The Sage Handbook of China and the Environment
Yifei Li editor Christopher Coggins editor
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Sage Publications Ltd
Publishing:14th Feb '26
£135.00
This title is due to be published on 14th February, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
The Sage Handbook of China and the Environment offers a comprehensive exploration of China′s environment through a multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary lens. This volume presents China′s environment as a series of interconnected temporal and spatial processes involving human agency and more-than-human dynamics. Contributions from leading scholars in social science, environmental science, and humanities focus on long-term environmental change, shifts in environmental perception, and the dynamic adaptations that have shaped China as both a nation and a mosaic of distinctive socio-ecological networks.
The handbook delves into the processes of human-environment relations that have shaped contemporary landscapes, ecosystems, and livelihoods within China′s territorial boundaries, as well as global industrial and commercial processes affecting climate change and geopolitics worldwide. Each section of the book includes chapters that summarize key contributions to specific fields of environmental research, assess prevailing paradigms, and chart a course for future work, including calls for activist research that encourages collaborative engagement with the dynamic political, economic, ecological, and cultural processes shaping China′s environment and policy.
Organized into four main sections, the handbook covers the long-term ecological transformation of China, biodiversity conservation and the social construction of nature, pressing environmental concerns in urbanizing China, and China′s role in global sustainability. It provides a nuanced understanding of China′s environmental challenges and achievements, emphasizing the need for multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary approaches to address the complexities of China′s environment.
The Sage Handbook of China and the Environment is an essential resource for scholars, practitioners, and students seeking to understand the intricate processes shaping China′s environment and its global impact.
Part 1: Past as Prelude: The Long Journey Toward Understanding China′s Long-term Ecological Transformation
Part 2: Biodiversity and Wild Landscapes: Conservation and the Social Construction of Nature in Contemporary China
Part 3: Pressing Environmental Concerns in Urbanizing China
Part 4: Global China, the Biosphere, and Planetary Sustainability
Deeply impressive in its spatio-temporal and thematic scope, while simultaneously cohesive in its relational approach, The Sage Handbook of China and the Environment is a remarkable achievement. Its interdisciplinary contributions, from the environmental humanities to the environmental sciences, span topics ranging from imperial forests to climate change governance to virtual reality in Chinese environmental education. As such it will be an indispensable reference for scholars of China’s human-environment relations from ancient times to the present, and a useful guide for anyone who wants to better understand global China in our current era of accelerating planetary change.
-- Emily T. Yeh
A thoughtful and innovative collection that goes well beyond conventional accounts of China’s environmental challenges. The Handbook on China and the Environment explores the historical foundations of Chinese conceptions of humans as transformers and producers of their environment, contemporary processes of degradation and pollution, patterns of biodiversity, conservation practices old and new, environmental governance, and the global reach of China’s resource use and development. More than this, though, the Handbook offers a course in ecological literacy for a world in which China – along with the United States – plays an outsized role, and carries a greater responsibility, in charting a path toward future sustainability.
-- Tim Oakes
This timely volume offers a vital introduction to Chinese perspectives, practices, and policies toward the natural world. The essays are succinct, lucid and balanced. As the world grapples with ecological crises of global scale, the insights gathered here underscore how deeply China’s choices reverberate not only across its vast landscapes but throughout the planet.
-- Prasenjit DISBN: 9781529623239
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
658 pages