It’s time to move again: What Mongolian pastoral nomadism can teach us about surviving today’s global crises

It’s time to move again: What Mongolian pastoral nomadism can teach us about surviving today’s global crises

Written and photographs by Bat-Orgil Bat-Erdene

For almost 99% of human history, we moved. Constantly. We followed the stars, the rivers, the seasons, and the herd. The settled life as we know it today, our apartments, office, and the permanent address that we fill out on various forms was virtually unknown to us until very recently. People sometimes moved because they wanted to, but for the most part, they had to move, leaving behind places they once called home.

Many of us feel discombobulated today when confronted with the seemingly insurmountable existential global challenges and vast social fragmentation engulfing not only our immediate communities but the entire world. So, the question should not be why we feel restless today. Perhaps it is why we even expected ourselves not to feel restless in the first place. 

For the past several millennia, we have collectively built a world where sedentary living is rewarded. Modern nation-states largely depend on permanence for not only survival but also prosperity, at least prosperity as they define it. Modern states generally depend on permanent addresses to collect taxes, run schools, build infrastructure, and provide public services. In his book Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott explains that states have repeatedly sought to make society more ‘legible’ in an effort to simplify the messiness and complexity of human life into something that can be counted, mapped, and governed. In this system, permanent settlements, standardized names, cadastral maps, and fixed boundaries become the very bedrock of administrative infrastructure. 

In contrast, being mobile has often challenged this administrative logic as people who are constantly on the move for various reasons are harder to count, tax, enlist into armies, classify, and govern. This present tension between legibility and movement is not merely administrative. It also represents two fundamentally different ways of understanding society. One seeks to organize life into predictable categories, while the other accepts that life is inherently dynamic and almost impossible to fully contain.

Later, capitalism reinforced these same ideas by transforming permanence from a practical necessity into a moral ideal. Max Weber argued in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism that modern capitalism flourished alongside a culture that celebrated discipline, rational organization, industrial labor, productivity, and incessant drive for optimization. Work or labor became more than a means of survival. It became a defining feature of identity. Success increasingly meant following a specialized and socially prescribed path toward an outcome defined by prevailing institutions. 

The combination of capitalism and the administration structures of the modern state created a world with a value system deeply embedded in the ideals of permanence. We are not only encouraged but often required to choose a career, move into an urban city, buy a home, and construct an identity that remains legible to governments, employers, our friends and family, and even ourselves. If we deviate from this path in the slightest way, we risk being pushed toward the fringes of society. Stability has become synonymous with success and well-being, while movement is interpreted as instability that leads to uncertainty and even failure. Yet this pursuit of permanence exists inside a reality that is anything but permanent.

Thanks to this settled world, we have created unprecedented levels of prosperity, scientific progress, and overall human flourishing at a level that would have been unimaginable centuries ago. Yet it has also quietly reshaped our societies and our imagination of what a life well lived should look like. We now face existential threats from the climate crisis, the rise of AI that could transform the meaning of work itself by making the best and brightest of us obsolete, inequality that makes difficult to comprehend how a trillionaire and a herder can coexist on the same planet, and the enduring threat of nuclear weapons – a technology we created without fully understanding the consequences of unleashing it. To navigate this world, we must adapt by moving and once again reclaim our identity as mover, not settlers. We must learn to see movement as the essence of life, not an interruption to it.

We live on a rock perpetually moving through space. Our planet earth rotates, revolves around the sun, and drifts through a galaxy that is itself in motion. Life, too, is defined by movement. Long before theories of evolution and adaptation, the ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus recognized this fundamental truth. He understood that permanence was an illusion and change was the essence of existence. “No man ever steps in the same river twice,” he wrote, reminding everyone that neither the river nor the person remains unchanged.

It would be far-fetched sci-fi fantasy to imagine a world where everyone abandons their urban life for a pastoral nomadism. This imagination is neither possible nor desirable. However, there are many lessons we can learn from people who embodied movement as their relentless strength. The lesson of nomadism is therefore not where we live, but how we respond to a world that never stops changing.

Anthony Sattin argues in his book Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World that many nomadic civilizations did not move aimlessly. They moved because the world itself moved as the seasons changed, rivers changed course, and climate fluctuated. Movement was not simply wandering for its own sake. It was an adaptive response to reality. In many ways, mobility became one of humanity’s greatest evolutionary advantages, enabling the exchanges of genes, ideas, languages, technologies, and knowledge that ultimately shaped our civilizations.   

For nomadic societies, wealth meant something profoundly different from what it meant in sedentary societies. Accumulation material possessions that anchored them to a specific place made little sense. Instead, the most valuable assets were those that could travel easily: knowledge, memories, relationships, practical skills, trust, resilience, and intuition. Their wealth was portable because the world they lived in demanded it. Similarly, identity was defined less by ownership or fixed borders than by community, shared stories, and the capacity to endure hardships while adapting to uncertainties. 

The Mongolian word нүүдэлчин (ᠨᠡᢉᠦᠳᠡᠯᠴᠢᠨ, nüüdelchin) is commonly translated as ‘nomad’, but it carries a deeper meaning. Нүүдэлчин is someone who moves with purpose. Pastoral nomads rarely move because their home is broken. They move because by remaining in their land would eventually overgraze the pasture, weaken the herd, and undermine the life they are trying to preserve. Movement through this perspective is not the opposite of stability. It is the mechanism through which stability is sustained in a changing world in the long run. This I believe is the lesson our modernity needs the most. 

Being a nomad in the 21^st century does not necessarily mean living in a ger (yurt) or herding livestock across the vast steppe. It means cultivating a nomadic mindset, one that is capable of intellectual, emotional, and moral movement in a world changing faster than ever before. It means recognizing that adaptation is not weakness but wisdom. It means that the most valuable forms of wealth are those we can carry with us at all times. It means that our identity should evolve with us without losing its roots that make us human. Above all, it means that resilience comes not from resisting change, but from learning to move with it. 

So, can we challenge our assumptions when reality changes overnight? Can we cross the invisible cultural, disciplinary, and political boundaries that increasingly divide us and conform us to norms and legibility? Can we allow our identities to grow instead of harden? Can we imagine institutions that reward learning as much as certainty, flexibility as much as permanence, and correction as much as coercion?

For thousands of years, pastoral nomads in the steppe understood that survival did not belong to the strongest, the wealthiest, or even the smartest. It belonged to those who could become one with the land, trust one another, and know when it was time to move. As we confront the climate crisis, AI, and geopolitical uncertainty, and deepening social fragmentation, a nomadic way of life and way of thinking may no longer be merely an ancient practice that’s not relevant to today. It may once again become one of humanity’s most important ways of thinking to navigate the challenges ahead. We have spent the last few centuries learning how to settle. But the next century may require us to remember how to move again. So let’s get moving…

References

Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press, 1998.

Sattin, Anthony. Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World. John Murray, 2022.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. 2013.

Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons. Routledge, 1930. 

С.Дулам. Монгол соёлын тайлбар толь бичиг. 2025