Revolutionary Natures - Grassroots Environmental Histories of China's Mao Era

Uncovers China's tangled legacies of environmental destruction, resistance, and conservation 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 industrialization 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 labor 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.