China

This deeply informed and clearly written text provides, previously published with the slightly different title China: Its Environment and History, a comprehensive and comprehensible history of China from prehistory to the present. Now updated to include recent political events and scientific research, China: An Environmental History focuses on the interaction of humans and thei...

This deeply informed and clearly written text provides, previously published with the slightly different title China: Its Environment and History, a comprehensive and comprehensible history of China from prehistory to the present. Now updated to include recent political events and scientific research, China: An Environmental History focuses on the interaction of humans and their environment. Tracing changes in the physical and cultural world that is home to a fifth of humankind, Robert B. Marks illuminates the paradoxes inherent in China's environmental narrative, demonstrating how historically sustainable practices can, in fact, be profoundly ecologically unsound. The author also reevaluates China's traditional "heroic" storyline, highlighting the marginalization of nature and contacts with other peoples that followed the spread of Chinese civilization while examining the development of a distinctly Chinese way of relating to and altering the environment. Unmatched in his ability to synthesize a complex subject clearly and cogently, Marks has written an accessible yet nuanced history for any student interested in China, past or present, or indeed in the world's environmental future.

The second edition has been updated to reflect changes in China's environmental policies. The translation of the first edition into Chinese by two Chinese scholars led to many questions that required clarification, as well as highlighting errors by the author. Their improvements for the Chinese edition have in turn been taken in this second edition.

Robert B. Marks is professor of history and environmental studies at Whittier College. His books include The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Environmental Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-First Century, and Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt: Environment and Economy in Late Imperial South China. He is the recipient of Whittier College's Harry W. Nerhood Teaching E...

Robert B. Marks is professor of history and environmental studies at Whittier College. His books include The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Environmental Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-First Century, and Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt: Environment and Economy in Late Imperial South China. He is the recipient of Whittier College's Harry W. Nerhood Teaching Excellence Award.