China’s Environmental Challenges in a Long-term Historical Context, Dr Robert Marks (Whittier)

Tuesday, March 9, 2021 | 12pm Noon

CHINA TODAY HAS emerged as the world’s largest economy, and that rapid economic development has brought with it massive environmental changes and challenges.  China also has the longest continuous and documented history of any place on earth.  That history provides us with an opportunity to place China’s current environmental challenges into a very long-term context.  As one historian put it, China has experienced “three thousand years of unsustainable development."  

ROBERT B. MARKS is Professor Emeritus of History and Environmental Studies at Whittier College. He is the author of several books and articles on Chinese and world environmental history, most notably Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt: Environment and Economy in South China (1998), The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Environmental Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-first Century (4th ed. 2020), and China: An Environmental History (2nd ed., 2017) (all translated into Chinese). He has presented papers at conferences in China, Hong Kong, Sweden, Norway, Japan, and the Netherlands. In 1997, he received the Aldo Leopold Award for the best article in the journal Environmental History from the American Society for Environmental History, and Tigers was featured in the New York Historical Society’s “Books That Matter” campaign in 2008. He is currently working on an environmental history of the Eastern Sierra region of California.

Some relevant links for more information and further readings:
Dr. Robert Marks, Professor Emeritus of History at Whittier College: https://www.whittier.edu/academics/hi...
Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt: Environment and Economy in South China: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/...
The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Environmental Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-first Century: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538127032...
China: An Environmental History, 2nd edition: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442277892...

For more events in this CSUSB China lecture series: https://docs.google.com/presentation/...

Presented by the CSUSB History Department, the History Club/Phi Alpha Theta, the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, and the Intellectual Life Fund. Please contact Jeremy Murray ([email protected]) with any questions.


Apologies for the slight jump around 54.5 mins.