Write 6-8 pages, double-spaced, on one of the following topics
A) The field of environmental history has been based on the premise that environmental degradation in recent centuries stems from the profit motive in capitalism, which compels resource extractors and manufacturers to carry out their activities in the most profitable way, and thus requires them to cut costs wherever possible, making it impossible to guard resources or the environment. Examples are legion.
Judith Shapiro's Mao's War Against Nature challenges this view, showing how state socialism in the 20th century was just as destructive to the environment as was capitalism, though perhaps in different ways. You should consider the question of whether socialist environment-trashing and capitalist environment-trashing are identical results of high modernism, or if they are inevitable results of industry under any kind of ideology or political system, or if they each have their own unique characteristics dictated by the political and economic features of their respective systems.
B) On pages 129-30 of Robert Weller's Discovering Nature (assigned for the next unit, but you might as well get ahead if you want to write on this topic), he quotes Chinese environmentalist Liang Congjie as saying "China's biggest problem...was the environmental ignorance of he peasantry, and thus it wa crucial to offer educational programs."
This view is extremely common among Chinese intellectuals: the peasants are ignorant, backward, and superstitious, and it is the duty of the state and the intellectuals to educate them. Are the intellectuals missing something here, at least when the topic is the environment? What, exactly, are the peasants ignorant of? Is it possible that the intellectuals might learn something useful from the peasants (or the pastoralists or the upland farmers) as well?