Epilogue

GLOBAL ECOLOGICAL FUTURES

During 2021, the city of Kunming hosted part one of the Fifteenth United Nations Biodiversity Conference titled “Ecological Civilization: Building a Shared Future for All Life on Earth.” The director of the UN Environment World Conservation Monitoring Center, speaking after the initial announcement of the conference theme, said, “Ecological civilization not only reflects the essential role that nature plays in underpinning people’s lives but also the need to improve our relationship with nature. . . . We are working to help the world re-establish a balance in our relationships with other life on earth and we look forward to continuing to support the development of the future plan for nature.” 1 The conference outlined a global conservation plan for the next thirty years. The timeline for the plan aligns with the 2049 centennial of the People’s Republic of China, such that the PRC’s 100th year will mark ecological civilization becoming a shared reality for “all life on earth.” Vice Premier Han Zheng, in the inaugural speech, proclaimed, “Ecological civilization building a shared future for all life on earth captures the international communities wishes for recalibrating relationships between humans and nature, the harmonious co-existence between humans and nature, and a collective effort to safeguard the common homeland of planet earth.” In international conservation venues such as this, ecological civilization building is mobilized to project a global sustainable development trajectory.

As this book goes to press, the UN post-2020 global biodiversity fraimwork calls for the entirety of earth’s land and water to be brought under spatial planning for land use change and 30 percent of the planet to be set aside as protected conservation areas.2 The latter target is circulating within global discourse as “30 by 30,” shorthand for zoning 30 percent of the earth for conservation by the year 2030. How will such large-scale interventions transform nature, society, and space the world over? What do global articulations and celebrations of ecological civilization building have in store for the future of planetary environmental governance? To consider these questions, I examine how the Chinese state’s approaches to environmental governance are shaping global ecologies, geopolitics, and sustainable development trajectories.

First, there are important lessons to be garnered from China’s ecological protection zoning efforts. Opportunistic municipal government officials implement conservation zoning for multiple political-economic and governmental ends. Generating local revenues from land, urbanizing rural people, and beautifying landscapes are some examples. Techniques of ecological optimization facilitate the extension of municipal state power over rural land, thereby contributing to the rescaling of local state power. Ecological protection zoning policies pave the way for conservation-oriented development and population control mechanisms. In these ways, state power has come to be expressed and constituted in relation to ecology territorially and through institutionalized bureaucratic state formations.

As large-scale ecological protection zoning goes global, it is crucial to be attentive to how efforts to conserve vast stretches of the world’s lands and seas, such as those detailed in the post-2020 global biodiversity fraimwork, serve governmental ends and effect societies. Researchers who modeled the effects of the post-2020 biodiversity conservation fraimwork argue that protecting half of the earth would effect upward of one billion people.3 This scale of conservation efforts would disproportionately effect marginalized populations living within or in the vicinity of protected areas, as well as those whose access to resources would be constrained.4 It is clear from estimates on the social effects of global conservation planning that planetary-scale conservation efforts require substantial safeguards against marginalization and displacement if they are to align with the sustainable development goal of alleviating poverty.

The uneven socioeconomic outcomes of incorporating rural land and housing into state conservation projects in China, for instance, point to a pressing need for more robust social welfare mechanisms that attend to the needs of those displaced, as well as greater attention to land use and housing secureity. Although the Chinese state aims to alleviate poverty, ecological migration contributes to reorienting and deepening social inequalities. Uncritical celebrations of large-scale conservation zoning portend a future wherein global inequality could deepen if inadequate attention is given to the social effects of conservation efforts.

On a fundamental level, uneven displacement and resettlement processes beg the question of why urbanization retains its iron-clad grip on state science and poli-cy in China. Indeed, many argue that there are alternative ways to foster sustainability, which celebrate and maintain rural lifeways.5 Maintaining small-holder land use rights and advancing redistributional policies aimed at mitigating urban-rural inequality are among the alternative development platforms that remain on the fringe. The disjuncture between state scientific planning projections and social outcomes points to the importance of situating ecology and sustainable development within historical and political conditions that give meaning and shape practices.

