The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (review)

The reviewer must admit at the outset to having read this fascinating book in a condition of considerable disadvantage. Since the version provided for review was an "advance uncorrected page proof" it lacked five maps to be included in the published version, which made several of the descriptions and analyses difficult to follow. Mark Elvin recommends, wisely, that the reader have at hand an atlas of China, but since the book was read and the review written in a rather out-of-the-way part of Italy, this, too, was impossible. My images of Chinese geography and topography being hazier than anticipated, I thoroughly endorse for serious readers the author's recommendation concerning the atlas.

Elvin's comprehensive volume is divided into three main parts. The first, "Patterns," gives a synoptic overview of the history of the human impact on the natural environment in China over the past three millennia. Emblematic of this impact is the virtual disappearance of elephants from what is now China (the "retreat" of the title) as a result of the destruction of their habitat by the clearing of land for farming, the killing of elephants to protect crops, and hunting and trapping for human benefit and profit. The second part, "Particularities," focuses on the environmental histories of three very different regions of China: Jiaxing on the central east coast, where an extensive system of sea walls and levees and polders was constructed over the centuries to gain land for farming and protect it against the sea; Guizhou in the southwestern interior, where the Han majority gained imperialistic power over the resident Miao people; and Zunhua in the northeast, an area rich in resources and underdeveloped in relation to the first two regions. The third part, "Perceptions," discusses the ways that various Chinese have understood the natural world at different times in their history, as manifested in literature and poetry and scientific writings. The detailed presentation of the changing states of the natural environment in China along with associated interpretations and understandings of nature make the whole book a uniquely valuable study.

Elvin's reading of the environmental history of China is based on an extraordinary array of primary (and some secondary) sources, ranging from prefectural gazetteers to literary texts (mainly poems), all presented in readable English translations. If some of the translations of poetry are on occasion stilted—and Chinese poetry is surely even more difficult to translate than poetry in most other languages—the service provided to nonreaders of Chinese in the form of so much material relevant to assessing Chinese views of and impacts on the environment is immeasurable.

The book treats a vast range of topics in environmental history. There are two long chapters on deforestation that cover the ground in amazing detail, one on the effects on the environment of various wars and another on the enormous projects undertaken at different periods in China's history to control water, whether seawater by walls and dykes, or streams and rivers by ditches, dams, and canals. The Chinese have built and sustained hydrological systems on a far greater scale than any other people, and yet Elvin shows how these systems repeatedly fell prey to damage and destruction once they reached the limits of sustainability by overtaxing the labor and resources necessary for maintaining them.

At the beginning of the section titled "Perceptions," he writes that "there developed among the elite an artistic and philosophical attitude toward the landscape that saw it as the exemplification of the workings of the deepest forces in the cosmos. As, not a momentary, but a perpetually present and accessible revelation . . ." (p. 321). This idea, familiar to those who have looked to Daoist philosophy as a resource for ways to think about the interrelations between human beings and the natural world, comes into obvious conflict with the picture of millennia of environmental exploitation and devastation so vividly painted in the...