Recasting the collapse of pastoralist societies

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I type “collapse of pastoralist societies?” into Google search and get this AI-generated answer:

Pastoralist societies have been declining for a variety of reasons, including: 

• Loss of land: Pastoralists have lost access to land due to the development of large-scale cultivation and irrigation, the establishment of nature reserves and game parks, and the imposition of national boundaries. 
• Climate change: Climate change has threatened the availability of water and arable land, which are critical for pastoralism. 
• Government policies: Governments have expropriated land from pastoralists, and converted communal property systems to open access situations. 
• Migration: Some pastoralists have moved to populous areas to pursue education, abandoning traditional lifestyles. 
• Conflict: Conflict, disease, drought, and famine have particularly affected vulnerable pastoralist communities. 
• Arms proliferation: Arms proliferation has significantly altered the pastoralism landscape. 
• Lack of government support: Pastoral communities receive little support from their governments. 

No surprises here. This is the gist of the literature I read. But an obvious question remains: How many of the pastoralists affected see collapse in the same way or for the same reasons?

I don’t know their number, but I most certainly see how some herders might believe their pastoralist systems are collapsing but still adhere to a very different narrative of what is going on and being responded to.

To see how and why, let’s turn to a recent article that describes the opposite case: Urban people who see it inevitable that modern societies are collapsing and who respond differently.

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In his 2024 preprint, “The conviction of the inevitable: Collapsism and collective action in contemporary rural France,” Jérôme Tournadre, a political scientist and sociologist, wonders why some people who are absolutely convinced on the inevitability of collapse in modern (“thermo-industrial”) societies–for them, it’s self-evident the collapse is well underway–nonetheless respond by moving to the countryside and acting neither fatalistically nor apathetically but collectively and differently together.

You might think those different ways included “back to nature” and eschewing all things modern and technological. But no, and here is where it gets interesting for pastoralist comparison:

Sophie, for example, has no trouble using a thermal brush cutter when it comes to freeing agricultural commons from overly invasive vegetation. Alex earns a little money by occasionally installing photovoltaic panels for individuals. However, he does not see the need to use it at home insofar as his connection to the electricity grid satisfies him. Similarly, if the members of the neo-village [one of the research sites] have chosen to gradually do without cars, it is not to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions but, above all, to no longer depend on oil that is bound to become rare or to lose its usefulness in a collapsed world. This logic obviously leads them to use bicycles but also to learn how to handle and maintain tools such as the scythe, the lumberjack’s handsaw or the Japanese saw that is supposed to replace both the chainsaw and the jigsaw. The acquisition of new skills is in any case a central ambition within these collective actions, which endeavour to break away from the specialization found in industrial civilization and develop a versatility more in line with troubled times: knowing how to milk goats and process their milk, graft fruit trees, recognize wild plants and mushrooms, etc.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14661381241266936

Now turn the quote inside out for pastoralists. I don’t think it is generalizable, but say you do find pastoralists who are convinced that their systems are collapsing. More and in their own terms, that collapse is inevitable.

So what?

So, yes you see them learning to use all manner of saws and acquiring new skills, while at the same time continuing to milk the goats and process milk and collect local herbs. Yes, you see them cutting firewood for burning but relying on electricity where available. Yes, you see them undertaking money-paying jobs off-site. Yes, you see them breaking away from the specializations of pastoralism and developing more versatility and options in their also troubled times.

Yes, there are also alarming turnabouts in contemporary pastoralist societies as well, but as Tournadre and other colleagues put it, this is an “alarmed reflexivity.” Some pastoralists, like some urbanites, are alarmed by events in their respective systems. But their response is a more nuanced voice than it is outright exit. They are like whistleblowers who still live amongst us: “Something’s wrong here and it has to change and here’s what I have to say and am doing.”

Hardly the negative narratives and critiques AI has been trained on.