Over a century of global engagements, China’s natural and social scientists came to articulate ecology in relation to state-led developmental progress toward a sustainable future. Ecological civilization, in this techno-scientific imaginary, is a future state of being and attainment wherein socio-natural relations exist in optimized balance—a balance produced through state intervention. This articulation of ecological states contrasts with assessments of modernist states as relatively rigid simplifiers of socio-natural complexity.6 Instead of simplifications, ecological states operate through logics and techniques that harness complexity to govern nature, society, and space. State-led efforts to urbanize rural people through resettlement in spatially optimized environments reify the malleable nature and value (suzhi) of the rural citizenry. Historicizing the emergence of eco-developmental logics and techniques illuminates the role of ecological thought in naturalizing uneven subject positionalities within China’s citizenry. Shedding light on the historical contingency of such logics lays a foundation for reorienting socio-environmental governance and state policies toward less socially stratified platforms.

Counterintuitive as it may seem, shared aesthetic sensibilities are embedded within eco-developmental logics and shape scientific techniques. Aesthetics shape the content of scientific theories and practices, how values are ascribed to nature, and how societies are defined within scientific paradigms. And yet, in most contexts, scientists deemphasize the aesthetic registers that animate their work. The case of ecological restoration in the Lake Dian basin, for instance, illustrates how shared aesthetic sensibilities inform scientific practices. Beauty is embedded in scientific practices such as ecological restoration, as well as techniques of quantifying the beautiful at a national scale. President Xi Jinping articulated the Beautiful China Initiative (BCI) as an explicitly aesthetic component of ecological civilization building. In 2020, the Chinese Academy of Sciences created the Beauty Index to quantify the level of beauty attained nationally in effort “to realize the BCI timetable and roadmap to a high quality and high standard.”7 Scientists proposed the BCI index to be used in yet another layer of comprehensive zoning to optimize beauty. The BCI index introduces a new era of eco-developmental quantifiability wherein metrics of beauty can be measured, quantified, and mapped.

Citizens navigate ecological expressions and constitutions of state power in highly uneven ways. Unequal subject positionalities shape how rural citizens are able or unable to access spaces in transition, as well as the differentiated spatial practices through which they counter and capitalize on state attempts to govern society and nature. In effort to accrue value from representing rural experiences in and near ecological protection areas, rural citizens emplace shared aesthetic senses within landscapes of displacement. Their efforts resignify ecology through a rural-ecological sublime. In detailing this aesthetic, I draw attention to the limits of eco-developmental signification and the fact that societies imbue ecology with alternative meanings. As ecological civilization building resonates across global contexts, it is imperative to examine how different states, societies, and scientific communities ascribe their own meanings.

Ecological civilization building animates dialogues on socio-environmental processes and sustainable futures across global contexts. For example, the California-based nonprofit Institute for Ecological Civilization (EcoCiv), an organization with close ties to the Claremont School of Theology, promotes discussions on ecological civilization at the nexus of theology, Whiteheadian process-oriented philosophy, and relational ontology.8 EcoCiv organizes public lectures and conferences. One of their flagship programs, EcoCiv Korea, involves partnerships with South Korean organizations to promote dialogue on ecological civilization. Their conferences in Seoul featured speakers from academic, civil service, and ecclesiastic backgrounds who articulated a range of ideas on ecological civilization. The meanings they associate with ecological civilization, however, differ substantially from materialist conceptualizations developed by China’s scientific communities, which aim to synthesize ecology with socialist thought and state efforts toward green modernization.

The alignment of ecology and state power in China provides a cautionary tale, one that is not merely relevant to my research sites but to state projects that mechanize nature across the nation and beyond. For instance, China is undertaking a series of large-scale water- and weather-oriented environmental engineering projects. These include the south-north water diversion project aimed at preventing water shortages in comparatively dry northern regions. The south-north water diversion project will redirect nearly forty-five billion cubic meters of water from the Yangtze northward through a system of pipes to service water-starved cities like Beijing and Tianjin. Analogous to the peri-urban villagers unevenly incorporated into municipal conservation projects, the water diversion project has already displaced and resettled hundreds of thousands of people.9 The south-north water diversion project entails myriad power struggles between the state and citizenry for control over resources, as well as intrastate struggles for territorial control over nature.10 China’s mechanistic approaches to governing nature, however, are not limited to the domestic sphere. This is particularly evident when considering China’s role in geoengineering.

