As the word “struggle” in the book title indicates, the preservation of nature in China eventually comes down to intricate choices and continuous negotiations among local cadres, farmers, migrant workers, ethnic communities, and private business owners in the tens of thousands of villages throughout the country. Many times, this means businessmen losing lifelong savings, workers becoming jobless, farmers being removed from the land and becoming infuriated, and township officials risking their future on the bureaucratic ladder. With nuanced accounts and micro-level analysis of the political economy in Futian Township in southwestern China, Bryan Tilt successfully explains the macro-level policy predicament facing those caught between industrialization—feeding and providing self-development opportunities to a rural population of 800 million—and environmental protection. In doing so, he provides an example of the craftsmanship of “environmental anthropology” (p. 17).

The book consists of eight chapters. The first half outlines the historical, eco-geographical, and cultural background of Futian Township, particularly its economic history and developmental trajectory from the Great Leap Forward to the Great Western Opening. Readers will quickly find themselves captivated by the fates of three factories in the township: the zinc smelter, the coking plant, and the coal washing plant. The family stories, social ties, monetary transactions, and politics surrounding these once collectively owned, recently privatized small-scale factories reflect the major ups and downs of China's overall recovery from social turmoil and economic devastation over the past thirty years. Tilt's insights into the political economy of Futian in the 1990s, which he likens to “a fire sale” (p. 59), are sharp. Such an account of the background is important in order to understand the difficulty of reversing the environmental impacts, the developmental mentality in official rhetoric, and the political bargaining among local farmers, factory owners, and local cadres in the 2000s.

The heart of Tilt's argument is found in chapters 5 and 6, on environmental values and pollution control enforcement, respectively. In chapter 5, Tilt develops a survey method of evaluating environmental values that is sensitive to local culture and argues that, contrary to conventional knowledge, local villagers (victims of environmental pollution) have a clear notion of environmental pollution. “Villagers' concerns about environmental contamination were grounded less in abstractions about aesthetics and harmony and more in a sense that their economic livelihoods were being threatened” (p. 91). In addition, he found that local views of pollution were anything but homogeneous because of occupational factors and the uneven distribution of environmental damage (pp. 105–6).

Social scientists who are interested in China's environmental issues will find Tilt's methodology of environmental values an important contribution to the existing literature. The field does not lack large-n cross-regional surveys on public environmental awareness or reviews of the environmental elements in ancient Chinese philosophy. Nevertheless, starting with a globalized discourse of the environment, neither of the two foregoing approaches captures the contemporary and diverse attitudes and sentiments toward pollution, loss of biodiversity, or other matters related to environmental change in rural China. Tilt is right in pointing out that “cross-cultural research on environmental values often encounters the challenge of capturing salient ideas about what exactly constitutes ‘the environment’ in specific cultural contexts” (p. 107). His project offers a way to redeem the knowledge gap in this area and a possible new direction for survey research on public environmental awareness in China.

The chapter on pollution control enforcement presents the most recent changes in Futian's political economy. Here, Tilt situates his argument in the literature of civil society development in China. He categorizes the phenomenon that he observed as “less-institutionalized, ad hoc mobilization on the part of concerned citizens” (p. 124), as distinguished from the focus in previous scholarship on environmental nongovernmental organizations, “rightful resistance,” and other forms of civil society actions. This part provides new evidence for theoretical development in the field of environmental politics in China, yet is less provocative than the previous chapter on environmental values.

The Struggle for Sustainability in Rural China succeeds as an academic work in explicating the complex processes in environmental politics “at the ideological and discursive levels including, but not restricted to, definitions of sciences, knowledge, environment, sustainability, and biodiversity” (p. 143). It can serve well for undergraduate teaching or as an introduction to graduate research in the field of China's environment and contemporary politics.