<p><b>How animal conservation became a defense against cultural erasure<br/><br/></b>China today positions itself as a model of state-led environmentalism. On the country&#8217;s arid rangelands, grassland conservation policies have targeted pastoralists and their animals, blamed for causing desertification. State environmentalism&#8212;in the form of grazing bans, enclosure, and resettlement&#8212;has transformed the lives of many ethnic minority herders in China&#8217;s western borderlands. <br/><br/>However, this book shows how such policies have been contested and negotiated on the ground, in the context of the state&#8217;s intensifying nation-building project. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Alasha, in the far west of China&#8217;s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Thomas White describes how ethnic Mongols have foregrounded the local breed of Bactrian camel, mobilizing ideas of heritage and resource conservation to defend pastoralism.<br/><br/>In exploring how the greening of the Chinese state affects the entangled lives of humans and animals at the margins of the nation-state, this study is both a political biography of the Bactrian camel and an innovative work of political ecology addressing critical questions of rural livelihoods, conservation, and state power.</p>