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and environmental costs of economic growth and the rampant political cor-
ruption that destroyed a variety of landscapes and habitats, and their costs
to human and nonhuman populations. From the burgeoning water crisis, to
the hundreds of thousands of early deaths from the polluted air (often trig-
gered by poor fuel standards in a transportation system centered almost
entirely over the past three decades around automobiles), the toxic and
chemical pollution that contaminated Lake Tai (the third largest body of
fresh water, which sustained two million local residents), the extinction (or
near extinction) of rare Yangtze River species (the Baiji dolphin and large
freshwater turtles), wastewater contamination, and illegal drugs used in the
farmed fi sh markets, the picture was grim and largely devoid of hope.
To longtime China watchers, “Choking on Growth” off ered no real sur-
prises. In her topic
h e River Runs Black: h e Environmental Challenge to China's
Future,
the foreign policy expert Elizabeth Economy documents the ruinous
environmental costs of China's economic development in fl ooding, deserti-
fi cation, water scarcity, and dwindling forest resources. In
Mao's War against
Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China,
the international
relations scholar Judith Shapiro argues that CCP rule laid the groundwork for
the contemporary landscape and politics of Chinese pollution. She docu-
ments how closely intertwined the abuse of people and the abuse of the nat-
ural environment were under Mao. h ese abusive programs included popu-
lation control policy in the 1950s, the building of the fi rst big dams, the
Great Leap Forward, “grainfi elds in lakes,” wetlands destruction, and the
forced relocation of urban youth.
h is war on nature, or seeing nature as the enemy, is not unique to China;
in many ways it came out of the U.S. World War II context of military
research, especially the postwar growth of pesticides.
20
What is arguably
unique is the large scale and destructive impacts of this Mao-era war. My
own parents, like virtually everybody in China at that time, were directly
aff ected by Mao's war on nature. My parents remember banging pots to keep
