Pasture, land, power
"Our livestock are our life and we believe that they maintain our dignity."
A drone shot of sheep moving through common land, grazing the new grasses that have grown since the start of the monsoon season.
40% of our earth's land is rangelands.
While many think they are uninhabited, they are protected by 500 million pastoralists and mobile communities around the world.
There is no such thing as empty land.
One of those communities is the Maldhari, literally meaning “keeper”, whose lives and livelihoods depend on the livestock they keep. A group of nomadic pastoralists who live and move freely in and around Gujarat, India. Their way of life is traditional, but their practices are deeply attuned to the rhythms of nature.
A pastoralists elder stands near a‘Prosopis Juliflora' tree, an invasive plant that is becoming harder to keep at bay with the change in climate. They provide almost no nutrition but consume the vast majority of water in the ground.
A pastoralist after milking one of his goats so that he can make a cup of tea.
There is a common and misguided narrative that pastoralists overgraze, degrade and turn land into deserts. This is not only false but reckless.
Pastoral mobility is restorative, innovative and adaptive, while also being steeped in centuries of tradition.
Because, traditions can exist without being stuck in time.
Their way of life improves soil microclimates and biodiversity and enhances its critical capacity to store soil organic carbon, often lost due to the conversion of rangelands to other uses such as crop farming and industry, including green energy.
For most of the year in this part of Gujarat the land is dry and arid but during the rainy season the grasslands burst into life producing a rich variety of plants and grass is very grazed by the animals.
A goat seeds on the higher branches of a bush, not reached by the herd of sheep.
A young pastoralist spends the day with his sheep and goat grazing on common land in Gujarat.
“We have our own traditional and scientific knowledge, and it’s through this knowledge we know when to graze our animals on what pasture, and in which season.”
A woman pastoralist milks one of her cows after its return from grazing around the village. The first rains have fallen and the nutrient rich grass has been able to flourish. Once these resources have been consumed, the community will begin their migration to areas that are able to sustain their animals before the monsoon ends.
Yet, secure land tenure for pastoralists continues to remain tenuous in practice because of the twin features of shared land use and mobility. The lack of secure tenure impedes their dynamic and low transformative capacity to provide for people and nature, as well as increases their vulnerability to oppression and violence caused by settlement schemes, industrial and infrastructural development, agricultural expansion, ‘fortress’ conservation, green energy and carbon neutrality programmes, and, more recently, carbon offset projects
Sand mining has become a huge problem in this area as the demand for resources such as sand are continuously exploited for short term profit.
“For years our community has been protecting land, but now the lands that we had been protecting no longer exist so how can we protect them?”
Unpredictable weather patterns due to the climate crisis and government concessions on pasturelands are threatening pastoralists’ way of life.
Slowly these shared lands are being appropriated by industry along with agricultural expansion where once it was pasture.
Patoralist women hold a special place in communities like the Maldhari, yet their role in supporting restoration is often overlooked.
Outreach workers travel to the remote villages to hold dialogue with the community to better understand the issues that they are currently facing.
During monsoon season many ]pastoral women stay in their houses and produce beautiful traditional textiles.
To help save these pastures, women pastoralists came together to convince the government to lease the land to continue practicing their traditions of conservation and restoration.
Thanks to the work of ILC member Maldhari Rural Action Group (MARAG) in India and the persistence of 110 pastoralist women, 100 acres of land has been successfully restored across 10 villages in Gujarat.
Restoration begins with rights and that is why at ILC, we're fighting for land rights commitments in processes like the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).