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Book Review
| Discovering Nature: Globalization and Environmental Culture in China and Taiwan. By Robert P. Weller. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, and São Paulo: Cambridge University Press, 2006. viii + 189 pp. Includes illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth $70.00, paper $27.99.
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| For over a century, China and Taiwan have had widely divergent political and economic histories, yet a comparison of their responses to the environmental challenges caused by extraordinary economic development over the recent past shows remarkable similarities. Why is that? Robert P. Weller, an anthropologist with field experience in both Taiwan and China (and hence with excellent Chinese language skills), proceeds in this brief but fine book to explore indigenous cultural traditions, twentieth-century globalization, and the different political and economic systems of China and Taiwan as possible explanations. Weller concludes that shared cultural traditions outweighed political and economic differences as people and elites in China and Taiwan fashioned understandings of environmental change over the past twenty years. |
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Weller distinguishes between the environment, which he defines as "the broadest physical environment in which humans live," and nature, "the social construction of that environment" (p. 8). The concern of this book, as the title indicates, is with nature. It is thus an exploration of human mental encounters with the environment in China and Taiwan, using as cases the emergence of nature tourism to new state nature preserves and kitschy amusement parks alike (chapter 4), local protests against mounting pollution, in particular garbage (chapter 5), and national environmental policies (chapter 6), to explore the interactions among local, global, and modernizing elite ideas about nature and the environment. These case studies are interesting for their detail, and important because of Weller's findings about the complex interplay among global, national, and local forces. |
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The first two substantive chapters might be especially interesting to readers of Environmental History. In chapter 2, Weller explores the ways in which Chinese have historically thought about their environment. This chapter is the best overview of Chinese ideas about the environment that I have yet read. Examining Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist ideas, Weller concludes, following philosopher Tu Weiming, that historic Chinese views of the environment can best be described as "anthropocosmic," that is, not only are humans always in the cosmos, but that humans can use the environment, preferably in ways that resonate with cosmic harmony. Weller also examines Chinese words that might translate as "nature," and provides an insightful discussion of the Japanese origins of the modern Chinese term for nature, ziran. |
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In chapter 3, Weller examines Western ideas about nature to explore and explain which ones were adopted by Chinese in the twentieth century and what consequences those ideas have had. Noting that Chinese had three Western views of nature from which to choose—the post-Enlightenment "scientific" view of an objectified nature as opposed to human culture and civilization, the Romantic view of nature for itself, and a Jeffersonian "pastoral" view of people and nature in "happy equilibrium," Weller argues that China's modernizing elites in the two main political parties that came to rule China and Taiwan (the Communists and the Nationalists) seized upon the first, leading to wars on nature in the service of rapid economic development in both places. The acceptance of Western ideas separating nature from culture then led political elites and NGOs alike to adopt models for national parks (the United States for Taiwan, and UNESCO for China) that try to recreate a human-less "nature," and for national, top-down environmental protection policies that let slip important sources of degradation. |
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Because they have over a quarter of the world's population and economies growing faster than anywhere else on earth, how China and Taiwan understand nature and the environment are globally important questions; Weller has made an important contribution to understanding both. |
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Robert B. Marks is Richard and Billie Deihl Professor of History at Whittier College, and the author of Tigers, Rice, Silk and Silt: Environment and Economy in Late Imperial South China (Cambridge, 1998), and The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative (Rowman and Littlfield, 2002 and 2006). |
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