Environmental Winds is an exploration of global conservation efforts in Yunnan Province, and their intersection with the work of Chinese scientists and the livelihoods of local people.
Drawing on the Chinese metaphor of “winds” (feng), often used to describe social and political movements that bring far-reaching changes, Michael J. Hathaway suggests that Chinese citizens now find themselves in the midst of environmental winds that are reshaping humanity's relationship to the natural world. The book is based on extensive ethnographic field research in Yunnan, coupled with a critical reading of historical documents, government reports, and scientific and promotional materials produced by prominent international NGOs such as the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the Nature Conservancy.
Hathaway focuses primarily on the Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture, a subtropical repository of tremendous biological diversity in southern Yunnan. In the process, he paints a sophisticated and nuanced picture of how these environmental winds function as global processes, suggesting that “the notion of winds allows us to explore how globalized formations travel back and forth across national boundaries and larger global divisions (east/west, north/south) and how they are transformed along the way” (p. 36). He argues that three inter-related processes influence the direction in which the environmental winds blow: transnational work, the art of engagement and the making of an indigenous space.
In the chapter on “transnational work,” Hathaway examines how Chinese scientists contributed to the push to conserve Xishuangbanna by painstakingly cataloguing the diversity of the region's flora and fauna. These efforts went hand in hand with global initiatives, by the WWF and other organizations, to pursue conservation in China's “biodiversity hotspots.” In the same vein, Hathaway explores in detail how the remaining population of Asian elephants in Xishuangbanna has been used to attract financial support from international conservation organizations, national government agencies, and domestic and foreign ecotourists. It is no accident that this story unfolds in the 1980s, 1990s and beyond, a time in which Chinese scientists were attempting to re-engage with their global peers after decades of state persecution and isolation.
In the chapter on “the art of engagement,” Hathaway explores rural villagers’ attitudes toward, and behaviours in response to, global conservation programmes spearheaded by the WWF, which often entail drastic changes in farming practices or loss of access to agricultural land. Drawing upon theories of resistance from James Scott and others, he finds that local people's behaviour does not constitute resistance per se, but rather an opportunistic way of engaging in conservation projects – including the protection of rare birds and other key species, and the implementation of agroforestry projects – in order to maximize the benefits to their economic livelihoods or to mitigate some of the negative consequences for their communities.
In the chapter on “making an indigenous space,” Hathaway's focus is less on specific indigenous groups – such as the Dai, for whom Xishuangbanna is a traditional homeland – than on the Han scientists and activists who have helped launch an indigenous rights movement in Yunnan in recent decades. Drawing on interactions and interviews with these experts, he shows a self-conscious effort on their part to eschew the dominant term “minority nationalities” (shaoshu minzu) in favour of “indigenous peoples” (tuzhu ren), which puts them in line with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and other international protocols and also helps them to attract funding from international donor organizations. Many of these experts also strive to push back against the common discourse about non-Han people as unmodern and backward, and to promote a model of conservation that does not marginalize local people.
In sum, Environmental Winds demonstrates, in vivid detail, that conservation is as much a political and social project as it is a biological and ecological one. Theoretically nuanced, empirically grounded, and written in accessible prose, the book will prove extremely useful for students and scholars in Chinese studies, anthropology, environmental studies and related fields.
