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Stevan Harrell, "An Ecological History of Modern China" (U Washington Press, 2023)
00:57:43
An interview with Stevan Harrell
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Stephen Harrell
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:33]
Brian Hamilton
Hello and welcome back to New Books in Environmental Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Brian Hamilton here at Deerfield Academy, and I'm very honored to be joined today by Stephen Harrell. He is professor emeritus of anthropology and of Environmental and Forest Sciences at the University of Washington, is the author of many books, including the one that brings him here today. It's called An Ecological History of Modern China. It comes out today from University of Washington Press. Dr. Harrell, welcome to the show.
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Stephen Harrell
Oh, thank you. I'm just very happy to be here.
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Brian Hamilton
Well, this is just such an achievement, this book, and it's such a gift, I think, both, I imagine, to scholars of East Asia, but also to kind of hopeless Americanists like me who are just curious to learn about this. This is such a rich topic and you, you go into it in great depth. It's a, it's a hefty book, but also reads very, very quickly and, and is amazingly comprehensive for such an endless kind of topic like this. And so thank you for it off the top.
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Stephen Harrell
Well, you're very welcome.
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Brian Hamilton
And you know, we're just going to be able to scratch the surface here today, but I Wonder. To start, if you could say a bit about your approach to the topic, you're conceiving of something you call ecological history. Other people. Ecological history as. As more than another name for environmental history, you write. So what should readers expect from an ecological history of modern China?
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Stephen Harrell
Yeah, thanks for that question. I think that environmental history has been, on the whole, two things. It's been empirical, just looks at phenomena as they happen, and it's also been centered. Even though the name is environmental history, it's often not as centered on the environment itself, but rather centered on human decisions and how they affect the environment. And when I'm talking about ecological history, I'm talking about two things that I think distinguish it from ordinary and conventional. Good. I'm not saying it's not good environmental history. One is that it has more science in it. And I'm not a trained natural scientist, but after writing this book, if you look at the bibliography, you'll find that almost all those sources, or at least a great portion of the sources, come from earth science journals or earth science publications, rather than from social science or history publications. So there's more science in it. But the second thing is that it's more systems focused. In other words, if you think about ecology as the way things interact, less in the sense of cause and effect and more in the sense of two things happening together and influencing each other, and you put not two things, but several thousand things or several million things together and watch, you know, sort of mix them up in a natural, you know, sort of nature's test tube and sort of see what happens and how the system evolves. So there's no prime movers in it, but there's rather ideas about how systems include feedbacks and interactions and so forth. Now, this includes, of course, not just the non human variables, the soil and the plants and the animals and the crops and the air, but it also includes the human variables. So you get to something which we call a social ecological system. How humans react to the environment and the environment reacts to humans. Humans are really part of this environment. We don't want to make the humans separate. I think that's what distinguishes what I call ecological history from a lot of environmental history.
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Brian Hamilton
That's great. And you divide the book after a couple of opening chapters, orienting readers to the geography and the chronology of what you call modern China. You divide the book pretty equally between one part on land, water and food, and one part on cities and industry. And so, beginning with the first section here, what struck me most to learn about this first period of agricultural development under the Chinese Communist Party, which is really how you date modern China from its rise. I was really struck by how little capital investment was directed to the countryside and how much happened on the countryside at the same time. So why was it that the PRC resisted investing in agriculture, and what tools did they use instead to support this kind of rather. Rather impressive expansion of agriculture?
