Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2014. xi, 244 pp. (Figures, tables.) US$120.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-85793-349-2.
This volume is an extremely comprehensive and informative book about environmental education in contemporary China. It would serve as a useful reference book for educators, students, and researchers alike. It is organized into eleven chapters, including an introduction and conclusion. The other nine chapters cover discussions of Confucianism as it relates to environmental ethics; environmental education in primary and secondary schooling (including “green schools”); informal vectors of environmental education (including the media, NGOs, GONGOs, and other non-state actors); variations in environmental education within China, and also between the PRC, Taiwan, and Hong Kong; and some assessment of levels of environmental consciousness, knowledge, and behaviour. Each chapter is divided into multiple sections with headings, which makes for a guided and organized read, allowing one to quickly move through sections if so desired. Some of the sections are one or two paragraphs long, however, and one cannot help but feel that this interrupts the flow of the discourse ever so slightly. Chapters range between 16 and 31 pages; none feel too long. Each chapter has extensive endnotes (chapter 7 in fact has 91 notes!), which demonstrate the far-reaching research that the authors have conducted on the subject. Missing is a final list of references, which this reviewer was disappointed with, but an index is provided (and chapter 3 has an appendix with sources).
There is some repetition throughout the volume. This is not a distraction, however, in that the enormous amount of detail provided is somewhat of a challenge to keep track of; a reader can benefit from a bit of repetition. This could also allow one to read chapters as stand-alone works, or in groupings, while still being exposed to the majority of the topics explored. While the authors state that their argument unfolds over the course of nine chapters, a single argument is not clearly stated. If anything the most important point to take away from this book is that there has been some progress in environmental education in China in the past several decades, but there is still more work to be done. The volume reads more as a descriptive account of environmental education in China (with some comparisons to other nations), providing suggestions for possible improvements to this type of education. There is an argument in chapters 2 and 11 that New Confucianism could potentially provide an important moral anchor for environmental education, but this argument is not sustained throughout the volume—as important as it is. In fact, one of the general findings in the volume is that while environmental knowledge or awareness may be high (it is not so everywhere), often behaviours do not match this heightened sensibility; what is missing is motivation, I would argue—and morality gives one exactly that (hence more focus on New Confucianism may have been warranted). This is not to say that there is no analytical rigour here, as there certainly is; chapter 5 in particular (“Environmental education in China’s training of teachers”) has some very insightful critical analysis of training programs. And the authors repeatedly point out that China’s top-down, authoritarian political structure makes grassroots organizations (which have spearheaded much environmental awareness-raising in Western countries) significantly challenged as key actors.
In addition to a comprehensive list of references, I would have appreciated more usage of Chinese (pinyin would have been fine) for key terms, and more information provided about the sample size and other methodological accounting for the surveys discussed in chapter 9. Surprisingly, overall I have become more optimistic about the future of environmental education in China from reading this book, largely because I was not aware of the extent to which various programs have been implemented. I was somewhat surprised to see that in some surveys conducted (not by the authors themselves) one of the indices of having environmental knowledge was knowing environmental laws, regulations, or policies (about sewage treatment, for example); I wondered how Americans would score on the same scale—my guess: quite low. In the very interesting chapter about the media, I of course thought of Chai Jing’s recent film Under the Dome and marvelled at what an excellent case study this would make for the volume in a future edition.
One of the larger epistemological questions that occurred to me throughout the volume, and with which I am left, is what counts as “environmental knowledge.” As an ethnobiologist and an anthropologist (who researches in China), I am used to thinking about the way that human rural communities, in long-term relationships with the flora and fauna around them, develop environmental knowledge. They know which local plants to use for stomach aches, how to process and utilize animal fat on their joints to ease discomfort, which crops grow best next to other crops, etc. But this is not what is meant in the field of environmental education. In this field, it is the urbanized and formally educated who hold the knowledge, about acid rain, smog, water pollution, biodiversity loss, energy-saving devices, “green” technologies, climate change, etc. Thus people in the countryside are in need of being educated about the environment, and in most measures they are lacking in environmental knowledge and awareness, according to this field of research. While I do not deny that most rural residents in China could benefit from learning about air, soil, and water pollution (among other things) from the perspective of Western science, if I were to offer suggestions to the developing field of environmental education in China, I would recommend that localized and rural ways of knowing about the natural world also be considered as important and legitimate forms of environmental knowledge, and be taught to educated urbanites. For one, such systems often have a key moral component—which, as the authors demonstrate, may be sorely needed to change behaviours toward the environment. In this way, environmental education should not be just a one-way dissemination project, but a two-way project of convergence and communication.
Denise M. Glover
University of Puget Sound, Tacoma, USA
pp. 876-878