Customer Reviews

The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China

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This is a landmark book on environmental history that is well-received by many academics (also check out other reviews on the web). For me personally, this books helps me understand today's China's problems better than many other books I've read.

It maybe a stretch for people that to understand today's China, you need to go back to its 3000 years of environmental history. However, this book offers many potential answers to many questions that are still relevant today - e.g. Is China's growth sustainable? Why Chinese people have such relationships with their government? Where does her seemingly in-exhaustible labor pool come from?

The book illuminates the constant struggles between the Chinese population and her environments throughout her 3000 years of written history, with the Chinese state often being the driving force and the subsequent victim when nature eventually fought back. Many such struggles are still being repeated today - for example, the recent push of China to develop its north-west region resembled the same push Chin/Han dynasties started from 300 BC, which resulted in permanent soil erosions that gave yellow river its name and caused numerous disasters downstreams since. The Three Gorges Dam is an extension to the long running tradition of massive state-sponsored hydro-projects trying to control the river in the name for "growth". The list goes on and on...

History is bound to repeat herself if we ignore her. Hopefully this books will not be ignored.

Mark Elvin's book is not really about elephants. The elephants are a symbol for the retreat of nature from China. What the book makes clear is that China's environmental disaster is not a product of the 20th century, but dates back thousands of years when the early dynasties stamped out a culture of hunter-gathering in favor of agriculture and engaged in a deliberate destruction of flora and fauna for economic and political gain. Early Chinese dynasties were damming rivers and carving away mountains long before Mao tse-tung expounded his theories man conquering nature, the Chinese were damming rivers and carving away rivers. The book is not complimentary of Han Chinese culture's attitudes towards the environment. Elvin makes clear that other ethnic groups had more interest in maintaining harmony between man and nature. The research that went into this book is impressive. Elvin quotes extensively from literary sources and even oracle bones to explore Chinese attitudes towards nature. The book doesn't dwell much on what happened after China's economic boom in the late 20th century, but nonetheless goes a long way towards explaining why the Chinese landscape looks the way it does today.

An impressive effort by a highly learned historian to study the impact of and consequences of Chinese civilization's exploitation of the natural environment over the many centuries of Chinese history. The books is organized into 3 sections. The first is Patterns, and arguably most important, is Patterns, a description of the impact of an continuously expanding agricultural civilization on the natural world. The second is Particularities, a set of descriptions of the interactions between Chinese civilization and nature in 3 disparate parts of China. The third is Perceptions, a study of Chinese attitudes, particularly intellectual attitudes towards the natural world.

The basic story, captured by the title, is the gradual expansion of agriculture and the destruction of forests across China. Forest elephants once ranged across much of China. The spread of Chinese agricultural society resulted in habitat destruction and accompanying loss of elephants and many other species. This is hardly unique to China. Hannibal's elephants were native North African forest elephants, long since vanished. A particularly important aspect of the story, which Elvin analyzes quite well, is the relatively large scale of Chinese environmental manipulation. The relative power of even early Chinese states allowed massive hydrological engineering projects which in a set of positive feedbacks, furthered Chinese agricultural development. Elvin also argues that these impressive successes came with considerable costs, not only to the natural environment but also to successive Chinese states. The massive hydrological engineering not only required huge resources for maintenance but also continuously increasing needs for re-engineering as unanticipated negative consequences of hydrological engineering further investments. Elvin argues that this recurring problem produced "technological lock-in," a major commitment of resources to these technologies that acted to ultimately reduce resources that could have been invested in alternative technologies. This is partly a reprise of a well-known argument made by Elvin in a prior book that China suffered economically and technologically from a "high equilibrium trap." In Elvin's interesting analysis, technological lock-in interacts with another important feature of expanding Chinese agriculture, environmental degradation, to produce horribly difficult problems. Massive deforestation, for example, resulted in major erosion and compromise of river and irrigation systems. Agricultural expansions allowed considerable population expansions but the limitations of the system resulted in involution and exposure to subsistence crises.

The last part of the book on attitudes to nature is also quite interesting. Elvin reviews Chinese attitudes towards nature across several centuries. This is interesting in its own right with a particularly comparison of differences with the scientific attitudes that emerged in Western Europe.

Elvin is a good writer and a very impressive analyst. One defect of this book is that sections are a bit diffuse. The middle section, for example, on different parts of China is interesting but essentially descriptive and adds relatively little to the overall analysis. A good deal of the book is Elvin's analysis of primary texts, particularly literary sources. Again, this is done very well but sometimes the degree of detail obscures the analysis. I think some important themes are not explored well. Elvin implies, but doesn't really explore the idea that the large scale hydrological engineering favors a relatively large state. Similarly, he suggests that private land-holding exacerbated environmental degradation presumably reflecting the changes in land-tenure systems over the course of Imperial history but doesn't pursue this theme.

I found the book fairly hard-going as the writer is a master of many fields and switches from discipline to discipline quite regularly. It is, however, certainly thought-provoking in relation to many issues about humans and the environment, and the current economic boom in China, taking place in a country that has already over-exploited its resources in an effort to feed its huge population.