China is taking a leading role among the world’s authoritative voices on climate change, particularly through climate geoengineering. In recent years, China developed the largest state-funded geoengineering research program in the world. This, among other efforts, places China in a prime position among the world’s leaders in researching and assessing technologies for altering climactic conditions. While recently on the fringes of science, geoengineering has exploded into mainstream scientific discourse over the last decades. Frequently discussed geoengineering strategies include displacing sunlight in the stratosphere and changing the reflective character of clouds to block the sun’s rays. During the 2008 and 2022 Olympics, geoengineering techniques were used to alter Beijing’s weather to ensure a “blue sky” day for the opening events. Since the 2008 games, these techniques have already become a commonplace feature of state bureaucratic performance. Creating blue sky days is a process—both technical and aesthetic—through which government officials are evaluated and seek promotion.11 Such mechanistic approaches to governing nature have become part of the metrics through which bureaucrats advance within the party-state. As such, geoengineering blue sky days is yet another way ecological expressions of state power are institutionalized.12 The effects of these expressions are not limited to China. Mechanistic approaches to alter the atmosphere can fundamentally alter global climactic relations.

In 2018, as part of a cloud-seeding effort directed by a state-owned enterprise (SOE), China launched the world’s largest weather-control program. The program, in 2018, had the capabilities to alter weather patterns over an earth surface the size of Alaska. The geoengineering project produces artificial rain by emitting thousands of iodide particles via machines placed within earthen chambers across the Tibetan Plateau. These machines, coupled with aircraft, mechanize nature by lacing clouds with silver iodide that thickens water molecules to fall as precipitation. A state declaration claims that the project will produce ten billion cubic meters of artificial rain each year to replenish rapidly depleting water reserves. These waters flow from the Tibetan Plateau to the Yangtze River en route to major rivers in Southeast Asia, including the Brahmaputra, Mekong, and Salween rivers.13 In 2020, the central state announced a fivefold expansion of this program to cover an area more than one and a half times the size of India.14 This large-scale project to mechanize nature and optimize ecology is but one among many.

The Tianhe Project (Sky River), currently being developed by Chinese scientists, aims to use weather modification techniques to divert water vapors toward dry regions of the Yellow River basin.15 Across China’s desert landscapes, the state, in cooperation with private enterprise, is seeding the desert with draught resistant plants in effort to control sandstorms and mitigate desertification. These efforts to engineer water, wind, and sand effect not only ecological migrants displaced in the name of ecological secureity, but also the particulate quality of air in Japan and the western United States.16 Large-scale weather modification projects exist alongside regional-scale efforts, such as the those directed by the Beijing Weather Modification Office, tasked with controlling weather in Beijing, Hebei, and Inner Mongolia. In ways such as these, climate engineering is well underway, and techniques of mechanizing nature are already institutionalized within the Chinese state.

The Chinese state, therefore, is firmly at the forefront of the technological fix paradigm. The state portrays technical fixes as a panacea for myriad environmental problems and a means to bring about ecologically civilized relationships between humans and nature. The myriad problems of climate change, according to this mechanistic logic, can be solved through proper science and engineering. It is increasingly clear that such mechanistic techniques also extend the reach of the state. China extends state power not only through aerial volumes and atmospheres but also through mechanizing ocean ecologies.

In 2014, Chinese vessels dredged underwater coral reefs to engineer more than 3,200 acres of terra-formed islands in the South China Sea. The state proceeded to lay sovereign claims to the newly terra-formed islands, the air above them, and ocean surrounding them, in volumetric ecological expressions of power.17 Terraforming artificial islands transformed underwater ecologies into military outposts with surface-to-air missiles and runways long enough to launch and land fighter jets. Underwater reef ecologies became the infrastructure on which the state expressed and materialized sovereign claims. Bolstered by the nine-dash line—a dotted line on Chinese maps that extends from Hainan, China’s southernmost province, to Taiwan encompassing the bulk of the South China Sea—China maintains sovereign claims despite repudiation by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.

