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Book Review
BOOK REVIEW EDITOR'S NOTE
ISSUE BY ISSUE, the book reviews in this journal provide an overview of the progress of scholarship in environmental history. These reviews point to the increasing diversity and richness of the field. The literature reviewed spans the globe—including parts of all continents (except Antarctica) and one ocean (the Pacific), and cover a wide variety of topics—from public policy (the EPA, nuclear earthmoving, wolves, healthy forests) to corporate policy to gender. Notably, two prize-winning studies are reviewed: James McCann's Maize and Grace, which won this year's ASEH George Perkins Marsh Prize for Best Book in Environmental History and John Soluri's Banana Cultures, which stems from an article that won the ASEH Leopold-Hidy Prize for Best Article in Environmental History in 2003.
MELISSA WIEDENFELD
| The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China. By Mark Elvin. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. xxviii + 564 pp. Bibliographical references, index, maps, and illustrations. Cloth $39.95, paper $22.00.
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| Mark Elvin's book wears a marvelous title. Although the fate of China's elephants is only one among many narratives of nature and culture elucidated by this reliable environmental history of China, it is an engaging one. Found today in dwindling numbers in a corner of Yunnan Province, elephants ranged across China as far north as the future site of Beijing four thousand years ago, Elvin says, were used in warfare seven hundred years ago, and for transport as late as 1662 CE. Their recessional is emblematic of the diminution of many species of megafauna such as the rhinoceros, tiger, and panda. The reasons behind this and other environmental narratives are the subject of more than mere speculation. Elvin shows us that China's historical record is unusually long and comprehensive, and gives evidence for comparisons with other regions such as Europe. |
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Although the organization is not chronological, the sweep of the book extends through the period from the time of the earliest records to the end of the Chinese Empire in 1912. Elvin readily admits that one of the most important uses of his study will be to provide background for understanding the turbulent and often destructive history of the last hundred years, and he gives a number of stimulating hints in this regard, but makes no sustained exposition. One hopes for a second volume that may do this. |
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The present volume consists of three sections, "Patterns," "Particularities," and "Perceptions." "Patterns" looks at the major interactions of human culture with the natural environment, including a general consideration of the comprehensiveness of environmental exploitation in Chinese history, which reached its apogee in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; an overview of the process of near extinction of the elephant; the long story of the "great deforestation" (which deservedly occupies two of the six chapters in this section); the environmental impacts of warfare and military organization; and the control of water distribution, irrigation, and flood control. "Particularities" contains three case studies, each of a province or region in contrasting parts of China: Jiaxing on the eastern coast south of the lower Yangzi delta; Guizhou, a colonial frontier area in the southwestern interior; and the relatively undeveloped Zunhua on the old northeastern border near the Great Wall. These examples are well chosen to suggest the variety of environmental experience in the huge and diverse realm of China. "Perceptions" uses writings from various periods to investigate the possibility of identifying Chinese attitudes to nature. Early views relating natural and supernatural; scholars who, however tentatively, exhibited the beginnings of a scientific approach; and the interplay between official imperial doctrine and the reflections of learned individuals are typified and compared. |
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One of the greatest values of the book is Elvin's inclusion of very many translations of the Chinese sources. These will open a treasury of evidence to students of Chinese environmental history, particularly those whose primary fields of study are elsewhere and who wish to make comparisons. While this is in no sense a "source collection," it is also true that no other book on the environmental history of this region offers a selection as rich and well chosen as this. For instance, Elvin quotes Ding Wei's late-nineteenth century "Investigation into Back Lake" as one of the first Chinese efforts to write environmental history (p. 284). Ding used place names and other evidence to show that a forest had once existed there but was gone in his own day. In another example, Elvin gives us Qin Lian's poem on the reconstruction of a seawall as an example of human striving against nature:
Rising upward for a hundred feet, toward the towers of Heaven!
So if Feng Yi [the River God] is angry, he will still not dare transgress,
And uncanny beasts beneath the sea will, in terror, hold their breath (p. 445).
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Although comparisons with the People's Republic are beyond Elvin's purpose in this book, the attitude expressed here may seem to foreshadow a poem by Chairman Mao Zedong that portrays the stone wall of the Three Gorges Dam as an act of defiance against the Goddess (that is, if she were still alive, which he doubts). |
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Elvin is extraordinarily adept in displaying the wide variation in Chinese attitudes toward nature. Like many who have written on other parts of the world in similar periods, he finds it difficult to demonstrate a connection between prevailing views of the environment and the actual course of environmental transformation by human hands. His reflection on this conundrum is well worth quoting: "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" (p. 470). |
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Elvin asks, probably rhetorically, if China is unique in this respect. It seems clear that the answer must be "no." It is a problem that all environmental historians must deal with, avoiding simplification while not getting lost in the thickets of complexity. Elvin handles the challenge well. |
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Elvin's style is consistently clear and readable, with a few quirks: Many sentences without verbs. It is unfortunate that the book lacks photographic illustrations or drawings. Although the dust jacket image of a man riding an elephant is delightful, it serves to indicate what might have been added to the book itself. The book contains some fine maps of the historical retreat of the elephants and of Hangzhou Bay in succeeding periods, but the only map of all China is a "schematic model," not to scale, which is all right as far as it goes, but does not even locate Elvin's three case study areas. Because he is one of the editors of A Cultural Atlas of China (Facts on File, 1983), he could have helped the reader more, cartographically speaking. |
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This book is the finest introduction to premodern Chinese environmental history as a whole that has appeared. It embodies high standards of research, identifies the major problem areas with accurate intuition, and recreates the changes of the past with disciplined imagination. |
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J. Donald Hughes is John Evans Professor of History at the University of Denver and the author of The Environmental History of the World (Routledge, 2002). He received the ASEH Distinguished Service Award in 2000. |
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