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Stephen Harrell
Well, I think it begins with, if you think about the Chinese revolution, it was in sort of a paradoxical way, fueled mostly by mobilization of the rural population. And so it's sort of surprising, as you say, that once the Communist Party came to power, they didn't sort of thank the rural population for, or putting them into power, but rather directed their investment into industrial growth. And I think there are two reasons for this. One is they had no model for development except for the Soviet Union, which had come, what, 30 years before. And so they really adopted the model of economic development that was developed under Stalin, which had to do with industry as the driving force of modernization. Now, there was also, in both the Soviet Union and in the early People's Republic, a huge anxiety over national security. They just fought a war, not just against the Japanese, and they fought another war against the Kuomintang, the Nationalist Party, and they fought a war against the United States in Korea. And they were acutely concerned with military security. And so military security and the necessity of industry to become modern. Those are very expensive things. They take steel, they take concrete, they take machinery, they take a lot of advanced knowledge. And so this was the place that investment had to go and it would bring agriculture along. That's one angle to explain this. The other angle. Well, two other angles. One is that they thought that the reason for the poverty of Chinese countryside had to do with exploitation. You had a landlord class, they call it a feudal landlord class that was taking any surplus, and it was tiny surplus from the peasantry. And using that in consumption, not even in capital investment, but in consumption. And they felt that if that surplus could be transferred from the wasteful consumption of the landlord class into national growth, into the government coffers, this would aid in the process of industrialization and building up national defense. So in other words, they didn't use these words, but basically what they were saying is, well, it used to be that the landlords exploited the peasantry. Now we can exploit the peasantry. They didn't put it in those terms. They put it in the terms of liberation and growth and overthrowing this oppressive feudal rule. But actually, the economic logic was to transfer the exploitation from the, or the beneficiaries of exploitation, from the landlord class to the Communist Party and its development. And then the third thing is that they really felt that a lot of labor was being wasted, not just through exploitation, but because it was individual. And they took to heart, I think, Karl Marx's idea that the peasantry constitute a class in the same sense that a large number of potatoes tied together in a sack constitute a sack of potatoes. And if the labor of the peasantry could be concentrated through collectivization and cooperation, then they could begin to produce more just because their labor was being used more efficiently. And so we don't need to put any money into it, I think. So those are really three reasons why they adopted this sort of anti rural strategy, even though in fact it was the rural population that had supported their rise to power.
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Brian Hamilton
And in the book you make some, I think, what's looked to be really important distinctions between kind of the timeline or the periodization of the political history of the PRC and your periodization of kind of important eras in the ecological history of the prc. And you show how some things that are really important epics like the Cultural Revolution kind of don't really register when looking at the ecological history timeline of the country. But an exception to that certainly is the Great Leap Forward, which is terribly important politically and ecologically, as you show. And here. And in your earlier work you described the Great Leap forward. This is 1958 to 1961, if I'm getting this right here, as a hopeless Americanist, as a. You call it an ecopocalypse and you identify four horsemen of this ecopocalypse that are responsible for its arrival. Who were these horsemen?
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Stephen Harrell
Yeah, and this is where the ecological approach that we talked about a little earlier comes in very, very clear one place where it comes in very, very clearly, because so many people have written about the Great Leap Forward as a human tragedy, which of course it was. You know, we don't know how many excess deaths there were, but it was somewhere between 20 million and 40 million, which is bigger than any other disaster in the history of the world anywhere, period, you know, the biggest disaster in human history and even bigger than the Black Plague in absolute numbers, not in percentages, but in the ecosystem. If you look at why I think there's a tendency among Americans at least, to think of evil Communists. They were just trying to drive people to the bone for their own purposes. I don't take quite such a cynical outlook. I think the problem with the Great Leap Forward was that the Communists ignored this ecosystem framework that coincidentally I happened to organize the book around. So if I'd been running Chinese agriculture in 1958, maybe I wouldn't have caused a famine. But on the other hand, I'm not all that competent in agriculture anyway, so maybe I would. But. So I call the four horsemen of the apocalypse are the ways that they distorted the social ecological system to the point where it broke down. And these four are. One is the overemphasis on single variables. There's a dictum in some kinds of system ecology that if you maximize one thing in a system to too great an extent, then the whole system is going to break down. And so that was one thing. For example, if you think about there's a campaign to deep plow and close plant. In other words, say we're going to plow the land deeper than it had ever been plowed before. In some places they plotted a meter deep or even a meter and a half. I mean, it's absolutely insane. And I tell some sort of almost funny stories in the chapter about how when the ground froze, they were putting bombs in there and blowing it up, you know, so they could get it. And you know, it's goofy stuff, but the point is when you say, okay, we need to activate more of the nutrients in the lower horizons of the soil, which might have worked if you're talking about plowing maybe, you know, 10 inches deep instead of 6 inches deep, but when you go down 3ft, it's an absurd emphasis on this one variable of maximizing the amount of soil nutrients you can get over the lower horizons in the soil. So there's over emphasis on single variables. The other one is steel production. We're going to produce as much steel as we possibly can. Of course, this comes in the latter part of the book, but it's part of the same story. And so they mobilized