Oasis Agriculture in Pakistan

This book emerged from decades of agro-ecological research in the Karakoram highlands and the Cholistan Desert of Pakistan conducted in collaboration with local researchers, PhD scholars, and villagers in partly very remote oases that exhibit a historically unusually high diversity of agro-pastoral land use systems. Due to their resilience under isolated harsh environmental conditions, these oases exemplify many centuries-old sustainable systems of resource use that are currently undergoing rapid transformation. Using an interdisciplinary, mixed-model approach that combines classical multi-location biodiversity research and molecular analyses with a collection of 169 Folk Tales, this book draws attention to the sustainability lessons that are encoded in ancient social-ecological systems.

In an environment whose interacting environmental stresses of drought, floods, harsh winters, hot summers, and fragile political conditions can hardly be controlled by small agropastoral communities, people found ways to manage constraints and uncertainties. Sustainable water use (SDG 6, Clean water) is key to the ancient, gravity irrigated terrace agriculture practiced in the mountain and lowland desert oases. Given millennia old trading between East and West but also South and North across Asia and with Europe, the crops cultivated and the animal husbandry systems practised are extraordinarily diverse and adapted to varying resources (SDG 15, Life on land). This equally applies to fruit and cereal species but also to livestock, mainly yaks and goats, that thrive on the summer pastures surrounding the oases. Responsible consumption and production (SDG 12) are inherent to these systems and prerequisite for their mere existence. Section 3 of the book takes scientific account of this rich biodiversity. In managing their oasis systems, their residents are highly dependent on each other. Collaboration is essential for survival and this has formed strong social commitments (SDG 11, Sustainable communities). Their governance is encoded in cultural practices, and has been passed on in a large reservoir of Folk Tales. Section 2 of the book presents a unique collection of such tales reported by village elders. In original language videos and their English translations, peasants narrate historical events, traditional practices of every-day life, mystical fairy-tales with symbolic meanings, and general lessons of moral as part of an ancient global mystical heritage.

The linkage between socio-cultural and bio-physical heritage has been little explored in scientific research. This book therefore provides a starting point for a deeper, interdisciplinary analysis, which takes into account different knowledge systems. It unravels a rapidly vanishing biological and cultural diversity preserved for many centuries and testifies of eye-level partnerships that allowed their documentation.