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The forests fell next. Elvin describes "[t]he destruction of the old-growth forests that once covered the greater part of China" as "the oldest story in China's environmental history." The story unfolded because "the original core of classical Chinese culture was hostile to forests, and saw their removal as the precondition for the creation of a civilized world." Trees were cut for fuel, to provide building materials, and as obstacles to farms and other human projects. But the disappearance of the forests caused other, albeit predictable, problems. Deforestation increased erosion, which resulted in huge amounts of sediment collecting along the coasts and the sides of lakes and rivers. Wood became scarce as early as 600 bc in some parts of the country. By the 19th century, a writer lamented that "[t]hese days, people have used their axes to deforest the mountains." Today China's timber reserves are just one-eighth the world's average in relation to its land mass.
The Chinese were even busier moving water. Water was redirected to facilitate irrigated rice production, and watercourses were channeled so that goods and people could be transported to where they were needed. Such human manipulation of hydrology yielded a landscape that was quite different from the naturally occurring environment, but the force of nature was always fighting back against human constraints. During the 16th century, for example, China restructured the lower Yellow River at enormous cost, and with only temporary success. As Elvin writes:
The same skill in water control that had contributed so greatly to the development of the Chinese economy in ancient, medieval, and even in the early part of the late-imperial times, slowly fashioned a straightjacket that in the end hindered any easy reinvention of the economic structure. Neither water nor suitable terrain was available for further profitable hydraulic expansion. … Deadliest of all, hydrological systems kept twisting free from the grip of human would-be mastery, drying out, silting up, flooding over, or changing their channels. … No other society reshaped its hydraulic landscape with such sustained energy as did the Chinese, nor on such a scale, but the dialectic of long-term interaction with the environment transformed what had been a one-time strength into a source of weakness.
China continues to struggle with its water, building the massive and controversial Three Gorges Dam to control flooding on the Yangtze River, and making equally questionable plans to divert the abundant freshwater from its southeastern provinces nearly one thousand miles north to the parched capital city of Beijing.
China's environmental history teaches that seemingly new efforts to address environmental challenges are not so new after all. Consider ecosystem management, the catchword for many current environmental protection efforts. Any suggestion that ecosystem management is a 21st-century innovation is belied by Elvin's account of the previous three millennia of Chinese history. The millions of people who died after the failure of human efforts to control rivers show that "a mismanaged ecosystem can kill on a colossal scale." In Jiaxing, an area of shallow lakes that lies south of the lower Yangzi River delta, "it was human activities that had converted a regularly fluctuating environment into one of artificial equilibrium that needed an attentive government and continual maintenance to keep it under control." In rural Ghuzhou province, a 19th century gazetteer proclaimed that "[w]e have driven away the wolves and foxes, and opened up the rocky mountains and the weedy wastes for farming." That the objects of our efforts to manage natural ecosystems are different now, including preservation of the animals that live there, does not negate the historical evidence that the Chinese have been aggressively managing their ecosystems for thousands of years.
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