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1869, Ep. 134 with Jesse Rodenbiker, author of Ecological States | Otter.ai

1869, Ep. 134 with Jesse Rodenbiker, author of Ecological States

Cornell University Press34min

Jonathan Hall

00:09

Welcome to 1869, The Cornell University Press Podcast. I'm Jonathan Hall. In this episode we speak with Jesse Rodenbiker, author of the new book, Ecological States: Politics of Science and Nature in Urbanizing China. It's available as a free open access ebook, download it from our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. Jesse Rodenbiker is Associate Research Scholar at Princeton University, at the center on Contemporary China at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, and Assistant Teaching Professor at Rutgers University with the Department of Geography. We spoke to Jesse about China's urban sustainability efforts, and how they are increasing both state power and social inequality in China, the seminal ideas that shaped the field of ecology in China over the past 100 years, and the potential lessons that Western nations can learn from China's ecological initiatives. Hello, Jesse, welcome to the podcast.

Jesse Rodenbiker

01:13

Hey, thanks, Jonathan, for the invitation. It's great to be here.

Jonathan Hall

01:17

Well, I'm excited to talk to you about your new book, Ecological States: Politics of Science and Nature in Urbanizing China. The book is available as an open access book for free, you can download it on Amazon, you can download it from our website, anywhere you can get the ebook the Open Access ebook is available. I've been reading it on my iPad, and my phone. So anyone that's listening to this, you can instantly get it. There's also an affordable paperback if you prefer it in print, but the Open Access version is free everywhere around the world. So tell us the backstory to this book. Thanks.

Jesse Rodenbiker

01:49

Thanks, John, for the question. So I lived in I worked in China for many years during the 2000s. In 2010, I wrote on issues related to the environment, and society for Chinese domestic magazines. And afterward, I worked on sustainable urban development with landscape architects and urban planners in places like Beijing and Chengdu and other major cities in China. And in the urban planning sector, China's environmental problems are often approached as something that could be solved through kinds of technocratic solutions. So if you could just make buildings more energy efficient, for example, or add enough permeable pavement or create more green space, in cities, etc, then you'd finally achieve sustainability. And a lot of what I saw in the 2000s alongside this was massive displacement. So in pursuit of building greener cities, homes were being raised, millions of people were being displaced. And I was really struck by how urban planners were really convinced that this was the right kind of solution, tearing down housing resettlement on a really massive scale, and rebuilding ways that imagined that urban planners essentially imagined to be optimizing socio spatial and socio natural relationships. And these experiences really got me interested in looking deeper into how these logics of urban sustainability came into being why green urbanization was being pursued in these particular kinds of ways. And what happened to all of these millions of people who are undergoing displacement, and resettlement. So this is something of a kind of starting point for researching the book, I wanted to make sense of these realities, and give voice to the different people who are involved in these processes. And this includes, you know, everyday citizens, as well as scientists, and urban planners who are interviewed as part of the research for this book.

Jonathan Hall

03:43

That's great. That's great. Yeah, I mean, sustainable development. Sounds good. It's a buzzword that everyone seems to be in support of, and the mainstream scientific and planning journals, they are celebrating China's urban sustainability efforts. But your book looks into a little bit of the darker side of these programs, you're talking about resettlement and things like that, tell us about the science of ecology and ecological thought, have now become active forces in reinforcing state power and increasing social inequality in China.