everybody to make steel. You know, school teachers are out there building little, you know, three cubic foot blast furnaces. And out there, you know, during their school off hours, you know, carting in iron ore and smelting it and so forth because they had to make so much steel. Well, it's overemphasis on steel. And it was wasteful or over emphasis on something like deep plow. But it neglected other things. The other thing is I talk about cross scale mismatches. That's to say that something that looks good, for example, at a national scale may not actually work out very well at a local scale. A third thing is what I call top down panacea. It's a concept I take from the great political ecological thinker Eleanor Ostrom. She was the, the Nobel Prize winner in economics. Only woman I think so far to get that one. More women have gotten this at the Nobel Prize in physics, chemistry, so forth than have in economics. But anyway, Ostrom talks about top down panaceas where you start something from the top and you say, well look, we're going to apply this situation everywhere. So there's this curious thing and a Great Leap Forward was that the Soviet Union, in order to open up the, the steppes of Central Asia to cultivation, they invented something called a two wheel, two blade plow. And it worked really well in these desert or steppe semi desert environments in Central Asia. And so Mao decided actually earlier than the Great Leap Forward this would be a great thing. But they didn't have enough steel to make them. But during the Great Leap Forward they made millions of these plows. But they don't work in a rice paddy. It gets stuck in the mud. And you know, even we. And it took two animals, they were so heavy, it took two animals to plow them. Well, Chinese peasants have been plowing with one ox or one water buffalo, you know, for hundreds of years. Well they get put two on there, they can't turn it around in a narrow field. It gets stuck in the mud. And so something that may work in one place doesn't work in another place, but they're going to apply it everywhere. And then the final of the four horsemen is the ignorance of system feedbacks. In other words, when you see that something isn't working, there's a feedback. In other words, certain kinds of irrigation, you're going to irrigate more land. Well this is fine. But if you don't build drainage then over irrigation, especially when you get a storm, it leads to flooding. And if you don't build drainage, it leads to what they call waterlogging. The water just stays in the field forever and there's a feedback that should tell you there's too much water in the field. You don't keep irrigating but you ignore that. You just push the policy harder and you push the policy harder and it leads to system collapse. So I hope that's not too complicated a explanation of how the Great Leap Forward worked in the social ecological system sense.
- [17:58]
Brian Hamilton
No, it's very, very helpful. And the way you described the great Famine earlier, there's just so many moments in this book which reads is a very level headed analysis that jump off the page as seeming like hyperbole. But then of Course they're not. And that's maybe that's just kind of how an Americanist reads the history of modern China. But, for instance, you argue that in the past 20 years, when you look at this countryside, we have witnessed what amounts to, quote, perhaps the most profound change in the East Asian countryside since the first foragers settled down 10 millennia ago. And I read that, I'm like, well, come on now. In my lifetime, this has happened. It's striking. And then, of course, you flesh it out. So what confluence of factors have precipitated such an epic transformation?
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Stephen Harrell
Well, you know, the reason I think it's a bigger transformation, you know, bigger transformation than, you know, wheat replacing millet 4003, 4000 years ago, or a bigger transformation than a collectivization, which happened in the 1950s. Or a bigger transformation than a decollectivization. It's even a bigger transformation than the big effort to use chemical fertilizers which started in the 1970s. And the reason why I say that is because despite all of the social changes, until around 2000, most of Chinese agricultural work was done in small fields with human and animal labor. And even trying to emulate the Soviet Union in the earlier years of the People's Republic, they didn't have enough tractors. So there's still one guy walking behind a water buffalo plowing a field. When it was collectivized, then, you know, the production team, the collective, assigned a certain number of people to plow or somebody else, you know, did some other task. But it was still the same sort of technology and with some input of chemicals. But since 2000, the idea has been there's not going to be so many people farming as there were this since 2000. I mean, it really starts in the late 1980s, but there was a agricultural labor surplus. But now the whole Chinese countryside is being transformed from something that's worked by individual labor with animals or small machines to something that's been worked in big fields with small amounts, small numbers of people working with big machines, a lot of chemical inputs, and people are not consuming what they produce anymore. In other words, even in a collective era, in a post collective era, most Chinese people lived in the countryside. And although they sold a lot and they sold increasing amounts, obviously China's had cities for thousands of years, and you had to feed those cities. Still, people produced most of what they consumed and consumed most of what they produced. But not now. You know, the rural population was 80% in 1980. It's now 40% or 35% of the population and most of those people who live in the villages are no longer farmers. It's only a few people are doing the farming. They're doing a lot of capital investment. They have big agribusiness companies that are some of their state owned and some are state private, some are foreign joint ventures and they're specializing in crops. You know, you go to places. I went to a place a few years ago in Guangxi where there was, as far as the eye could see were dragon fruit plantations. Now it doesn't take very many people to do that. People living in the village are not doing that anymore. They're selling E commerce or they move to the cities or, you know, they're running a shop or a restaurant or something like that. So you no longer have an agrarian population. You no longer have food and other crops that are produced by small amounts of machinery and large amounts of labor. It's flipped the other way around. And then the system itself, the actual landscape, is transformed from tiny farms into big farms. And big farms, of course, are amenable to these kinds of mechanical and chemical and commercial inputs. So it's a sea change, pure and simple, and much bigger than any change that happened before that at any time in history.
