Geography Reference
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to a degree that had few parallels in the premodern world. . . . This paradox shows
that the relationship of a representation to a reality . . . may be complex, . . . What
is portrayed can at times be the opposite, in a sense, of what is.
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Attitudes die hard, and it doesn't seem likely that mere education or the influence of the
West is about to turn Chinese into deep ecologists. Utilitarian motives, with a subordinate
theme of appreciating beauty (as long as it is tamed or anthropomorphized), retain their
dominance. If there has been a subtle shifting of the words used to justify conservation, it
has not taken the form of valuing nature as a good in and of itself, regardless of any concern
for mankind's future. Rather, it has taken the form of denying any kind of conflict between
the interests of nature in its pristine state and the requirements of civilized mankind. This
relatively newly encountered paradigm—which says that saving nature is really in our own
best interests— arises from a concept I call Confucian optimism.
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CONFUCIAN OPTIMISM AND THE PROBLEM WITH
TUANJIE
This newer conception, used invariably as a public exhortation to conservation actions
that remain unstated or vague at best, is most often encountered in the motto “Protecting
wildlife is really protecting mankind itself.”
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It also appears in close variants (depending
on the context), such as “Protecting forests is really protecting mankind itself,” which I
once saw extended to “Protecting the woods is really protecting wildlife,”
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and even—from
a provincial Party secretary in reference to wildlife conservation—“Protecting wildlife
is really protecting our [economic] productive capacity.”
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Notwithstanding the simple elegance and possibly the persuasive power of “protecting
wildlife is really protecting ourselves,” there is a small problem with it, at least as the
conceptual basis for useful conservation action: it is simply not true. At least, it is not
likely to be true within a time frame and spatial scale that encompass people's decisions
about their lives and the impact of those decisions on wild animals and their habitats.
It certainly is true that maintenance of the earth's biotic health, including its biological
diversity, is ultimately good for all of us. Nobody doubts that humans require clean air, un-
polluted water, and the continued growth of plants that can be processed into products that
we eat or use to shelter ourselves. Environmental toxins are likely to first affect wild spe-
cies, which, finely tuned to expected environmental conditions, are likely to be ill equipped
to protect themselves or adapt quickly enough to cope. Like the canary in a coal mine,
poisoned wildlife is likely to be a warning of future health concerns for people. There is
similarly no doubt that human civilizations are premised upon the natural world remaining
more or less as it currently is. Urban and agricultural communities near rivers that originate
in distant mountains are built with the assumption that those rivers will obey historical flow
patterns. If deforestation, grassland degradation, or wetland destruction (all of which are
clearly harmful to wildlife species that live in these habitats) result in unprecedented floods
(as occurred in the Yangtze drainage during the late 1990s), mankind ultimately pays. In this
sense, degrading the natural environment to the point where it fails to support humans and
wildlife alike clearly brings about disastrous outcomes for both, justifying some sense of
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