Jesse Rodenbiker

04:16

Sure, yeah. So I don't know if I would necessarily call it like a darker side. But I would say that there developed a kind of specific epistemological orientation around ecology in China. So ecology is often thought about as the same everywhere a kind of Universalist science aimed at an objective truth. And I'm pushing back against this kind of conception of kind of an apolitical Universalist ecology in this book. So one of the things that I'm aiming to do in the book is to provincial allies ecology, in a sense, often people consider ecology as a kind of science emanating from the West it has a particular kind of Leopold in lineage, at least within the US imaginary But in the book, I traced a different lineage of thinkers that come from China that come from East Asia, whose reasoned argumentation, they different kinds of foundations for ecological thought. And that's a specific logics of ecology they produced shape relationships of power between the state and society in different forms of social inequality. One of the predominant features of ecological thought in China is what I what I call or referred to, in the book as a mechanistic approach to nature of a mechanistic approach, simply put, is the understanding that if the appropriate application of science and technological intervention is applied, then desired outcomes will result in the kind of predictable machine like fashion. And with this understanding the role of scientists, planners in the state are really front and center. Scientists imagined that if they can just gather enough data and get the models, right, and the planners can get the planning right, then they'll be able to produce the kind of optimal relationship between humans and nature. And then the state, of course, is the enforcer of this technoscientific vision. These logics of socio natural optimization shape different scientific practices and State Society relationships within China. So what do I mean by that? Let me just highlight three different kinds of ways in which these logics come to matter. And that I discussed a little bit more in more detail in the book. One is technoscientific control of nature in society. The second is large scale interventions in land management. And the third is participation level of participation by everyday people in these practices. So one practice stemming from an mechanistic understanding of ecology is an attempt to techno scientifically control nature and society. In China, for instance, virtually everything is modeled, you've got economic growth models, population models, models of carrying capacity, and other different types of socio natural relationships are all modeled. Vast stores of data are input into these models, and they become part of state plans to manage society to manage nature, and to manage space. These models also shaped efforts to control human interactions with the landscape. So where can people live? Where can agricultural production take place? Where can industry take place, etc. These are all things essentially engineered by the state in an effort to optimize socio natural relationships. So second, another way this understanding of ecology is shaped environmental governance in China is through large scale interventions in nature. So China's really famous for these large scale environmental interventions. You can think of projects like the Three Gorges Dam, for instance, this huge infrastructure project. And you can take a look at the cover of my book, ecological states, if you've got a link, either in the, in the in the podcast or on the website, you take a look at the cover. And the cover shows this human made waterfall, essentially the largest in Asia, made by redirecting the headwaters of the three parallel rivers in Northwest Yunnan. And they redirected the flow of this river to flow right through the heart of the city of conveying the idea here, and scientists and planners explained to me in interviews, is that redirecting the river would accelerate the rate of flow through Lake Dam in the south of the city, and help alleviate eutrophication. At the same time, it creates a kind of beautiful landscape with an urban park surrounded by new commercial housing. So this is an instance of large scale intervention in nature that serves multiple ends, it aims to optimize biophysical relationships in nature, as well as landscape aesthetics. Another really important large scale intervention that I discussed in the book is what's called ecological redlining. It sounds like really good in Chinese. And then in English, people often think about the history of redlining. And it sounds a little bit suspect. So this is a key state policy, initially, and to zone 20%, of national territory for conservation. So that's really a lot of land really large scale intervention. So when I started to research for the book, this figure was at 20%, of national lab. And just last month, the Ministry of Environment and ecology, announced that they increased the sum total of lab to be included in ecological rendering to 30% of national territory. So again, this is a huge amount of land that we're talking about in the state increase this year, of course, to align with the new global biodiversity framework. So the scale of intervention and land management continues to go up and keeping track of this figure is an ongoing process. And I would really characterize this as one of if not the largest area based conservation project in history. And part of what I detail in the book gets how this conservation zoning facilitates what I call ecological territorialization. That is processes by which local state actors, territory alized land, in the name of sociol natural optimization. So there's really an alignment here of state power, and ecology. So the third and the last thing that I want to stress here is that there's generally a lack of meaningful social participation in conservation within the China context. Everyday people in their history of land use, particularly gruel people, as I write about in Chapter Two are often left out of decision making in favor of these models and projections by scientists for optimizing land use, again, an effort to optimize socio natural relationships. And this often precipitates various forms of social injustice and social inequality, such as land dispossession, and displacement. And I detail a lot of this in the book, including some of the history of how these logics of ecological thought came into be.

Jonathan Hall

11:04

Thanks for sharing all that when you mentioned that there isn't a whole lot of public interaction that does basically state, you know, top down decisions, you start off your first chapter, telling us the story of this farmer Zhang, and how his life has dramatically changed and how he was told, during the Maoist time during the Cultural Revolution to do one thing, and now he's being told a completely different thing out there, do what he was told just a few years ago, or, you know, 20-30 years ago, with no agencies just has to do what the state tells them to do. And that's really, it's really interesting.

