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  • Environmental Winds: Making the Global in Southwest China by Michael J. Hathaway
  • Szu-hung Fang
Michael J. Hathaway, Environmental Winds: Making the Global in Southwest China
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. xi + 258 pp. $27.95
paperback, $65.00 cloth

Environmental Winds is a book about environmentalism in remote China. Working from in-depth observations recorded during his long stay in Yunnan, Michael J. Hathaway analyzes the dynamics of Chinese society through the idea of “wind,” which he uses to represent the uncertain and fluid characteristics of certain thoughts, practices, and campaigns. In this ambitious study, the author discusses various topics, from conservation and environmentalism to local people’s engagement and survival tactics, the limits of the use of (ontological) dichotomy when analyzing China, the creation of indigenous space and knowledge, the role of nonhuman agency in (re)shaping social landscapes, and most important, the way people understand, interpret, absorb, and transform globalization as subjectivities emerge.

One of the central themes of this book is the relationship between Western and Chinese environmentalisms. By using the term “wind” to refer to ideas, campaigns, and practices, the author questions a range of ideas and categories often accepted by researchers outside China, which tends to be seen as a passive recipient of Western ideas about the natural world and its preservation. When people in China recognize certain movements and campaigns proposed by the government and foreign organizations as “winds,” the implication is that their direction and end might change—even reverse—without clear reasons, just as breezes intermittently blow and die down. As a result, it is more important that researchers examine how people predict, experience, and adapt to various winds than that they simply take a linear view of the trajectory of certain (environmental) policies. As Hathaway argues, “Winds do not simply impact people; they are made, shaped, and transformed by people” (11).

Hathaway’s initial question is how Yunnan, a remote province in southwest China, became a world-class base of conservation committed to preserving its great biodiversity, attracting considerable attention through its protection of tropical rain forest and endangered species. Was this all due to the influence of Western environmentalism, [End Page 315] or did local impulses facilitate the transformation? By asking these questions at the beginning, Hathaway shows that a lively world could not readily be framed by existing theories. He replaces the term “social movement” with “globalized formation” in order to bring a dynamic and mutually constitutive perspective to social studies. People no longer need to make the painful choice between resistance, accommodation, and localization. Indeed, global winds do not always come from the West, and Hathaway points out that the Cultural Revolution stirred many liberation movements in the West (see chap. 1).

In other words, anthropological training and a constructive language help Hathaway challenge the common perception that globalization is a linear, fixed, and natural process. Instead, multiple agents, institutions, and structures are recognized as essential to shaping globalization and are themselves shaped by it at the same time. The dichotomy between global and local, power and resistance, and advanced and backward is thus deconstructed. When facing a powerful wind, whether it is from foreign states, global organizations, or their own government, local people may mobilize and organize resistance against challenges to local lifestyles and livelihoods. Nevertheless, one of Hathaway’s contributions is that local people’s resistance might exist only to the extent that the researcher/observer already holds a prerequisite framework in which resistance has a fixed seat. The real interaction between local people and foreign challenges is more dynamic and fruitful, just as Hathaway’s book demonstrates.

Consequently, the reactions of different local people to a World Wildlife Fund project or a government conservation plan are far richer than “resistance.” Instead, a range of people deploy various tactics to engage these environmental winds, which Hathaway describes as “the art of engagement” and discusses in detail in chapter 3. Local people, indigenous or not, tend to strengthen their connections to high-ranking officials in order to facilitate their business or pursue chances of development when (environmental) winds blow. The appearance of a World Wildlife Fund project in remote Yunnan did bring some...

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