Soil and Society on the Loess Plateau, c. 1850s-1950s: A History from the Bottom Up

UC Berkeley hosts a talk with Micah Muscolino

Speaker: Micah Muscolino, Jessica Rawson Fellow in Modern Asian History at Merton College and Associate Professor of Chinese History, the University of Oxford
Panelist/Discussant: Wen-hsin Yeh, History, UC Berkeley

Sponsor: Center for Chinese Studies (CCS)

Environmental China Colloquium 3

For most of history, little mattered more for human communities than their relations with the soil that provided most of their food and nutrients. For the past few centuries (the “Anthropocene”), nothing has mattered more for soils in China and the wider world than human action, which has accelerated erosion and rerouted nutrient flows, making humans into agents of geomorphological change. What understandings of environmental change prevailed in China’s erosion-prone loess plateau region during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, when human alteration of its soils reached new levels? How did multiple ecological perceptions and land-use patterns coexist and compete with one another? How did state-initiated soil conservation measures during the mid-twentieth-century fit into these changing social and ecological contexts? This presentation will engage with these questions in a preliminary manner through an analysis of reports generated by water and soil conservation survey teams (shuitu baochi chakan dui) deputed by the PRC government in 1953 to investigate socio-economic conditions, local history, and land-management practices in the major river basins of Shaanxi, Gansu, and other parts of the loess plateau.

Event Contact: ccs@berkeley.edu, 510-643-6321