- [22:54]
Brian Hamilton
Wow. I grew up with a grandmother who told me to finish my peas because people were starving in China. And probably one of the last Grammy to say that kind of thing, right? And China has a rapid increase in crop yields and China feeds it, you know. You know, at the moment where China feeds itself, but also along the way, with these increasing crop yields, the nation's also created what you call rigidity traps in ecosystems. What is a rigidity trap and what are some examples of that?
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Stephen Harrell
Yeah, a rigidity trap is another one of these concepts that comes out of systems ecology. It's when you make a desirable change, could call it an improvement in an ecosystem through buildings, either some sort of infrastructure or some sort of institution, or commonly both. And so, for example, I was thinking last night about this. Probably the best example of rigidity trap is a dike. So you. And in certain parts of lowland areas, for example, in central China, in places like Hubei, Hunan, Jiangxi, in the middle of the Yangtze river basin, there are lots of rivers and it's low lying land and it's very susceptible to flooding. The same thing is true on the North China Plain. And so there's a lot of land that you can't necessarily farm every year. And people previously had adaptive mechanisms or adaptive behaviors, for example. They would if there's too much rain in a year rather than try to get a harvest out of the field, they would catch fish or catch shrimp in flooded fields. It was low productivity. It was not particularly certain, but it was adaptive. But once you dike off these fields, once you channel the water to go out to the sea, once you build big levees along the river, then you can increase the production. It also requires building institutions because the levies have to be maintained. They have to charge people fees for maintenance or they have to get tax revenue. They have to hire labor. And this can happen on a small scale or can happen on a bigger scale. But once you are feeding more people, producing more food, producing more crops on that same area because of these technological and institutional improvements, then you are dependent on these technological improvements and whatever negative influences or negative effects these things might have, then you can't get rid of them. Because if you get rid of them, you're going back to the low productivity. And so the system is highly productive, much more productive than it was before. But it's also very dependent on a narrow or specific set of infrastructure. You know, another case of this, of course, is dams. And I have a whole chapter on dams, which was a fun one to write. And you know, you're using dams for flood control, you're using dams for producing electricity, you're using dams for irrigation. But if you don't have the dam, you don't have the irrigation and your productivity is gone. So the continued success and productivity of the system is dependent on this rigid structure. That's what we call a rigidity crap. You can't get rid of it, even though it has negative effects.
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Brian Hamilton
One thing you explore in this first half of the book that I was completely ignorant about was the alternative food movement in China. Can you say a little bit about that?
