Revolutionary Natures Grassroots Environmental Histories of China's Mao Era

About this book

This volume offers a groundbreaking reassessment of the environmental history of Mao-era China, a period often reduced to a story of unchecked ecological devastation. Bringing together leading voices in Chinese environmental history, Revolutionary Natures reveals a far more complex reality. Through vivid case studies, the contributors show how policies of rapid industrialisation collided with material scarcity, grassroots resistance, and the unruly agency of nature itself.

From forests planted and felled in the same decade to wetlands transformed by labour campaigns, the chapters reveal the contradictions of an era when deforestation, pollution, and biodiversity loss coexisted with nascent conservation efforts and early experiments in sustainability. Drawing on local archives, oral histories, and even the perspective of nonhuman actors such as trees, rivers, and wildlife, the book places nature at the centre of the revolutionary experience.

Rather than a single narrative of environmental destruction, Revolutionary Natures illuminates multiple, overlapping histories of struggle, sacrifice, and adaptation. In doing so, it not only complicates assumptions about socialism, development, and ecology but also traces the roots of today's environmental dilemmas in China and beyond. This volume sets a new standard for the study of modern China and global environmental history, offering critical insights into the legacies of revolution, the politics of scarcity, and the enduring entanglement of human and natural worlds.

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Biography

Micah S. Muscolino is a professor and Paul G. Pickowicz Endowed Chair in modern Chinese history at the University of California, San Diego. He is author of three books, Remaking the Earth, Exhausting the People: The Burden of Conservation in Modern China (Washington, 2025), The Ecology of War in China: Henan Province, the Yellow River, and Beyond, 1938-1950 (Cambridge, 2014), and Fishing Wars and Environmental Change in Late Imperial and Modern China (Harvard,2009).