Brian Lander – författare

China has a vast written history that records the countless ways people have observed, transformed, and preserved their environments over the centuries. This sourcebook, the first ever to document China’s environmental history, presents translations of hundreds of texts spanning more than three thousand years, displaying the diversity of how humans have related to the world around them.China’s Environmental History features texts translated from Chinese and eight other languages—most for the first time—in a wide variety of genres, including poetry, philosophy, official documents, religious tracts, travelogues, and oral histories. It has ninety-two short chapters, each containing primary source texts along with brief introductions and suggestions for further reading. Taken together, the chapters allow readers to study the many dimensions of environmental history in China, from the connections between resource exploitation and state power to the various forms of conservation and animal protection. Ideal for classroom use, this book shows how asking questions about the environment leads to new insights about the past and reveals the many threads of evidence waiting to be explored.

China has a vast written history that records the countless ways people have observed, transformed, and preserved their environments over the centuries. This sourcebook, the first ever to document China’s environmental history, presents translations of hundreds of texts spanning more than three thousand years, displaying the diversity of how humans have related to the world around them.China’s Environmental History features texts translated from Chinese and eight other languages—most for the first time—in a wide variety of genres, including poetry, philosophy, official documents, religious tracts, travelogues, and oral histories. It has ninety-two short chapters, each containing primary source texts along with brief introductions and suggestions for further reading. Taken together, the chapters allow readers to study the many dimensions of environmental history in China, from the connections between resource exploitation and state power to the various forms of conservation and animal protection. Ideal for classroom use, this book shows how asking questions about the environment leads to new insights about the past and reveals the many threads of evidence waiting to be explored.

Synthesizes multiple perspectives on Asian forests from early history to the near presentForests have histories that need to be told. This examination of wood and woodlands in East and Southeast Asia brings together case studies from China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Sumatra to explore continuities in the history of forest management across these regions as well as the distinctive qualities of human-forest relations within each context. With a general introduction to forest histories in East and Southeast Asia and a multidisciplinary set of authors, The Cultivated Forest constructs alternative lineages of forest knowledge that aim to transcend the frameworks imposed by colonial or national histories. Across these regions, forests were sites of exploitation, contestation, and ritual just as they were in Europe and America. This volume puts studies of Asian forests into conversation with global forest histories.

Synthesizes multiple perspectives on Asian forests from early history to the near presentForests have histories that need to be told. This examination of wood and woodlands in East and Southeast Asia brings together case studies from China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Sumatra to explore continuities in the history of forest management across these regions as well as the distinctive qualities of human-forest relations within each context. With a general introduction to forest histories in East and Southeast Asia and a multidisciplinary set of authors, The Cultivated Forest constructs alternative lineages of forest knowledge that aim to transcend the frameworks imposed by colonial or national histories. Across these regions, forests were sites of exploitation, contestation, and ritual just as they were in Europe and America. This volume puts studies of Asian forests into conversation with global forest histories.

A multidisciplinary environmental history of early China’s political systems, featuring newly available Chinese archaeological data  “Over four thousand years of unsustainable growth, Chinese states replaced a diverse ecosystem with a monocropping grain state. All states destroy environments, but only the state can save us. So ancient China's spectres still haunt our modern crisis. A brilliant and disturbing analysis!”—Peter C. Perdue, author of Environmental History in China and the West: Its Origins and Prospects  This book is a multidisciplinary study of the ecology of China’s early political systems up to the fall of the first empire in 207 BCE. Brian Lander traces the formation of lowland North China’s agricultural systems and the transformation of its plains from diverse forestland and steppes to farmland. He argues that the growth of states in ancient China, and elsewhere, was based on their ability to exploit the labor and resources of those who harnessed photosynthetic energy from domesticated plants and animals. Focusing on the state of Qin, Lander amalgamates abundant new scientific, archaeological, and excavated documentary sources to argue that the human domination of the central Yellow River region, and the rest of the planet, was made possible by the development of complex political structures that managed and expanded agroecosystems.