REVIEWS

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Where the Wild Things WereFOUR THOUSAND YEARS OF HUMANS VS. NATURE IN CHINA BY NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Who knew that elephant trunk tastes likepiglet? Or that more than a millenniumago, a writer declared that Chinese “com-peted to eat their trunks, the taste of whichis said to be fatty and crisp, and to be par-ticularly well suited to being roasted.”

Elephants, it turns out, once roamedacross nearly all of China, as did rhinoc-eroses. Indeed, for 1,000 years the stan-dard armor worn by Chinese soldiers wasmade from rhino hide. Yet these days rhi-nos are completely extinct in China, andelephants linger only in protected en-claves in the far southwest of the country.

China being China, everything hasbeen carefully documented, so we knowthat these large mammals retreated grad-ually over the past 4,000 years, half a stepahead of smaller, two-legged ones. MarkElvin, an Australian scholar, brilliantlyuses that prolonged elephantine trail oftears as the guiding metaphor for his newbook, The Retreat of the Elephants: AnEnvironmental History of China.

Frankly, I didn’t know that I was in-terested in the history of Chinese elephants,or that I was yearning for an environ-mental history of China, until I read thisbook. But Elvin combines an illuminatingaccount of the 4,000-year-long collision of

humans and nature with delightful tidbitsabout everything under the Chinese sun.

One could not have written such anenvironmental history about, for in-stance, Britain or Russia. From China’spoint of view, such countries are moderningenues with barely any history to speakof. But in China, we hear, for example,that the Duke of Zhou, more than 3,000years ago, drove “elephants far away”from the Yellow River valley. A recordfrom 548 B.C. describes the ivory trade,and later we begin to get detailed ac-counts of battles over crops betweenpeasants and elephants in, say, A.D. 962.

Of course, just because something hasbeen recorded does not mean it is true.One account from 1608 reports of trainedelephants in the Ming Dynasty court: “Ifan elephant commits an offense, or in-jures a human, the imperial commandwill be issued for him to be beaten. . . .Only when the beating has been conclud-ed will he rise to his feet to give thanks forthe favor received. . . . In the sixth lunarmonth they are bathed and mated. Thecoupling takes place in the water with afemale who floats with her face upward,in all respects like a human being.”Hmmm. Floating face upward? So that’show Ming Dynasty historians made love.

Elvin is particularly fascinating onthe history of China’s long wrestlingmatch with water. Chinese civilizationmay have evolved out of efforts to irri-gate the land, and there is an intriguingrecord of the quest to tame water andland, which would typically succeed fora while until the water rebelled.

The problems were especially acute

with the Yellow River, which was notcalled that in ancient times. Then, a littlemore than two millennia ago, the Qinand Han dynasties promoted farmingalong the upper reaches of the river, andthe resulting erosion filled the water withsediment that made it muddy and gave itits present name. The sediment raised theriverbed until it was held in place only byman-made dikes that required constantattention—because the water, in essence,flowed aboveground, not below it.

Periodically dikes broke, sometimescatastrophically. A flood in 1117 is saidto have killed more than one millionpeople, making it perhaps the worst suchdisaster since Noah. The Yellow Riverdramatically changed course in 1194,moving to the south of the ShandongPeninsula, until in 1853 it moved northagain. Elvin meticulously recounts China’shydrology, so we learn, for example, that

THE RETREAT OF THE ELEPHANTS: AN ENVIRONMENTALHISTORY OF CHINABy Mark ElvinYale UniversityPress, New Haven,Conn. ($39.95)

ELEPHANTS RANGED throughout most of the hugearea that became China. Today the only Chineseelephants remaining in the wild live in a fewprotected enclaves near the border with Burma.

COPYRIGHT 2004 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, INC.

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between 1195 and 1578 the Yellow Riverdelta advanced only 39 meters a year (assediment built up), whereas from 1579 to1591 it advanced 1,538 meters a year.

Sometimes the sheer weight of detailis numbing, particularly in later chaptersoffering case studies within China. Read-ers without an intrinsic fascination withChina may find this a book to browse,not to read cover to cover. But as a win-dow into the history of the Middle King-dom, and an extended account of humaninteractions with the environment, this isa magisterial work.

What gives this book special reso-nance is the impact China will have onthe global environment in the comingdecades. The industrial revolution in theWest has been so destructive of naturethat we should be wary of what the in-dustrialization of China and India willmean. I congratulate my Chinese friendswhen they buy their first cars, one afterthe other, but collectively the result ofChinese industrialization will be to swal-low up nonrenewable resources, to in-crease carbon emissions and presumablyglobal warming, and to send acid raindrizzling down on much of the globe.

Yet this book does not really illumi-nate the road ahead. Elvin tells us that itwas originally intended to carry us to thepresent day, but he ends up pretty muchgrinding to a halt a couple of hundredyears ago. The even more gruesome peri-od since—and, brace yourself, the preda-tions still ahead of us—will have to be thesubject of a companion volume. Alas, theChinese elephants have already been dri-ven to the country’s fringe and havenowhere else to go. And unless they fig-ure out how to mate even when the fe-male is not floating faceup in a pool ofwater, they’re really in trouble.

Nicholas D. Kristof is a columnist forthe New York Times. He won a PulitzerPrize for his coverage of China and isco-author, with his wife, SherylWuDunn, of China Wakes: The Strugglefor the Soul of a Rising Power.

LORDS AND LEMURS: MAD SCIENTISTS, KINGS WITH SPEARS, AND THE SURVIVAL OF DIVERSITY IN MADAGASCAR by Alison Jolly. 24 pages of photographs. Houghton Mifflin, 2004 ($25)Jolly, a pioneer in the study of primate behavior, first went to Madagascarto observe lemurs 40 years ago. Her research site was at Berenty, aprivate wildlife refuge that was part of the plantation of an aristocraticFrench family. The de Heaulmes had come to Berenty in 1928. As theydeveloped their plantation over the years, they also set aside a large areaof it for lemurs and other animals and helped the native Tandroy tribepreserve their traditions.

At the beginning of the 21st century, Berenty and its lemurs stillflourish because the de Heaulme family are still there—and vice versa. “Forest and familysaved each other,” Jolly says. The plantation no longer produces sisal commercially;together with the preserved forest and its lemurs, it has become a destination for eco-tourists. Woven around the life of the de Heaulme family is the entire history of Madagascar—

its geology, its animals and its colonization by humans, beginning with Indonesians andAfricans in around A.D. 500. It is an unexpectedly enthralling story, told with great flair.

The books reviewed are available for purchase through www.sciam.com

THE EDITORS RECOMMEND

“THE LEMURS FOUND ME. Staring lemon eyes in a black, heart-shaped face set in a square,white-furred head: a white sifaka clung vertically to a vertical trunk, its tail rolled up like awatch spring. Then, without warning, it leaped. It seemed to double in size. Its hind legs,longer than head and body together, propelled it backward into space in a curve as taut asballet. It did not jump away, but toward me! It turned in midair to land with both hind feet first,then folded up and clung vertically to another trunk, still watching me. Another followedacross the same gap. . . . ”

COPYRIGHT 2004 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, INC.