What accounts for the rich stream of edited collections on China’s Mao period? At a time when the edited volume is waning elsewhere—I am struggling to think of more than a couple of recent examples covering modern China before 1949—the tradition begun by Dilemmas of Victory more than 15 years ago continues to report on the state of the field and shape new ground in the study of Mao’s China.Footnote ¹ Does the patchy nature of the sources encourage collective projects? Do other peculiarities of the Mao period foster a sense of shared enterprise? Are we still seeing the fruits of an outstanding first generation of PRC historians, who are now also providing platforms for subsequent cohorts?

Whatever the secret, Micah Muscolino’s Revolutionary Natures is a fine addition to this canon. Its punchy, well-researched chapters encapsulate and continue the move in Mao-era environmental history beyond a framework of destruction and preservation. Many of the individual studies do contain stark evidence of the environmental destruction summed up by Judith Shapiro in her classic Mao’s War Against Nature.Footnote ² This is particularly the case for studies of agriculture and fuel and those with a focus on the years of the Great Leap Forward. However, Revolutionary Natures also finds evidence for the attitudes of conservation and care for resources found by the revisionists who have challenged Shapiro—often in the same chapters that also chart destruction, and even during the Great Leap itself.

Resting on a binary of destruction and conservation would have risked the coherence of the volume by presenting not much more than a set of environmental contradictions. Muscolino’s introductory mission statement does not assuage this concern: “the chapters reveal not a single environmental history of China’s Mao era but many environmental histories” (p. 4). However, as the rest of his introduction makes clear, this formulation undersells what ties together the book’s plural stories. The chapters of Revolutionary Natures reveal two patterns of interaction with the nonhuman environment that exhibited impulses of both destruction and preservation.

The first pattern is the intense anthropocentrism of an ambitious socialist state hampered by the scarcity of material resources. The Mao-era state understood the nonhuman environment as a bank of resources to be controlled and exploited for human gain. As Julia Strauss’ chapter on forestry policy makes clear, this national-developmental approach long predated 1949, but came to fruition in the scale of the early PRC’s economic ambitions and territorial control. This “great acceleration” often came at huge ecological cost, as Victor Seow shows in his chapter on the fossil fuel inputs of the Great Leap Forward, and as Xiangli Ding and Brian Lander exemplify in the destruction for agriculture of nearly half of the remaining Dongting wetlands, Hunan Province. However, the material scarcity of the Mao period meant that this anthropocentrism could also lead to an impulse to conserve resources, as Xuexin Cai shows in his fine chapter on destruction and preservation in different parts of Xishuangbanna (Sipsongpanna), southern Yunnan. Government policy devastated Xishuangbanna ecosystems to create state rubber plantations and at the same time created small nature reserves as national reservoirs of biological and medicinal resources. As in Cai’s chapter, however, conservation was patchy and always subordinated to other state goals. Ben Kletzer’s fascinating chapter shows how 1960s increases in efficiency in China’s steam locomotives locked the rail network into several more decades of coal pollution. Efforts at nature conservation were limited to species and ecosystems that the state designated exceptional in national culture or useful for long-term economic exploitation. The ill-fated baiji dolphin in David Pietz’s chapter fell into neither category and was on the verge of extinction by the 1980s; Kyuhyun Han’s Amur tiger was not quite “national” enough after the Sino-Soviet split to be a conservation priority, and survived only in Soviet nature reserves.

The second pattern exhibiting impulses of both destruction and preservation is the state’s intense, politicized deployment of labor to use and shape China’s environment—as Muscolino has reminded us in his own recent work.Footnote ³ What is perhaps most striking about Revolutionary Nature is the reminder that almost everyone who lived through the Mao era had close corporeal contact with the nonhuman environment: with trees and bamboo, with soils and crops, with fecal matter and microbes, with reeds and marshes, with coal and charcoal. Peter Braden’s chapter shows how the state mobilized these intensely physical inputs for both afforestation and deforestation, using similar campaign tools and political language. The close personal involvement of ordinary citizens also gave scope for local input in tools and methods (usually referred to as the tu 土 approach). Locals contributed methods most often at the behest of the state, as in Niall Chithelen’s study of bamboo-reinforced concrete, but sometimes outside the scope of state instructions. Bingru Yue’s sent-down youth were able to exploit the wetlands of Chongming Island only after following local methods and the island farmers’ slower timescale. These tu methods brought a distinctly Maoist and, at times, genuinely bottom-up twist to socialist China’s “high modernism.” Yet as Brian Spivey argues, the ambition of a “closed-loop” recycling system in which tu methods reused all byproducts could not disguise the waste and toxicity inherent in all versions of industrial modernity.

Paul Pickowicz’s closing chapter uses post-Mao independent documentary film to think through continuities between the Mao period and subsequent decades. He shows that the first pattern identified in this review—that of environmental ambivalence subordinated to state developmental goals—largely continued after 1978. By contrast, tracking the second pattern common across the chapters, that of forced labor mobilization and close physical contact with the nonhuman environment, emphasizes rupture: urbanization, mechanization, and the end of mass mobilization have ended this corporeal relationship in the half-century since Mao’s death. Or rather, as Pickowicz’s films remind us, human/nonhuman contact became invisible—either socially invisible, as in the migrant trash pickers of Beijing’s periphery (in Wang Jiuliang’s 2011 Beijing Besieged by Waste), or literally invisible, as in the toxic particulates of pollution (in Ruby Yang’s 2010 The Warriors of Qiugang and Chai Jing’s 2015 Under the Dome).

Muscolino’s compelling introduction does not clarify two questions about time that the chapters raise. First, is there a distinctly environmental periodization of PRC history? Several chapters point to a distinct shift toward environmental protection in the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward, exemplified by the 1962 State Council directive on wildlife protection. It is tempting to see two distinct phases of the most reckless environmental damage—between 1949 and 1962, and again in the breakneck growth of the Reform Era from the late 1970s to the late 2000s—and, by contrast, two phases of a more sustainable approach—from 1962 to the late 1970s and the two decades since the “ecological civilization” formula codified by Hu Jintao in 2007. However, this periodization does not map neatly onto all chapters, and authors imply contrasting views on whether the reckless destruction of the Great Leap Forward was a logical culmination of the PRC’s first decade or an aberration from it.

The second temporal issue is the way in which state ambition and state failure were set against peculiar timescales. The chapters by Yue and by Ding and Lander show how the state pushed the breakneck destruction of wetlands, contrary to the rhythms of its human and nonhuman inhabitants. Chithelen finds a state frustrated by the slow results and inconsistencies of bamboo-reinforced concrete. On the other hand, Nicole Elizabeth Barnes’ intriguing chapter on nightsoil collection shows how state experts occasionally pushed a slower timeline—in this case, longer storage of human fecal fertilizer to protect public health. These studies underline one of the implicit takeaways of Revolutionary Natures: that many of the colossal costs of the Mao period—human and nonhuman—resulted from the state, Chinese citizens, and ecosystems operating on painfully different and competing timescales.