O'Rourke wraps up term with trip to Asia

The Chadron State College professor-emeritus recently returned from spending 24 days in China and Mongolia, fulfilling his five-year term as president of the International Rangeland Congress. In that capacity, he was co-chairman of the convention that was at Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, a province in north-central China, from June 28 through July 5.

O'Rourke said the trip was exhausting and sometimes frustrating, but he also called it wonderful experience and praised the hosts for their hospitality.

"We didn't learn as much about their rangeland practices as we would have liked," O'Rourke said. "They didn't seem to want to tell us much about their policies and didn't give us much information.

"But they treated us super. We learned a lot about their culture and history, they entertained us royally and the food and the accommodations were great. They definitely tried to impress us that way. I think everyone had a good time. But it was frustrating that we didn't learn more about their rangeland and its uses. We kind of had to draw our own conclusions about that."

He added that often more was learned by mingling with the Chinese in attendance than during the tours or formal sessions.

One conclusion he came to is that if a problem such as overgrazing occurs, the government will abruptly address it by relocating the ranchers, or herders, from that area to a city.

"If they decide something is wrong, they'll fix it. But we wondered if they use good science in their decisions. We saw land that had definitely been overgrazed and there wasn't an animal in sight."

The convention center where the meetings were held is new and larger that the Rushmore Plaza Civic Center in Rapid City, O'Rourke said. All of the 1,500 delegates at the convention were placed in five-star hotels, even though many had signed up for cheaper facilities.

O'Rourke noted that the busses carrying those attending the conference were given a police escort as they traveled from the hotels to the convention center and all other traffic on the streets was stopped. The same was true when tours were taken. Law enforcement officers were at every intersection to prevent other vehicles from entering the road.

Inner Mongolia is more autonomous than most of the other provinces in China, O'Rourke learned during the trip. He frequently met with the governor and numerous vice governors at the convention headquarters to keep each other abreast of the agenda. The government shelled out something like $2.5 million for niceties such as travel, food and entertainment.

The entertainment included an opera that O'Rourke called "breath-taking" with many special effects such as smoke, fire and lightning. At meals, the convention-goers always had at least 40 choices and sometimes up to 70.

During the weeklong convention, there were numerous tours to museums, monasteries and other sites in and around Hohhot, a city of at least 2.5 million. O'Rourke said the delegates had lots of freedom and felt safe wherever they traveled.

The convention focused on three primary topics-ecology, production and people and policies. There were four speakers at each of the eight sessions on each of the three topics. O'Rourke had helped line up a number of the speakers, although his primary responsibility was finding corporate sponsors to help cover some of the costs.

Prior to the convention, O'Rourke was among about 105 people who took a tour on the Silk Road in Ganzu province to the south of Hohhot. He said the busses traveled for hours and seldom stopped.

After the convention ended, he spent a week on a tour in the nation of Mongolia to the north of Hohhot.

Mongolia, which is squeezed between China and Russia, was a part of the Soviet Union, but since 1990 is an independent democratic nation.

On that tour, O'Rourke said lots of country was covered, but at an extremely slow pace because of poor road conditions.

"We went by busses from Hohhot to the Mongolian border, then waited about three hours to get on a train that took us to the capital of Uaanbattar. That was a 12-hour trip. After that, we rode on buses that didn't go over 20 miles an hour much of the time. But the Mongolians gave us good explanations about the research they are conducting."

O'Rourke said the visit in Mongolia included the Gobi Desert, which has an annual rainfall of only two inches and includes lots of rocks and gravel but few plants. Other areas reminded him of the wide open spaces between Sturgis and Buffalo, S.D., with good grasslands, but few trees or settlements.

"We saw a lot of land that was overgrazed there," he said. "Like other parts of the world, they are confronted by the old dilemma. They know they should run fewer animals, but livestock is their only source of income."

The land in both China and Mongolia is state-owned the herders given allotments or long-term leases. The livestock in both countries includes sheep, goats, cattle, yaks, horses and camels. The animals are privately owned.

O'Rourke said in Mongolia all the species, including mares, are milked, to make cheeses and yogurt. He added that he tasted many of the products. Women do nearly all the milking.

He also said that nearly everyone rides horseback in Mongolia, which has a limited number of motorized vehicles.

A highlight of the Mongolian visit was attending a few "naadams," the equivalent of county and state fairs. Horse races, archery and wrestling were among the attractions. Youths rode the horses, and some of the races were up to 18 miles long.

"They go as hard as they can," he said. "We saw some horses that could barely take another step, but they were still trying to make them go faster."

Before becoming president of the International Rangeland Congress in 2003, O'Rourke was president of the Nebraska section of the Society of Range Management in 1994 and president of the national organization in 2001-02.

During his five-year stint as the IRC president, he visited Inner Mongolia five times to help plan the conference. During the past two years, he worked on some aspect of it about three days a week. His quest for corporate sponsors to help with the conference expenses raised about a half million dollars, but now he has to send the bills and thank you notes to the sponsors. He anticipates the chore will take at least three months.

The new IRC president is Iain Wright, a native of Scotland who is president of the International Livestock Research Institute based in Ethiopia, although Wright lives in New Delhi, India.

The next IRC convention will be in Argentina in 2011. O'Rourke went there in May to help with the initial planning. He also hopes to attend the convention, but he admitted that he's glad someone else will be in charge of it.