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Discovering Nature: Globalization and Environmental Culture in China and TaiwanPublisher:Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Copyright:2006
Pages:viii + 189
Review:
China’s environment, embattled by decades of rapid industrialization and neglect, is a hot research topic. Until recently, most studies of the human–environment relationship in China have dealt with the subject somewhat narrowly, either by focusing on environmental history or by examining how quintessentially Chinese value systems, such as Confucianism, interact with the environment. Discovering Nature is a short but comparatively ambitious look at the myriad factors influencing environmental attitudes and actions in China and Taiwan in the 20th century. Both countries, Weller argues, have undergone such a dramatic transformation in the human–environment relationship that they can be said to have “discovered” a new concept of nature. Material for the book is drawn from philosophical and historical sources, bolstered by case studies from the author’s 25 years of anthropological research in both countries. The narrative style of the book is accessible, compelling, and punctuated with personal and sometimes humorous anecdotes.
Two important analytical axes cut through the book and highlight the similarities and differences between the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan in regard to the environment: the nature of globalization and the nature of state power. In examining the role that globalization has played in shaping “environmental culture” in China and Taiwan, Weller points out that the traditional semantic categories in Chinese for describing nature (tian, shanshui) were replaced by the Western terms nature and environment only in the 20th century. Three important streams of European and North American thinking about the environment have successively influenced China and Taiwan: a utilitarian one that viewed nature primarily as an object for human use; a conservationist one that saw nature as something valuable in its own right; and an idealized one that saw nature as a “corrective to the ills of modern urban life” (p. 61). Such ideals helped to inspire the burgeoning national park and nature reserve systems in both countries. In examining the nature of state power in China and Taiwan in relation to environmental issues, Weller points out that both places have experienced highly authoritarian governments for much of the 20th century, and both have espoused a decidedly modernist view of the natural environment, promoting large-scale development and industrialization at great ecological cost. The two countries are quite different, however, in terms of the social and political mechanisms citizens use for dealing with environmental ills such as pollution, nuclear power, and garbage disposal. In Taiwan, these mechanisms include citizen campaigns and protests that draw in Buddhist temples, kinship networks, township and village factions, and local thugs. This stands in contrast to the situation in China, where the single-party state allows little room for overt, organized protest over environmental or other concerns. Nevertheless, Weller describes a 1990s case from Anhui province in which a private citizen sued an oil refinery when emissions damaged his crab-raising business on a local lake. The lawsuit—which rankled villagers, business owners, factory bosses, environmental protection officials, and state cadres—reveals the multiple and often conflicting interests of various state agencies and suggests a complexity and heterogeneity not often ascribed to China’s political and legal systems. As Weller advances this argument, suggesting that “there is no monolithic state here” (p. 119), his expertise in the anthropology of politics, civil society, and social movements becomes evident. On the whole, Discovering Nature accomplishes its goal of tracing the influx of global environmental values into China and Taiwan. One of its most conspicuous omissions, however, is a treatment of how the Chinese and Taiwanese cases fit into the global environmental picture. The book’s readers presumably share an interest in Chinese and Taiwanese studies, but the author could have made a much stronger case for why such a book matters in the wider world of anthropology and environmental studies: because China accounts for nearly one-quarter of the world’s population; because problems like pollution and endangered species protection are inherently transboundary in character; and because people everywhere are now breathing the fumes and living with the greenhouse gases produced by the overheated economies of East Asia. The book probably deserves a much broader readership than the one for which it has been written. In Discovering Nature, Weller makes a significant contribution to, and an explicit call for, more community-level anthropological research on environmental attitudes and actions in China and Taiwan. Readers can only hope to see similarly ambitious work from him in the future on this important subject. [photographs, glossary, references, index.]
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