Jesse Rodenbiker

11:39

Yeah, so Zhang, that my interactions with Zhang really crystallized some of the transitions that were underway in environmental thought and environmental practice, more broadly within China. Zhang's story is pretty interesting, because during the Maoist period, he served as one of the key propaganda performers for the Maoist regime to essentially transform the lake by filling it in and making it into agricultural land. So it's really a transition of of land that wasn't seen as agriculturally productive to become more agriculturally productive. And in the current regime under Xi Jinping. Zhang is now being asked to forego the agricultural land that he helped to create and move into an urban high rise apartment as part of becoming the urban population in China. So they have these kind of transitional dynamics. And if and to what degree, Zhang can exercise agency, within this context, and potentially counter state environmental projects is part of what I engage in the book.

Jonathan Hall

12:42

So you had mentioned, you know, ecology being used by the state in this kind of technocratic structure? And I was just curious, what are the historical linkages that shaped ecology in China over the past, say, 100 years?

Jesse Rodenbiker

12:58

Yeah, that's a that's a great question. And I think it's interesting to think about John within that context, because he's moving through a kind of transitional process where ecology in the Maoist era means a particular thing. And the ecology within the Xi Jinping era begins to mean really something different. And he's living through that it becomes part of his life. And in the book, I provide something of a genealogy of ecological thought, which really focuses on and highlights China's scientists and their global engagements from the early 20th century up to the present. So essentially, that history that Jiang is living through, how does it how did it emerge through the thoughts in minds of Chinese scientists ecological thought in China, developed over a century of global scientific exchanges across botany, systems, science, economics and other fields. And part of what I do in the book is trace the history of how different strains of ecological thought came to be layered into broad conceptual frameworks, which more recently have been articulated by both scientists and politicians as part of building an ecological civilization. This is what Zhang is living through under the current Xi Jinping regime, what does it mean now to build an ecological civilization and the layered meanings of ecological civilization building that I want to highlight briefly include ideas about the role of the state, the role of society in sustainable development ideas about a kind of historical progression from an industrial society, to what started as an ecological society, and ideas about aesthetics in nature? So the science of ecology really took root in China through early 20th century baldness, like Miyoshi Manabu, a Japanese botanist who studied ecology in Germany, and Chinese botanist Hu Xiansu who studied in the US academies, UC Berkeley and Harvard. And these were really kind of key ecological thinkers for a lot of East Asia and China in particular, in their work we see the aesthetic cessation of plants and their subject matter both in their use of text and their use of images. And this is fetishization of ecology remains really prevalent today and finds expression in national discourses to build a beautiful china. So what I want to emphasize here on the onset is that one of the meanings layered into Chinese ecological thought is aesthetic. Again, we get to get back to the cover of the book, that kind of aesthetic cessation of landscape there, and one of the purposes expressed by scientists of building this so called ecological civilization is literally to set aside the national landscape. For example, in 2020, scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences developed a quantification index to measure and tabulate beauty This is called the beautiful china index, which literally quantifies beauty across the national landscape. In those that those scientists that invented this beauty index have training in systems science, their earth system scientists and system science thinking was particularly from the 1980s Onward, was a really important field that contributed to defining different roles for the state, and for society. And in the book, I highlight China's reform era, Earth system, scientists, like Ma Shijun was a really important figure in popularizing system science thinking and applying it to the management of society and nature. system, scientists like ma advocated for modeling human populations, particularly rural people like John, and optimizing agricultural and industrial production. So this kind of systems thinking led to nationwide functional land zoning during the 1990s and 2000s. And more recently, it's contributed to do programs like ecological redlining, that became part of nationwide planning that I talked about earlier. So what I'm emphasizing here is that Systems Thinking contributed to normalizing these processes of ecological protection zoning, and these have come to be thought is key to sustainable development. And they have the effect, as I mentioned before, of extending the reach of the local state, in addition to system science, ecological variants of political economic thought, were really key in framing ecological civilization building as a kind of teleological transformation from an industrial society, to an ecological society. Ecological Marxists from the early 1980s, up to the presence wrote a lot about what they call developing sustainable socialism. And this is something that figures really all over the world have been struggling with and writing about for some time. So how can we square socialist thought, with ecological thought, how do we surmount these challenges of socialist states balancing industrial production, with the industrial effects of production, industrial production, it's no easy task, and there's no silver bullet. And because there's no silver bullet, people have come to really think about and write about it in a lot of different ways. And embedded in the writing of Chinese ecological Marxists, their ideas about the deficiency of the rural population, and their need to be governed by a strong state. So Chinese ecological Marxists, particularly from the 1980s Onward, argued for strong state intervention in transforming rural society, to an urban society. And this is the moment that Jiang is living through right now, where the expectation has shifted for him. That's the petition used to be to transform more land into agricultural land. It's now the expectation in transforming this primarily agrarian society into an urban society. So the expectation from the standpoint of the state is to get him to move into an urban environment and become a fully urban citizen.

