1. We must fight for the expansion of pastoralism as a universal public infrastructure, just as is now being done for universally available electricity!
2. Government agencies and donors working in pastoralism ask to be overhauled so as to meet pastoralist needs faster and more effectively. (“The C.D.C. director, Rochelle Walensky,. . .called for her agency to be overhauled after an external review found it had failed to respond quickly and clearly to Covid.”)
3. Pastoralists explain their responses to government and donor initiatives this way: “We corrected a few things on the ground. Our job, after all, is to protect you.”
4. Researchers on pastoralism agree that the people and areas they study are usefully marginal and marginalized. In point of fact, pastoralisms provide the only valid commentary on the center where many researchers, among others, are also routinely to be found.
5. We refuse to play the game conjured up by analyses that start with tables and numbers of livestock. The follow-on question, almost immediate, is who owns the livestock and, sooner than a blink of the eye, we are down to: “But what about the old woman with 5 goats or fewer?”
As if to ask: “What are you going to do about these inequalities?” Thus leaving us hardly any time to reply that, well, the most ethical thing in response is to see if there are more effective ways to think about this problem than one starting with livestock owned and held.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 