July/Aug 2005

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On the morning of March 20, 2002, I left my windowless office in the Tsinghua University Law School for a short break. Then I saw it: a bright orange sky, which soon turned brown and finally a dusky gray before eleven o'clock in the morning. What I was seeing was dust. Lots and lots of dust. So much dust, in fact, that two days later the United States Environmental Protection Agency reported that the particulate levels established by the Clean Air Act had been exceeded in Aspen, Colorado, because of the millions of dust particles that had been blown all the way from China. I soon learned that it was Mao's fault. The grasslands several hundred miles west of Beijing had remained stable for countless generations as local herders grazed livestock on the rich grasses. Then, in the 1950s, Mao Zedong moved thousands of native Chinese to the area to increase agricultural production and to repopulate the region with people more loyal to his regime than the traditionally Mongolian local culture. The orange sky that I saw in Beijing that morning was the predictable result of overgrazing and its resulting desertification.

My experience with the unintended consequences of human manipulation of the Chinese environment is just one of countless such anecdotes that could be drawn from the long history of China. Mark Elvin's The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China tells many more. Elvin is a professor of Chinese history at the Australian National University's Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies in Canberra. His book recounts how generations of Chinese have labored to modify the natural environment to better achieve their own ends. Three thousand years ago, China was a land where forests filled much of the landscape, ...