Jonathan Hall

18:38

You say in your book that ecological construction revolves around displacement, resettlement, and conservation oriented development, we're talking about Zhang having to make the shift from the rural to the urban, and this whole urbanization effort. And that sounds like a difficult transition for sure. But there's there are some people or many people that have weighed heavily navigated these changes in ways that actually benefited themselves and their stations in life. They call this moving into riches. Tell us about these individuals.

Jesse Rodenbiker

19:09

Yeah, of course, of course. Thanks, Jon. Thanks so much for bringing this up. Yeah, it's pretty important on the onset here to re emphasize what you noted here, really the scale of these transitions that are underway. So when Xi Jinping became president and chairman and early 2010, he outlined a plan to urbanize 100 million people. And this was just part of a longer term plan to eventually urbanize 250 million residents. So the scale of people that are involved in these processes is really enormous. According to state plans. The primary mechanism through which this urbanization is supposed to occur is the resettlement of rural citizens into three types of cities, and three types of cities, particularly in China's central and western regions, and these include provincial capitals, prefectural cities. In county level towns, and that's why I chose for the study of my book to focus on these three types of cities. So I interviewed many people that are undergoing these processes into the cities of Chengdu, Kunming and Dali in China's southwest. And these interviews revealed how citizens enrolled in environmental campaigns to conserve nature in urbanized countryside are navigating these processes involved in as you put it, in some cases, essentially moving it to rich riches or having upward socio economic mobility. And what I want to highlight here are just three dimensions that I found to be really important in how citizens are navigating these environmental policies. The first is land and housing valuation. The second is rural aesthetics, and the third is infrastructure. So as part of these resettlement processes, rural land and housing need to be evaluated and compensated by the state, housing and land allotments need to be measured, and they need to be assigned to value. And these are really inherently contested and slippery processes is in the book, I write about how citizens strive to maximize compensation, and how they use compensation capital in ways that differ from what the state plans, for instance, some villagers corporatize, to collectively manage the assets that are derived from land, and some of them form businesses and share the profits collectively. Others have traded in their housing and land for multiple units in high rise resettlement complexes. And in doing so the essentially transition from farming to becoming urban landlords. interviewees would refer to these processes, as you noted as moving into riches or moving into richness, Bonfiglio was the Chinese term that they would use to describe this process of upward socio economic mobility through the process of displacement, and resettlement. Others however, in contrast, didn't obtain such good prices for mountain housing, and they would describe their experiences moving into high rise poverty, many other people would find themselves somewhere in the middle, or somewhere in between. And these people would creatively utilize state assets to undertake various types of livelihood transition. So for example, some villagers would use their compensation capital to rent agricultural land elsewhere, and move into different agrarian sectors. And in this way, villagers are essentially resisting the drive to become urban, at least in a nice straightforward kind of sense as they're undertaking agrarian practices in some other parts of the town or some other parts nearby. So the second dimension that I want to emphasize is rural aesthetics. So in these transitional processes resettlement, instead of taking place all at once, actually unfolds piecemeal, piece by piece part by part. So in some instances, rural people lose access to their rural land, their agricultural land, but not their house. So as the land is transformed into an ecological protection area, many in this situation, turn their homes into rural themed restaurants and guest houses. And then Chinese these are referred to as non Jalla. And in doing so, the essentially are curating a kind of rural ecological aesthetic to draw in tourists who are coming to visit the ecological protection site. This is a kind of livelihood strategy for those who essentially recently lost access to their farmland. So instead of farming, the citizens have begun performing a kind of rural nature for urban customers who are coming to the ecological Preserve. And these performances tend to reinscribe forms of social difference that I talked about earlier. So urban citizens held in a particular hierarchical configuration, a relatively high comparative in comparison to rule citizens were deemed or imagined as being of lower or lesser value. They also reinscribe social differences within rural society. So different kinds of class stratifications within rural society, are represented aesthetically in different ways within these landscapes. So the third dimension that I want to highlight is infrastructure. So part of what I bring attention to in the book is the role of infrastructure in diffusing social resistance to resettlement. So for example, cases where residents are resisting resettlement, I found instances where infrastructure would be removed, or services would be stopped. So if you think about things like electricity, or water or sanitation service, imagine a situation wherein those infrastructural services are discontinued. There's no running water, there's no electricity garbage is piling up in the streets because sanitation services have been discontinued. This is kind of intervention in infrastructure to hasten the process of resettlement. I also bring attention to cases where demolition bureaus partially demolish housing, and intentionally leave the remains of housing in place as a kind of aesthetic eyesore, so living with Within this quoting reality, where the you're essentially surrounded by Rubble, you're surrounded by detritus, you don't have the infrastructural services that you would otherwise have in your everyday life. it from the standpoint of residents being asked to resettle resettlement begins to look pretty quite different when you live within one of these kinds of situations. So again, I bring attention to the role of infrastructure in defusing social resistance to resettlement and thereby reinforcing authoritarian governance. This is really important because it points to some of the limits for Chinese society and countering authoritarian state power. So going back to this question, if we think about this through the lens of John, what can John do? What are the limits of his conduct, encounter conduct in the face of the authoritarian state?

