ABSTRACT

The veneration of nature is an ancient ingredient of China’s admirably longlived civilization – but the presence of this attitude has not provided a sufficient counterweight to all those much less admirable forces of environmental destruction whose cumulative effects bequeathed modern China with extensively degraded landscapes. To these old problems were added insults committed in the name of a superior ideology during Mao’s years, as well as all the new environmental assaults that have taken place during the post-1980 era of economic modernization guided by a peculiar mixture of state (party) control and noholds-barred private enterprise. And all of these developments have been unfolding against China’s complex geologic, geomorphologic and climatic conditions, which include a vulnerability to major earthquakes, extreme droughts and no less extreme monsoon downpours. I will outline some of these attitudes and constraints in the opening section of this chapter.