This volume explores some of the diverse niches created by humans in different times and places. The essays span the globe, from Texas to China, from Scandinavia to Papua New Guinea, exploring agricultural spaces and indoor biomes, human aesthetics, and Anthropocentric perspectives.
Content
David Bello explores the fraught struggle between humans and locusts for occupancy of the agricultural niches created by farmers during China’s Qing dynasty.
This film captures the rise of China’s influence in Africa and in Zambia in particular, through the lives of three individuals: a Chinese entrepreneur, a project manager for a Chinese multinational and the Zambian Minister for Commerce, Trade and Industry.
This film follows a resistance movement to the building of a dam on the Upper Yangtze River in southern China, highlighting Chairman Mao’s efforts to subjugate nature in the name of progress.
This film focuses on the causes of the decimation of honey bees and their hives around the globe, a phenomenon called “colony collapse disorder,” and its consequences for not only the economy but for humans’ very survival.
This film examines a vibrant urban farming movement that is catching on across the globe.
This film investigates the crises facing China’s environment from the perspectives of four activists.
Fei Sheng analyzes the ecological factors in China that spurred migration to Australia at a time when the discovery of gold as a natural resource made the country an ideal migration destination. He shows how Chinese migrants applied their environmental experience in a white settler colony.
In ¡Vivan las Antipodas!, award-winning documentary filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky visits four rare inhabited regions of the world that are antipodal to other landmasses and creates unexpected images that turn our view of the world upside-down.
This study is an overview of the state-led development projects and local efforts to ‘improve’ local conditions on the Zoige grass and wetlands on the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau since 1949 and their impact on the regional ecological and social environment. It focuses on historical state-led development projects, as well as more recent efforts to raise environmental awareness of the importance of Chinese wetlands.