Jonathan Hall

25:46

Clearly, we're not in an authoritarian state, it's easy for an authoritarian state to do these things. And in the West, there will certainly be massive social resistance to this type of thing. That being said, you know, what can we learn from this from from democracy? Are there any lessons we can learn from these massive initiatives that we potentially could use to help protect our environment here?

Jesse Rodenbiker

26:10

Yeah, that's that's a great question. So I think the book conserve is something of a cautionary tale about the alignment of ecology, and authoritarian power, or even the alignment of ecology and power. More broadly, I think it's important to note that some of the approaches to ecology, which have been talking about and have become really central to environmental management in China are actually gaining traction in global contexts. So this is something that I explore in the epilogue of the book and something that I'm continuing to research in write about him the current research, and one of the things that I bring attention to in the book is how China's homegrown environmental discourse of ecological civilization building has been taken up in global environmental forms, like the United Nations Convention on biodiversity. For the first time in history, China served as president of a major un environmental forum during 2021 and 2022. At the coffee of teen biodiversity conference, and again, this conference was thematically titled ecological civilization, building a shared future for all life on Earth. UN representatives really celebrated this theme, which shows how this idea of ecological civilization resonates to some degree within international circles. And at the conference, China took a leading role in brokering what's now called the Cuming Montreal global biodiversity framework, which set targets for biodiversity conservation, essentially, at a global level. And one of the global goals is to zone 30% of the world for conservation by the year 2030. This often goes by the shorthand 3530, you probably read about it in newspapers, it's been in international environmental discourse for the last several years. And now it's part of this globally agreed upon biodiversity targets. So let's just think back for a moment, about some of the stories that I've been relaying some of the processes I've been reeling about ecological prediction zoning in China, how it's transforming society and nature, how it's reinforcing state power. So well, if we think about zoning 30% of the earth for conservation, what will happen to people living in those areas in their relationship to land and their relationship to ocean resources. Recent models by scientists projected upwards of 1 billion people would be affected by such large scale conservation zoning, I would have billions or even 10s of millions of people's relationships and resources change what types of new inequalities or in justices might emerge? How might governments harness conservation practices to potentially deepen the reach of the state? The examples that I discussed in my book, particularly surrounding China's large scale, conservation zoning should give everyone pause to reflect on these kinds of questions. But to be clear, I don't want to come off as villainizing China, or give listeners the impression that China is wholly unique in harnessing ecology for governmental ends. Even democratic states, such as the US have drawn on ecology to enhance and extend state power. And there's lots of studies that have shown this to be the case I highlight a few examples of them in the introduction and the epilogue to the book. For some comparative context, the history of conservation the US is really riddled with social injustices, particularly dispossession of indigenous people from land, through processes that are often described by environmental scientists and social scientists as fortress conservation. So this entailed the exclusion of indigenous people in their long standing relationships to land in what a lot of new and emerging research is showing is that this kind of approach to conservation not only produces social and justices and forms of dispossession, which have long been established