Pity the poor elephants!
Pity the poor elephants! Over 4,000 years they were gradually pushed from all over China to a few protected enclaves near the border with Burma. The main reason was destruction of their habitat as humans cut down forests and introduced agriculture. Farmers found their dwindling herds a nuisance as crops were trampled and plundered. Others came to value a few of them for military, transport and ceremonial purposes: their ivory was prized and their trunks became a gourmet delicacy. But their numbers shrank until they became little more than a memory for most Chinese. It is the allegory used by Mark Elvin to illustrate the transformation of the Chinese environment to the end of pre-industrial times. Some of the same story can be seen in Africa today.
This book is not so much an environmental history of China as a collection of its fragments. With copious quotations from Chinese written sources of all kinds, Elvin is able to show what happened in different places and why. Even if we can see from archaeology that comparable events took place elsewhere, only in China are there such records which give a unique account of what it felt like by some of those who lived through them. It was not always a pleasant or edifying process, and as usual the voices of those worst affected will never be heard.
In broad terms the process, faster in some areas than others, had certain characteristics: first deforestation to make way for agriculture; next a bonanza as resources were exploited, species were lost and human numbers rose; then growth of towns, cities and states with social stratification; increasing competition between them, with war as the spur and environment sometimes used as a weapon; better technology mitigated by mismanagement of resources; entrapment within limited local circumstances, and consequent vulnerability to change; finally increasing risks of social and economic collapse affecting society as a whole. Elvin well shows the differences in three areas: Jiaxing to the south of the Yangzi river, Guizhou in the south where the Han people gradually displaced the indigenous Miao, and Zunhua in the mountainous north east.
Everywhere control of water was essential. "Hydraulic despotism" may tell only part of the story, but the state partly grew out of the need to manage a precious and sometimes capricious resource. The struggle to run irrigation systems, limit marine incursions, maintain banks and walls, undertake dredging, cope with floods and storms, and adapt to ever changing weather patterns is as difficult today as it ever was. With huge populations dependent on particular systems, any change can become increasingly difficult. What begins as a short term strength can become a long term weakness, well illustrated by susceptibility to waterborne diseases.
The complexity of Chinese attempts to manage human effects on the environment makes China special. Still more special are Chinese beliefs and attitudes towards the environment over the millennia. Generalizations are bound to be misleading. But in general terms the Chinese were driven, in Elvin's words, by a desire for rational mastery of the world. They had little hesitation in uprooting forests, redirecting and polluting rivers, destroying natural landscapes, and giving political and military needs absolute priority. They were capable of remarkable powers of organization, and ran projects far beyond European capacities at the time. But in doing so they paid scant regard to the environment and thereby created many long term problems.
On the other hand they had a particularly sensitive respect for nature and natural beauty in all its forms. Even if forests were destroyed, individual trees were singled out for admiration. Heaven and Earth were closely linked, and the line between the natural and the supernatural was blurred. There was a confluence of matter leading to energy, and energy leading to life, each a product of Bright Force and Dark Force. Dragons and spirits were sometimes above the surface in thunder and lightning, and sometimes below it in earthquakes. They formed part of a living world which sustained as well as punished humans. Even the behaviour of the weather was related to human activity so that there was morality in meteorology.
In such a world divination of what the invisible forces felt or did was crucial. This could involve sacrifices of animals or humans, or burning cracks in the shoulder blades of mammals or the undershells of turtles. In Shang times this had political significance as the ruler was the intermediary between the visible and invisible world. This was also true in other epochs when the apparatus of authority was given almost divine attributes.
It is as difficult for us to enter into this mental cosmology as into that of our own ancestors in pre-scientific times. Elvin well shows that the search for observable and verifiable facts about the world and putting them to use in programmes of thought was almost entirely alien to the Chinese. Thus the shock of change was more abrupt in China than in Europe where the scientific revolution began earlier. Traces of the old thinking may even have survived Mao tse Tung, and persist in fundamental ways today.
This book is not easy to read. Some of the quotations seem scarcely relevant, and the whole text could have been usefully pruned. At the end there is an unilluminating venture into equations as if sustainability could be reduced to an algorithm. Yet taken as a whole, the book is a fascinating, always scholarly miscellany of stories, poetry, and ideas from the history of the longest continuous civilization on Earth. The relationship of that civilization with its fragile and sometimes tortured environment contains lessons for others, particularly at a time when industrial society in China as elsewhere is pressing harder than ever on the environment. This will be a source book, elephants and all, for generations to come.
