Geoscience Reference
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the sparrows from landing in order to kill these pests through sheer exhaus-
tion, and they experienced the famine triggered by the Great Leap Forward.
My father was forced to relocate to the countryside, and those memories
explain why he still won't eat carrots, one of the few foods available during
those turbulent times.
h e traumas of Maoist China have been well told, and my parents' expe-
riences are not exceptional. Far less understood is how much these traumas
under Mao were directly caused by his war on nature, and what the continu-
ing legacies of this war are in contemporary Chinese environmental and
urban development policy. Contemporary CCP's ecological development
can't be separated from the historical and authoritarian context, no matter
how attractive it may be for some in the West to imagine China as an envi-
ronmental savior. Shapiro argues that the long, dark “shadows of Mao” con-
tinue to hang over China's environmental policy, in the case of the h ree
Gorges Dam—the world's biggest dam, power plant, and consumer of dirt,
stone, concrete, and steel, which displaced 1.3 million people (and led to
major environmental problems like landslides and fl ooding). h is infl uence
continues in projects now coming to fruition: the three-decade-long mas-
sive urbanization policy and other huge public works projects, like an epic
sixty-two billion-dollar plan to move twelve trillion gallons of water from
the south to the parched north; in campaigns to develop the western fron-
tier; as well as in the unrelenting obsession with building the tallest, big-
gest—and, now, most sustainable—buildings. h ese plans are less of a direct
attack on nature than that against the sparrows, but they are nonetheless
motivated by similar impulses. h ese include an obsessive technological
control of natural resources, masked now in part as sustainability dis-
courses, as well as the belief in large-scale monumentalism.
While this war on nature may have begun under Mao, it is only in the
post-reform period that the environmental costs of Chinese pollution have
truly gone global. h
is transformation is largely due to technological