and written about out. But it also disrupts local ecosystems, which have really come to be constituted through long term processes of interaction between humans in nature. And when you take humans out of the equation, it transforms those established ecosystems. So this points really to the importance of emphasizing social equality. And social inclusion is key principles of conservation and sustainable development. Sustainable development, in particular has long been thought about and written about through kind of tripartite schema of trying to sustain the environment, sustain economy, equity, etc. But unfortunately, in practice, equity often falls by the wayside. And we can see that in the case of China, we can see that in the history of us concentration, and in many other places around the world. And I think a big lesson for global conservationists or conservationists, from any country, is that social equity, justice and inclusion should really be at the heart of conservation and sustainability planning, rather than as an afterthought. And this is something that the book brings attention to, throughout each of the chapters, and enclosing discusses is really a crucial area for continued research and ongoing interventions.

Jonathan Hall

31:12

I like that a lot - that bringing the human into the equation, rather than excluding them, you'd said that was a fortress ecology or portraits conservation, or portraits conservation. Yeah, that there's this pristine environment then, which in reality was actually heavily influenced by indigenous peoples throughout centuries that we don't really take that into account where the Garden of Eden that hasn't been touched, you know, but I think this is a great story, as you said, it's a cautionary tale. It's also it's exciting to see ecology being brought in at this level, the same time, you know, there's the shadow side of all the displacement and the resettlement and the the lack of empathy with humans within their environment. But I think that this is a fascinating, as you said, cautionary tale that we should all learn from particularly looking at the environment as a global issue, we need to see what works and what doesn't work. For each country's strategies on how to protect the environment, we have plenty of struggles ahead of us, particularly with global warming, and mass extinctions and whatnot. But I would encourage everyone who's listening to this, you can get a free copy of Jesse's new book, Ecological States: Politics of Science and Nature in Urbanizing China, it's available, as I said, Open Access and get it for free, you can download it right now. Or you can get an affordable paperback as well.

Jesse Rodenbiker

32:34

If I can just closing I also want to bring attention to the fact that this book is the first single author manuscript in a new Cornell University Press series called The Environments of East Asia. So if you're listening, and you're an author, and you are working on a book related to environmental issues in East Asia broadly conceived, you might want to consider reaching out to the editors of this series, your book could potentially be one of the ones that come out within this series.

Jonathan Hall

33:03

That's great. Thanks for answering that. That's true. It's true. We're excited this, this is the first one in the series. It's great.

Jesse Rodenbiker

33:09

Thanks so much, Jonathan, for the invitation to be here. It's it's really great to share some of the some of the work with you and with the listeners.

Jonathan Hall

33:16

Our pleasure. Thanks so much for writing the book, and come on the podcast. Really appreciate it. Thank you. That was Jesse Rodenbiker, author of the new book Ecological States: Politics of Science and Nature in Urbanizing China. As mentioned earlier, you can download Jesse's new book as a free open access ebook at cornellpress.cornell.edu. You can also purchase the affordable paperback and our website as well and use the promo code 09POD to save 30% off. If you live in the UK, use the discount code CSANNOUNCE and visit the website combinedacademic.co.uk Thank you for listening to 1869, The Cornell University Press Podcast.

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