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Stephen Harrell
Well, it's very interesting and it's very comparable to what's been happening, I think, first in Europe, actually, actually, and then later on in the US and Canada, which is that people realize the downsides of this transformed agricultural system that I talked about a little bit earlier. And one of the things that people worry about, some people worry about ecosystem effects, like sort of agrarian radicals do here. But the main concern is, is upper middle class or middle class urban people worried about food safety? They're worried about food safety for a number of reasons. For one reason, there's lots of cases which have been fairly well covered by even the limited investigative journalism that's permitted in China about pesticide residues and using urban sewage sludge for fertilizer and Things of that sort, sort. And so people don't trust, they don't trust the food that they buy in the market because they think it's going to be poisoned. And this is exacerbated by the fact that most people who between 1979 and 2010 could only have one child and they, so their investment in the future and education of that one child becomes extreme sometimes to a level of, you know, sort of overdoing it. And so they think, well, what's going to keep my child from being poisoned? Or what's going to help my child get a good score on the, on the college entrance exams and diet is as it is here. One of the things that people always credit and blame for a lot of things that it probably doesn't need to be credited or blamed for. So anyway, people are worried about food security and, and sometimes worried about ecosystem effects. And the effect of this is that they're looking for sources of healthy food and looking for sources of healthy food. There are also people of the countryside who are dissatisfied with this model of industrial agriculture and they want to explore a niche market which is organic food or green food and so forth. So they're springing up, particularly on the outskirts of big cities in China. They're springing up of for example, ecological farms they call them. And sometimes they have a so called urban peasant program where people go out, they get these middle class families to pay a fee and then they go out on weekend and then, you know, they learn how to plow. I don't know if they probably not plow, but they learn how to grow vegetables and do things like this. They sell them at farmers markets or they put together the CSA community supported agriculture where you contract with a farmer at the beginning of the season that every week you'll get a delivery of certain healthy foods. And then the government also has an organic certification program. But people don't trust it because they see corruption and so they think it's better to find a farmer and actually visit the farm and find a farmer that you can trust who probably doesn't have an organic certification because it costs money, costs a lot of money for a small farmer's bud budget. But it's a matter of trust. And so it's a niche market. But I think it's reflective of a worldwide trend of people not trusting either the health or the sustainability of the products of commercial, large scale commercial agriculture. Close your eyes, exhale, feel your body relax and let go of whatever you want carrying today.
- [30:56]
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- [31:04]
Stephen Harrell
And breathe.
- [31:06]
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- [31:17]
Brian Hamilton
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- [31:19]
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- [31:49]
Brian Hamilton
So in the book Second Half, you take us into the urban landscape and you walk us through the history, environmental effects of the nation's rapid industrialization in the 60s and 70s and during what we call the high socialist period. And what I always find interesting when looking into environmental effects of industrial development is, you know, in this country, it often gets pulled into debates over capitalism. And it's always interesting to try to disentangle or to wonder if you can disentangle capitalism from industrialization, when of course, we have a corollary over, you know, in, in China and in the Soviet Union of industrialization in a different political economy. So how much did China's state socialism matter to the story of industrialization? Or is it a kind of a global story of industrialization where political economy kind of takes a backseat?
- [32:39]
Stephen Harrell
I go into this at a conclusion of the book, and this is probably the most controversial thing that I say in the book is how much did it matter? Not much that, that industrialization and development. And I have a whole chapter about development sort of built around Deng Xiaoping's saying in the late 1970s where he said, Fa Zhan says, Ying Daoli, that development is the only solid truth. In other words, whatever methods we adopt, our goal is development. And it's implicitly the same as the goals of capitalist development in other countries, even though we're using different methods. And so if you actually look at the effects of early industrialization, and you know, there was some industrialization obviously in China going back to the 1880s, but, you know, large scale industrialization wasn't really pulled off countrywide until the communists took over. And if you, if you look at those, the environmental effects, you look at the Air pollution, you look at the water pollution, you look at the soil contamination, you look at the environmental health consequences for workers and for people living near or downwind, polluting factories and so forth. And you look at the attempts to mitigate this on the part of either corporations or governments. It's all the same. It's horribly dirty, it's horribly unhealthy, it's horribly polluting. And you can go to Pittsburgh in the early, to take an Americanist view of it, you could look at Pittsburgh in the early 20th century, or you could look at LA in the 1950s, or you could look at any of the early centuries of industrialization, the dark satanic mills that William Blake wrote about in England in the early 19th century. And you transfer that to China in the mid 20th century and you don't see anything different. And so this is, you know, as I say at the beginning of the book, you have the capitalists saying one thing and you have the communists saying another thing. And you get into this political approach which says that, you know, one is different from the other. This is a war somehow. And it was a war, you know, for example, in Vietnam and in Cuba and other places, but they're really not having any different effects. And eventually it starts to get cleaned up and it happens here. I grew up in LA in the 1950s and the air was horrible. Now it's less horrible, way less horrible, still kind of horrible. And the same thing's happened in Beijing, Beijing in the 2013, 2014, with the airpocalypse because the air was in the. The purple and a brown, according to our pages that we all check now that there's Canadian wildfires and it was there all the time, now they clean it up. And the same thing is true with the deforestation. China was probably already deforested down to the point of about 12% forest coverage in 1950. And that went down again in a great leap forward because they're cutting down all these forests to fuel the steel production and other kinds of industrialization. And then later on they were cutting again in order to expand the grain acreage. But now we've doubled the forest cover in China, it's up to 23%. So there are quite a few areas where there's not only early industrialization causes horrible pollution and of course disruption of populations. People get moved for dams, people get moved for factories and other things to a sort of a partial mitigation or partial remediation. And you see the same trajectory going on, whether it's capitalist or communist So I think that if we think about development and industrialization, or even you could use an M word, you could say modernization. The material arc, the environmental arc of this seems to happen more or less the same everywhere, no matter what kind of social political system you have.
