China: Its Environment and History

by Robert B. Marks

This deeply informed and beautifully written book provides a comprehensive and comprehensible history of China from prehistory to the present. Focusing on the interaction of humans and their environment, Robert B. Marks traces changes in the physical and cultural world that is home to a quarter of humankind. Through both word and image, this work illuminates the chaos and paradox 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 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 reader interested in China, past or present. Indeed he argues successfully that all of humanity has a stake in China’s environmental future.

Genres: China, History, Environment, Geography, Nonfiction, Science

464 pages, Hardcover

First published December 16, 2011

Reviews

[Samuel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book sets out with a great ambition: to chronicle Chinese environmental and social history in just under 350 pages. Talk about scope! At times redundant and tiresome, the overall execution is rather impressive and mostly convincing. Moving from the Neolithic through the ancient, medieval, modern, and present eras of history, he continually situates the historical development of the "Han Chinese" people's civilization in their environment: continually discussing agriculture, water use, new technology, and expansion. I found it especially interesting to discover familiar patterns of exploitation of indigenous peoples and imperial periods of geographic expansion that mirror shameful episodes of western civilization. Chinese history is usually limited in secondary eduction and it tends to depict the Chinese as not only homogenous but at harmony with nature when in fact one of the more dominant intellectual ideologies--Confucianism--taught a hierarchal ordering of trusting men to control nature again paralleling Western civilization's dominion and subjugation of nature.

The population thrusts in China are absolutely staggering to understand. The modern history and the adoption of communism are also fascinating aspects of history that are brought up and explain why the environmental state of China is so bleak and congested. Though by no means a ray of sunshine for the future, there is a respectful resilience demonstrated for the past Chinese society even if the current populace seems to be nearly doomed by rapid industrialization, over-population, and environmental contamination.

Some fun facts:

Wet-agriculture of rice was in fact appropriated by the Chinese of the northern dry-farming forests and plains from the indigenous non-Chinese people of the south.

Stir-frying developed as a means of expending less energy to cook food in response to less timber and extensive deforestation.

Whereas 25-33% of dry harvest grains must be kept for the next season's planting, only 5% of rice does: making it a highly efficient grain producer.

Carp were used in rice cultivation to not only eat weeds and mosquitos (reduce malaria as it turned out) but also to fertilize the crop. Fruit trees and mulberry trees were added to provide the fish with more food (would fall into the water) and produce silk (from the worms on the mulberry bush).

Chinese soils would become more nutrient-enriched after a few years of intensive wet-agricultural farming practices that would make fields last for decades even centuries without having to lie fallow: talk about sustainability.

China missed out on the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century due to internal political conflicts and geographic migrations, but otherwise had the resources and technology to have undergone what happened in Europe and America.

[Hedyhohoho · Rating 4 out of 5]

环境史入门，新史学的配方，环境因子做驱动，能更从一个宏观角度看中国历史发展的起伏。