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Readings for Unit 2: HOW DID IT GET THIS WAY?

Thursday, January 10: Sustainability and Resilience; Agriculture and Diet

We begin today with a discussion of two important concepts that will inform our understanding of China's environmental history and its environmental present: sustainability and resilience. To begin understanding these concepts, you should read two theoretical pieces: Simon Levin et al.'s "Resilience in Natural and Socioeconomic Systems," p. 222-234 in the Policy Forum on Resilience and Sustainability (You're welcome to read more, of course), and Robert Solow's Sustainability: an Economist's Perspective. I will spend the first hour today talking about how we hope to examine China's environment in light of the concepts of sustainability and resilience.

We will also deal with agriculture as techniques of food production, and although wet rice agriculture is only one form of agricultural production common in China, I will show you a slide show of how it was done in the years immediately preceding mechanization. For background, you should read pages 101-117 from a chapter by Joseph Whitney on East Asian Agriculture, published in G.A. Klee (ed.), World Systems of Traditional Resource Management, 1980.

Finally, there is the matter of how food habits themselves are influenced by, and in turn influence, the practices of agriculture. We will talk a little about this in the context of Eugene Anderson's chapter on Chinese Foodstuffs Today from his book, The Food of China.

We may not make it all the way through all this material today, but it doesn't matter much; the topic of food and the topic of water flow (chew?) nicely into each other anyway.

Tuesday, January 15: Water

Water is a big part of any ecosystem, but in China water takes on particular importance at different scales. At the largest scale, there is too much water in the south and not enough in the north, as you can see from the maps on pages 154 and 155 of Smil's China's Past, China's Future. In fact, the necessity to control water to irrigate fields, prevent floods, and enable transportation led to Karl Wittfogel's famous theory of oriental despotism, which you may or may not want to read about.

More directly to the point, water control was a way in which Chinese modified their natural environment for human use over the course of the last few thousand years. They not only practiced water control, but philosophized and theorized about it. Two very interesting case studies of the late imperial period are presented in Peter Perdue's study of Dongting Lake in Hunan and Keith Schoppa's study of Xiang Lake in Zhejiang, both of which are required reading.

Thursday, January 17: Population Growth

Today we discuss how population fits into this model, as a series of macro-micro interactions between individual behavior and overall trends. Although the details of the macro-trends are hotly disputed, the overall pattern is easily captured in a single diagram.

What is more difficult is uncovering the individual behavior behind these trends. There has been a huge dispute about Chinese fertility behavior, starting with the assertions originally made in book one of Thomas Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population. For our purposes here, the best thing is for you to read Fertility," chapter 6, and "System," chapter 7 from James Z. Lee and Wang Feng, One Quarter of Humanity, and then read the dispute arising from this book.

In class, we will go over principles of fertility and mortality, debate the issues raised in the dispute of Wolf vs. Lee, Campbell, and Wang, and talk about how population and fertility fit into the ecosystems of traditional China at a micro and macro level.

Tuesday, January 22: Cities, War and Deforestation

Mark Elvin has advanced the provocative thesis that Imperial China, rather than being a society that kept humans and the environment in balance, was in fact a society and culture that devastated the environment, albeit more slowly than do modern industrial societies. Stated as "Chinese-style pre-modern hydro-agrarian city-driven development was the main source of difficulty and disaster in the historical period," this thesis is presented in concise form in one of your required readings for today, Elvin's Environmental Legacy of Imperial China, and in rather longer form in his book, The Retreat of the Elephants. Your other reading is a case study by Robert Marks, People Said that Extinction was not Possible from his work on Guangdong environmental history, Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt.

On the basis of these case studies, we will discuss the question of whether imperial Chinese culture was a three-thousand year slow train to disaster, or whether it contained the possibility of sustainable human-environment relations. We will not be able to resolve this dispute, but our discussion here will be supplemented next week when we talk about the ecology of local communities.

Thursday, January 24: Philosophy, Politics, and Nature

So what is behind all this? One of your required texts, Robert Weller's Discovering Nature addresses this question in some detail; for today please read the introduction and chapters 1-3 (I assume you couldn't resist reading something called "Night of the Living Dead Fish" anyway). Also, going a little more deeply into the relationship of China's philosophical and religious traditions to ecology and the environment, please read

After a very abstract lecture, we will have a class discussion on the degree to which Confucian principles of anthropocosmic proto-ecology are or are not manifested in the actual cases from Schoppa, Perdue, Elvin, Marks, etc., which in expanded form will be one of the topics for your first paper.

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