetan Frontier -- where wild yaks still roam the mountains, Tibetan wild ass gallop across the steppes in unbridled freedom and nomads continue to move with their herds of yaks across the highest elevation grazing lands in the world as they have for centuries.

"Nomadic pastoralism has been portrayed as
one of the great advances in the evolution of mankind. It is an
adaptation by people to grassland areas of the world where the raising
of livestock is more supportive of human life than the growing of
crops. People who specialize in livestock production requiring periodic
movements of their herds are known as nomadic pastoralists, or, simply
nomads. The survival of nomads on the Tibetan Plateau and Himalaya
provides examples of nomadic practices that were once widespread
throughout Asia and Africa, but are now increasingly hard to find. As
such, these portraits of nomads offer a rare glimpse into a way of life
that is rapidly vanishing.

The lives of the nomads are tuned to the growth of the grass and the
seasonal pulse of the grazing lands. The grasslands provide the theatre
in which the nomads and their animals interact to make a living. Over
centuries, the nomads acquired complex knowledge about the environment
in which they lived and upon which their lives depended, which enabled
them to persist in one of the most inhospitable places on earth. But,
they did more than just survive. The nomads created a unique, vibrant
culture, about which, even today, so little is known."

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