Wintering

Jadamba Soninjargal has survived almost 60 winters. As she prepares herself to invoke the spirits of her ancestors, she lights a cigarette and asks her guests: “How are you wintering?” Mrs. Soninjargal lives in a place where nobody can predict whether they will see one more winter.

To winter in Mongolia means to pull through the toughest season for herders. On an early December morning, Mrs. Soninjargal performs a shamanic ritual to soothe her neighbors’ anxiety for answers. Herders plea on their knees.

The governor of this remote village, Sangidorj Chadarbal, shows up at the end of the ceremony. “We need a miracle”, he says. “We have many more animals than our land can sustain”.

A pasture at its breaking point is just one of many challenges that the village of Numrug shares with herding communities across Western Mongolia. The situation resembles a perfect storm razing every corner of herding life: degraded pastures, exhausted resources and climatic shifts.

Hardships mount in winter, a time of low cash for already indebted herders, isolated by snow and the weakest roads in Asia. Catastrophic winter weather events like dzud have killed millions of animals and alienated the most vulnerable herders from their livelihoods in the past decade.

Not far from Mrs. Soninjargal’s ger, a 62-year old widow sums up her nightmare: “Two consecutive dzuds finished off our livestock. We gave up herding.” She receives a pension but lives on 10 dollars a month after repaying loans. Younger herders in a similar situation flee to cities.

The annual livestock census shows relentless growth each year. The central government keeps count yet does not intervene. Yadamsuren Sanjmyatav, the deputy speaker of the Mongolian Parliament, goes straight to the point: “Regulating herders can cost you an election.”

The current legal framework stemming from Ulaanbaatar is too broad for the practical urges of the steppes.

“I am up to my neck in complaints”, says Damchii Munkh-Och, a district environmental officer in Bombogor. His district has five times more animals than it can carry, in an area already severely degraded and infested with rodents. His phone buzzes with demands from herders affected by a nearby copper mine.

Mr. Munkh-Och listens to everyone, but local officials like him lack the resources to change things: “We don’t have a budget for land restoration. We hardly have money for salaries.”

On Mr. Munkh-Och’s side, conservationists are fighting against environmental collapse in this part of the country, which hosts more than half of Mongolia’s national parks. While environmental protection plans require the participation of herders, the balance between private needs and public good proves difficult.

“Herders are very profit driven. For them, their animals are more important than the environment,” argues the Tarvagatai Nuruu National Park director, who relies on a staff of 16 people to oversee a protected area of over 300,000 hectares.

This tragedy of the commons is not a loud disaster. Like the winter landscape, it’s quiet, cold and unforgiving. Emerging from that cold silence, the voices and faces in this report provide a first-hand account from the front lines of wintering in December 2019, based on 40 intimate interviews and over 15,000 photographs in seven hard-to-reach herding communities across four provinces of Western Mongolia.

You can download the full report in the section below.