sustainable china

Much intellectual discourse about Chinese philosophical and religious views of nature focuses on ideals such as harmony between humans and the natural world, or “forming one body with heaven and earth” (tian ren he yi). But when it comes to historical studies of Chinese environmental history, it’s hard to find instances of where this ideal was concretely realized. Mark Elvin concludes his monumental history of China’s environment with the following observation

The religious, philosophical, literary, and historical texts surveyed and translated in the foregoing pages have been rich sources of description, insight, and even, perhaps, inspiration. But the dominant ideas and ideologies, which were often to some degree in contradiction with each other, appear to have little explanatory power in determining why what seems actually to have happened to the Chinese environment happened the way it did. Occasionally, yes, Buddhism helped to safeguard trees around monasteries. The law-enforced mystique shrouding Qing imperial tombs kept their surroundings untouched by more than minimal economic exploitation. but in general, no. There seems no case for thinking that, some details apart, the Chinese anthropogenic environment was developed and maintained in the way it was over the long run of more than three millennia because of particular characteristically Chinese beliefs or perceptions. or, at least, not in comparison with the massive effects of the pursuit of power and profit in the arena provided by the possibilities and limitations of the Chinese natural world, and the technologies that grew from interactions with them.

But when it comes to the history of religion in China, (rather than philosophical ideas), the story is quite different. Chinese religions demonstrate a continuous attempt to grapple with the natural world, imploring the heavens to aid the productive bounty of the earth. For popular Chinese religion in particular, the natural world is also depicted as a dangerous force capable of producing death and destruction on a massive scale. Read the rest of this entry »

A collapsed building in Dujiangyan, close to the epicentre of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.

China’s massive system of hydroelectric dams and water distribution has come under fire once again. Right after the devastating Sichuan earthquake of May 12, 2008, in which over 70,000 people lost their lives, officials rushed to deny that the massive Three Gorges Dam complex hundreds of kilometres downstream could have played any role in triggering the natural disaster.

Now officials are working hard to  play down a call by Fan Xiao, Chief Engineer of the Regional Geology Investigation Team of the Sichuan Geology and Mineral Bureau, for scientists to investigate whether the Zipingpu dam project, located upstream of the quake area, may have triggered the earthquake.

Fan’s call comes in the wake of a paper by Christian Klose at Columbia University which theorized how abnormal surface stresses caused by the Zipingpu dam system may have triggered the massive earthquake. Klose’s hypothesis also matches work conducted by Lei Xinglin a geologist with the China Earthquake Administration in Beijing.

Read the rest of this entry »

By James Miller

My new book came out recently. It’s called The Way of Highest Clarity: Nature, Vision and Revelation in Medieval China. It’s published by Three Pines Press, a specialist publisher in Daoist Studies, but you can also order it from the distributor, University of Hawai’i Press. The book studies a medieval Daoist religious movement, and has some interesting insights into traditional Chinese views about the environment. Probably the most important of these was that specific sites in the natural landscape were viewed as a source of religious relevation and power.  Mostly these were mountains and caves where Daoist adepts would meet gods and immortals and be trained in meditation and other forms of Daoist cultivation.

It’s such a contrast from the modern view of nature, which is essentially “flat.” A “flat landscape” has no contours, no features which stand out as being somehow different from the ordinary. Similarly, “flat” concepts of nature treat all features of the landscape indifferently: nothing is intrinsically more important or valuable than anything else. In this modern view, the value of nature is derived externally, when its value is added by being processed into consumable products. The problem with our modern view is that humans (usually wealthy manufacturers and consumers) become the chief arbiters of value, and they are unable to appreciate the intrinsic significance of natural elements within their own bioregions and ecosystems. An ecological theory of value should give worth to natural objects in terms of the role they play within the system as a whole, and not just when they are extracted from their origins and turned into consumable items.