Write 6-8 pages, double-spaced, on one of the following topics
A) In your readings for the first section, you have encountered numerous historical examples of how agriculture, war, transportation, flood control, and other human activities have altered the environment for human benefit. Some of these have indisputably reduced the sustainability and or resilience of the local or regional ecosystems, and by the end of the Qing dynasty, the Chinese environment was in a precarious state. Given the emphasis on anthropocosmic harmony in Confucianism, on non-interference in Daoism, and on both detachment and compassion for living creatures in Buddhism, it appears that there was disjunction between beautiful theory and messy or even ugly reality. This suggests a number of possibilities, and your assignment is to evaluate them:
B) There is a huge dispute today about the relationship between population and environment. On the one side are the demographic determinists or Malthusians, who say that overpopulation is the problem. On the other side are the social justice theorists, who say that maldistribution of resources across different segments of the population is the problem: the poor, the inland, the minorities starve, or are forced to degrade their environment not to starve, while the rich, the centrally located, the culturally orthodox thrive. Which of these two viewpoints best explains the local and more general degradation of the environment of imperial China described in the several case studies we have read and talked about?