The Sage Handbook of China and the Environment (Sage Handbooks of Modern China)

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

Chris Coggins is professor of Geography and Asian Studies at Bard College at Simon's Rock (Open Society University Network).  He is the co-editor and co-author (with Bixia Chen) of Sacred Forests of Asia: Spiritual Ecology and the Politics of Nature Conservation (Routledge/Earthscan, 2022), and the co-author/co-editor (with Emily Yeh) of Mapping Shangrila: Contested Landscapes of the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands (University of Washington, 2014). He is the author of The Tiger and the Pangolin: Nature, Culture, and Conservation in China (University of Hawaii Press, 2003) (runner-up for the 2003 Julian Steward Award for best book in environmental/ecological anthropology and nominated for the Kiriyama Prize in non-fiction.  He has published numerous refereed articles and chapters in geography, environment, and Asia-related books and journals. In 2019, he was selected to serve as one of fourteen scholars in Asian Studies on the ASIANetwork Speakers Bureau. He is currently co-authoring/co-editing Fengshuilin: Village Fengshui Forests and Ecological Transformation in Southern China (with Bixia Chen, Jesse Minor, and Ian M. Miller).

Yifei Li is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at NYU Shanghai and Global Network Assistant Professor at NYU. His research concerns various groups of people under China's brand of state-led environmentalism. He has received research support from the United States National Science Foundation, Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies, Rachel Carson Center, and many other extramural sources. His recent work appears in Current Sociology, Qualitative Sociology, Sociology of Development, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Environmental Sociology, Journal of Environmental Management, and other scholarly outlets. His scholarly work has been featured on NPR, in The Economist, Foreign Affairs, Le Monde, and other media.