- [37:29]
Brian Hamilton
Well, on that arc, and you mentioned this, we start to see things getting cleaned up. You dated to around maybe by 2010 or so. So we hear CCP authorities speaking of ecological civilization and eco developmental policies and not just development is the only solid truth, but the kind of development and what it's going to look like in green development. And so is this just again, it's just, oh, countries get rich and they start to talk like this or why was it then? And what do they mean by it in China?
- [37:57]
Stephen Harrell
Well, it's a complicated thing because public discourse in China is. As the great historian of Chinese Revolution, Joe Eschrich, who taught at UC San Diego for a long time, he talked about the sort of the, I forget exactly what the phrase is, but it's the transparent falsity of the communist narrative. And he was a leftist, right? I mean this is not some sort of right wing cold warrior. So you have to speak as if China is a socialist country because it's officially a socialist country. And so when you deal with historical trends, you have to deal with them. And this overall teleology that Karl Marx and his followers developed, and of course he wasn't the first one about, you know, we're heading, we went from feudalism to capitalism and then we go to socialism and communism. And this is the end goal. But people are at the same time are sincerely and realistically worried that this, whatever progress we're making or whatever teleology we use is going to be halted or severely hampered by the environmental negative externalities. And so the idea is, how do we talk about this historical progression and incorporate something that Marx and his followers in the Soviet Union and an early part of the People's Republic didn't consider, which was that the environmental effects, that the strains on the ecosystem, the kind of, the smaller versions or lighter versions of these four horsemen, are going to retard this progress? Well, there must be a stage that comes after the stage of heavy industrialization and pollution. And so these theoreticians, some of whom were academics and others of whom were high ranking bureaucrats in the Ministry of Environmental Protection, which is now called the Ministry of Ecology and environment since 2017, I think that they said, okay, we got to fit a sort of a post industrial, ecologically conscious, harm mitigating Stage into this historical progression of stages. And so they come up with the idea, well, when you had feudalism, you had an agrarian civilization. We talked about most of the people living in the countryside and you know, working on the land and consuming most of what they produced, producing most of what they consume. And then you get capitalism and early socialism, you get industrial civilization, you get urbanization, you got all these things. And then the negative part that comes along of course is environmental degradation. But now we're moving into what would in I think most of our English language journalism and public discourse be called post industrial civilization. But this idea in China is ecological civilization, which is another way of talking about a post industrial civilization. But in some ways it may be a better way, I think, because it puts the necessity of environmental sustainability at the center of the idea of what's going on. And so ecological civilization is both a hope that we'll be able to reach a new kind of, if not equilibrium, at least sort of reasonably steady state in which we're not continuously degrading the environment, but still at the same time maintaining the official Marxist idea that we have to were progressing of social stages from, you know, feudalism, capitalism, socialism, communism. And so it's a kind of an environmental or materialist or if you're going to be a structural Marxist, you could say it's the base that goes along with the superstructure of institutions of feudalism, capitalism, communism. So that's basically what ecological civilization is. It's a realization that we've gotten ourselves in huge trouble at the same time not giving up the grand historical narrative that began with or was really propelled by Marx and then by the various socialist regimes in the early 20th century or mid 20th century.