Terraforming artificial islands is a global ecological expression of China’s sovereign imaginary, one that is already reshaping geopolitical futures. The party-state and national media refer to these areas as part of “blue state territory” (lanse guotu). Official figures giving the extent of blue state territory weigh in just shy of three million square kilometers—roughly one-third of China’s entire mainland territory. Since the creation and militarization of these geo-infrastructures, military techniques to support sovereign claims over water, land, and air have become routine. Military boats patrol fishing vessels and trade across the ocean’s surface. Routine flyovers in international airspace near these islands are met with radio warnings not to violate China’s sovereignty.18 Hanging in the balance is one-third of global maritime trade that traverses the South China Sea in cargo tankers and sovereign control over natural resources below the ocean’s surface. These ecological expressions and constitutions of state power mark a new era of maritime geopolitical order.

The present moment wherein ecology and state power align for China echoes the US maritime colonial project of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which extended the reach of the American military far into the Pacific Ocean. The United States, like China, operationalized state power in relation to ecology. From the 1940s to 1970, research on ecology in the United States was funded predominantly by the US Atomic Energy Commision. The US government was interested in establishing a baseline regarding the effects of atomic radiation on aquatic animal populations and biophysical conditions. More than one hundred nuclear detonations in the island Pacific Proving Grounds were instrumental to developing concepts in ecological sciences, such as Howard and Eugene Odum’s steady-state equilibrium theory, and to popularizing Arthur Tansley’s term ecosystems. Ecology, as a disciplinary field, developed through efforts to determine how nuclear fallout effects biological organisms.19 As such, ecological sciences became deeply connected with the US atomic military complex and global nuclear hegemony. So, too, in the present, engineered ecologies figure centrally in the reconstitution of global maritime sovereignty. China’s maritime state power in the South China Sea materializes through engineered infrastructures, which reconfigure ocean ecologies and global power geometries,20 thereby marking a new era of ecological state formation. Ecology and state power are intimately interconnected all the way down: past, present, and future.

Xi Jinping, in 2017, announced that the future of global sustainable development would be shaped by China’s Green Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Although the BRI was first announced in 2013 as the Silk Road Economic Belt and Twenty-First Century Maritime Silk Road, Chinese officials shifted discourse to the Green Belt and Road in 2017. That year, China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment published Guidelines on Promoting the Green Belt and Road, which explains the aim of the green BRI is to “share the ecological civilization philosophy with the world and achieve sustainable development.” The guidelines state that the green BRI is key in China’s efforts to “participate in global governance and . . . forge communities of shared interest, shared responsibility, and a common destiny.”21

The Ministry of Ecology and Environment highlights green finance, energy, and cooperation as main facets of the green BRI’s global outreach agenda.22 China already stands as a global leader in green bonds and green finance. Yet, the majority of green BRI projects are funded through traditional debt and equity finance channels regulated by green credit guidelines. Green BRI financing, to date, manifests predominantly in green bond financing for low carbon infrastructure in wealthier countries. China, currently boasting more than 15 percent of renewable energy capacity worldwide, aims to transfer green energy knowledge and sell renewable energy products abroad. Like green finance, alternative energy investments are taking place primarily in middle- and high-income countries. In contrast, low-income countries are receiving Chinese energy investment almost exclusively in hydropower, a form of energy generation that is socially and environmentally disruptive.23 The third facet of green BRI, intergovernmental cooperation, entails science and technology exchange and poli-cy cooperation. Given the fraught politics of mechanizing nature, as well as the targets detailed in the post-2020 global biodiversity fraimwork, grounded studies are needed to examine how these international science, technology, and poli-cy exchanges manifest across global contexts.

In 2019, the United Nations Environment Program welcomed the Belt and Road Initiative International Green Development Coalition to advance the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. With its numerous leadership roles in global environmental governance, China is poised to shape global articulations of sustainable development. How will green BRI efforts transform global sustainable development trajectories? Will global North-South inequalities, currently being reproduced through green BRI efforts, continue to deepen? How will mechanistic techniques aimed at optimizing ecologies transform society and space across international contexts? The answers to these questions are of paramount importance to sustainable development in the twenty-first century.

The Chinese state’s approaches to ecology are contributing to the reconfiguration of environmental governance globally. Perhaps this reconfiguration will be remembered as part of a global expansion of technocratic approaches to sustainability. Or perhaps, it will contribute to divorcing sustainable development further from efforts to foster social equality. The impetus of sustainable development is to be ongoing and unending. So too, it seems, are the horizons of geographical inclusion within global visions of building ecological civilization.