Narratives of “the global” so often take the form of forces emanating from the West in recent times and spreading worldwide, a largely unidirectional movement making for homogeneity. In terms of the global environmental movement one generally thinks of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and other international conservation NGOs spreading (take your pick) the gospel of environmentalism, or coercive conservation, to lands deemed to be in need. In the case of the environmental movement of China, the narrative would begin with the adoption of the panda as a talisman by the WWF, followed by a couple of decades of the WWF trying and failing to get permission to work in China. In 1979 the Chinese government relented and opened up to the WWF, which contributed funds for panda conservation and sent the well-known wildlife biologist George Schaller to make a study of wild pandas. Thereafter Prince Philip of Britain, who was president of the WWF, made a visit to Yunnan, which proved to be a momentous occasion for Yunnan and China, greatly assisting the growth of environmentalism there. In the 1970s the Chinese government had declined to assent to international environmental measures coming out of the first international environmental conference in Stockholm; but in the 2000s it imposed an extensive ban on logging, turned much cropland and pasture to forest, and put an end to hunting. So far, the globalization narrative seems to fit the case.

Michael Hathaway tells this story of the global, but he situates it within a different kind of narrative that he signals with the word “winds” in his title. It invokes a Chinese expression referring to new tendencies that flow here and there without regard to human boundaries. Hathaway uses it as a concept by which to construct a narrative of globalization that is less one-sided and unidirectional, one that investigates Chinese precedents and not just Chinese reactions to the initiatives of global conservationism emanating from the West.

The resulting book is the fruit of several years of anthropological immersion in environmentalism in Yunnan and research in Chinese archives. Yunnan in China's far southwest, on the border of Myanmar, is ideal not because it is typical but, on the contrary, because it is a unique “biodiversity hotspot” and home to China's last remaining population of wild elephants. Those who have read Mark Elvin's magisterial work, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China, will know that (as established by Wen Huanran) wild elephants once ranged through most of China including the northern homeland of its civilization, but have declined in numbers and retreated to Yunnan before the expansion of humans and the spread of agriculture at the expense of wildlife and the forest. But in the era of environmentalism the remote region of Yunnan becomes a central place in its own right; the hotspot of biodiversity becomes a hotspot of environmentalism. Elephants that had been warred upon for millennia now come under protection, and there are attempts to increase their numbers.

In his project of composing a more dialogic story of Chinese environmentalism Hathaway brings fascinating material to the table. Personal histories of elderly Chinese professors who were conservation scientists during the Maoist era are especially valuable. Their attempts to construct a scientific conservation movement were suppressed and persecuted during the turbulence of the period, but they served to create the scientific basis for environmentalism in Yunnan that could step out into the open after that era had come to an end. In a very real way Hathaway's book recovers an unknown prehistory to the present environmentalist centrality of Yunnan.

At the international level the book has much to say. The dialogic framing generally succeeds, though there are points where it seems forced, as when the author says without evidence that environmentalism in the West was “indebted to winds deeply influenced by China” (31). At ground level in Yunnan it is superb, well-documented, fresh, fascinating, and often, as in his recounting of the environmentalist work of Professor Yang Yuanchang, deeply moving. State-level action is never absent from the narrative, but the satisfaction this book gives comes from its ability to ground the grand narrative of global environmentalism in the local and the personal. This is a valuable book whose contribution will only grow as environmentalism in China advances rapidly.