- [43:36]
Brian Hamilton
Yeah, I mean you'd be hard pressed today to find anyone who doesn't, doesn't admit that China is going to be crucially important to global environmental questions going forward. And you conclude the book with a rundown of what you see as both fair minded here, encouraging trends and also persistent worries as we look to China's ecological future. Without giving too much away, people should buy the book. Everyone should own this book. I really believe that. Could you share maybe a few of each to tempt us into it? And did you finish the project feeling more encouraged than worried or more worried than encouraged?
- [44:09]
Stephen Harrell
Well, you know, people want me to be more worried because that's the American center left, you know, the American liberals. We're trashing the earth. And you know, I think we are. And you know, given the weather to just the last week, you know, so there's the, there's the real climate question, which may swamp the entire narrative and make my book seem naive and, you know, and out of date. But in terms of, you know, direct environmental effects or direct environmental progress or retrogression, there's this thing called environmental Kuznets curve, which was named after the Kuznets curve. It's without going into the original, it comes from Simon Kuznets, the Harvard economist who talked about inequality and economic growth, that in the early stages of economic growth, environmental degradation accelerates. And by economic growth I mean industrialization. And clearly that's supported everywhere. That environment becomes more polluted as industrialization proceeds, at least in the early stages. But then there's the idea that, well, when you get past a certain point, when people have their basic livelihood and also when there becomes to be public awareness and public pressure about environmental degradation and you also can afford less environmentally destructive technologies and you move from industry, partially manufacturing construction to services as the main driver of the economy, then you should be willing and able to mitigate some of the environmental harm. So it goes up, environmental harm gets. Environment gets worse and worse. Harm goes up and up to a certain point, and then it begins to go down again. Now how far down it will go we don't know because according to this theory, we're just at the start, we've just peaked, or maybe we haven't peaked yet, but there's faith that it might peak, environmental degradation might peak. So I found two examples that I already talked about are the recovery of forests and the mitigation of air pollution and also the alternative food movement. Even though it's fairly small, there's no doubt that it's going to grow, that people are going to be able to produce without quite as many chemicals and quite as much potential environmental unsustainability of these big agricultural methods. But that's a small subset. And there's other things that are actually much harder to mitigate. We talk about water pollution as opposed to air pollution. Well, air pollution is the easiest thing to solve. All you got to do is quit emitting this stuff. Now people don't want to do that for various reasons, but it's pretty easy to do. And they've done it temporarily. The two sessions, the so called Liang Hui, the session of the Chinese National People's Congress and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, which is a mouthful that happens every year. You know, they stop some of the factories around Beijing and there's blue skies and it's great. They did that for the Olympics. In 2008 so they could run the marathon and impress all the foreign journalists. And so you can do that. But water pollution is different. That, you know, it's. You got to basically do a lot of pollution control, not just on industry, but on urban outflow, you know, sewage controls and so forth. It may happen, but it hasn't happened yet. And if you talk about soil contamination, then that's a long term thing. Once you've got those heavy metals, once you've got those organic pesticides that are sitting there in the soil to mitigate that, there are ways of doing it. There's phytometigation. You can plant trees that'll take up this stuff and eventually metabolize it and disperse it harmlessly, but you lose agricultural production in the meantime and you can't do it on a very large scale and it's too expensive. So the soil stays contaminated for hundreds of years as opposed to the water for years or the air for days. And there's, you know, I'll just conclude with floods because. Well, I won't conclude. I want to say something about climate change, but all of the replumbing of China that I devote several chapters to, really three chapters. Two in the first part, one in the second part has been partially, of course to generate hydroelectricity, but partially also to control floods. And what's happened, We've had big floods every year. This is something that simply the only way I think to really mitigate floods is not by building more and more infrastructure. And building infrastructure to correct the environmental harm that has come from the previous infrastructure is something in the book I call the fix to fix to fix or sometimes even the fix to fix, the fix to fix to fix. That these things don't work. They build a more and more rigid rigidity trap. And once this thing is breached, then the floods are worse than they ever were before. And as long as we have this artificial infrastructure which impounds and distributes and rechannels