BEYOND PASTORALISM. A wake-up call to institutions at the threshold of the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists

Abstract (English)

This paper justifies the need to extend, as much as possible, the unique opportunity represented by the IYRP to other communities with a nomadic tradition, illustrating the multiple and diverse connections these groups have with each other. Nomads teach us that we must prioritize the interests of nature, but if we prioritize the interest of nature itself over those of institutions, nations, and even indigenous communities and their diverse practices, then nomadism emerges as an integral system of environmental management that should nor be understood by isolating its different livelihoods neither supporting them indiscriminately. Evidently, pastoralism maintains a special status, given that the vast majority of mobile Indigenous peoples are pastoralists, but what makes it particularly valuable is mobility. Through mobility, nomads as a whole live without transforming the natural environment but rather adapting to it through diverse survival strategies that create biocultural entities over time within a global system of regional ecosystems linked to each other. The recent institutional attention focusing on pastoralism could be interpreted as a free pass to exploit other ecosystems, as important as or more so than grasslands, such as seas and tropical forests, arguing the minority condition of their native inhabitants and the own segregation that most of mobile indigenous peoples have tacitly accepted.