Rowman & Littlefield Publishers China: An Environmental History (World Social Change)

This deeply informed and clearly written text provides a comprehensive and comprehensible history of China from prehistory to the present. Now updated to include recent political events and scientific research, the book focuses on the interaction of humans and their environment. Tracing changes in the physical and cultural world that is home to a fifth of humankind, Robert B. Marks illuminates the paradoxes inherent in China's environmental narrative, demonstrating how historically sustainable practices can, in fact, be profoundly ecologically unsound. The author also reevaluates China's traditional "heroic" storyline, highlighting the marginalization of nature and contacts with other peoples that followed the spread of Chinese civilization while examining the development of a distinctly Chinese way of relating to and altering the environment. Unmatched in his ability to synthesize a complex subject clearly and cogently, Marks has written an accessible yet nuanced history for any student interested in China, past or present, or indeed in the world's environmental future. Review Robert Marks's book is a superb synthesis of the English-language literature on Chinese environmental history. In eight succinct but fact-filled chapters, Marks covers the entire period from ancient China to the present in a fluently written, balanced, and accessible manner. For the first time, general readers can gain a sophisticated overview of Chinese interactions with their landscapes, their manipulation of natural resources, and their exploitation and destruction of both. Anyone seeking to understand how the long course of China's history has produced the current environmental crises must consult this book. . . . Marks devotes three of his eight chapters to the last two centuries, embracing the entire period of industrialization, revolution, and devastation. No one has covered the modern period in such insightful detail. . . . Its continuous story of intensified environmental pressure, as documented in this brilliant analysis, carries disturbing lessons for all of us.--Peter C. Perdue, Yale University "Journal of Asian Studies " A broad survey of Chinese ecological history that encompasses more than 4000 years, Robert Marks' China: Its Environment and History provides a much-needed bridge between narratives of China's political, social, and economic history and its environmental history. It focuses on the relationship between humans and the environment, and emphasizes the transformative impact of civilizational forces such as agricultural production, deforestation, and water management, on China's natural environment. Marks illustrates the reciprocal relationship between humans and the environment by noting how human responses to natural forces, particularly climate change, instigated ecological transformations. Major themes include the ecological impacts of agriculture, warfare, technological advances, urbanization, the rise and fall of empire, and population growth. Intentional and unintentional effects of these anthropogenic forces include deforestation, soil erosion, flooding, the spread of disease, the depletion of natural resources, and the endangerment of wild animal species. . . .While the book's major focus is assessing the anthropogenic causes of environmental change, it is effective in presenting cultural attitudes towards the environment, from ancient ideas about nature to modern forms of environmentalism....The individual chapters could supplement world history courses, as many general textbooks lack an assessment of East Asian environmental history. Overall, the book provides an ecological backstory that would complement any world history survey.--Middle Ground Based in part on the author's earlier, more technical book, Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt: Environment and Economy in Late Imperial South China (1997), this new volume presents for a more general audience the parallel story lines of episodic and long-