and redirects the water, it seems like there's still going to be floods. And with climate change coming and heavier storms, which of course in most of China is a wet summer, dry winter kind of a climate that you can expect every summer and every fall. There's going to be floods, there's going to be floods somewhere. So that's really not anything that I see as having a quick solution or an easy solution. And then there's two other things. Well, three other things. One is environmental injustice. You know, so many of these big projects are, have horrible local Effects on the local populations who tend to be poor and less educated and often ethnic minority population. And then also China's exporting its environmental degradation. You know, Chinese fishing fleets catch most of the fish around the world and then they go everywhere. Well, and China, you know, China's recovering its forests. Well, it's still not, it's still producing a lot of wood products. What you do is importing wood from Papua New guinea, from Malaysia, and not, not anymore, but for a long time from Indonesia, from Solomon island, and more than anywhere else, from Russia, from Siberia. And so they're deforesting these other places in order to mitigate the deforestation and to restore China's forest. The final thing I'll talk about, of course, is greenhouse gas emissions, because China's in a real bind here. It emits, of course, more greenhouse gas. I think we're up to around 11 billion tons per year of carbon dioxide equivalent, which is about a quarter of the world and about twice as much as the United States, which is next. And of course it has four times the population, so in a certain sense it's doing twice as well as the United States. But. Its greenhouse gas emissions are greater than those of some very advanced, advanced economies such as Germany and Italy, per capita. And this despite the fact that it is undoubtedly the world leader in green energy production. You know, the increases in both wind and solar and hydro, whether you want to call hydro green or not is a question, but it certainly emits a lot less greenhouse gas than, than thermoelectric power or other fossil fuel burning technologies. It's a world leader in all of these things, has a greater percentage of the world production of these kinds of energy than its own population or its own gdp. So it's a paradox. At least until this year, it's been growing so fast that even though a lesser and lesser percentage of their energy is generated by fossil fuels, they're still using a greater absolute amount of fossil fuels and making, and continue to have an increasing, increasing contribution to global warming. And, you know, and I think this is another aspect of China exporting its environmental harm because of course, the greenhouse gases go in, they affect people in Massachusetts, of people in Washington, people in Paraguay, and, you know, people in Solomon Islands, as much as they affect people in China. So I think, you know, half full or half empty, it's probably 3/4 empty or 2/3 empty. I mean, I'm being facetious about the numbers, but it is a world leader in trying to do things about this. So I guess that's kind of my conclusion about the optimistic or pessimistic.
- [54:56]
Brian Hamilton
Thank you. And this book, as I've said, is such an achievement and such a gift to readers that if there's ever a time to rest on your laurels, it is now. But I have to ask, do you have any current or future projects you're ready to give listeners a preview of?
- [55:09]
Stephen Harrell
Yeah, of course. I'm only so I'm not quite 76 yet, so I still got a lot of projects. Projects. I have a memoir of a school that we helped start in the mountains in southwest China that is drafted, and it's kind of a it's a very different book from this. It's all very personal. It's all very local. You know, there's, you know, 30 sources in a bibliography, as opposed to 1200 and shorter, which is good. So that's I'm having people read that and give me feedback and so on. And then the current thing is I'm getting active in local climate action here, but at the same time, I live in an agricultural county or part agricultural county here, Whatcom county, the northwest corner of the continental United States. And so I'm trying to write another history of agriculture here. And right now we have three crops. We have dairy, we have raspberry, and we have blueberry and some potatoes and a few other things. And so this is a incredibly concentrated and specialized form of agriculture. How did we get here from 1950 when there was several thousand small farms where they had a few cows and a few chickens, they grew beans and they grew peas, and they grew, you know, all sorts of different stuff. And so how does this process work? So that'll be the next thing, I think.
- [56:49]
Brian Hamilton
Well, it does sound really enticing. But to stay in the moment, this book, again, is an ecological history of modern China. It comes out today from University of Washington Press. Its author is and my guest has been Stephen Harrell. Steve, thank you so much for your time and for this book.
- [57:07]
Stephen Harrell
Well, I'm very happy to do it, and I hope people learn something from the book and find that it's not too th. This year's tax changes better not get caught snoozing. Miss one deduction, lose thousands. Not amusing.
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Stephen Harrell
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Stephen Harrell
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