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wenty years ago, Peter Walker (2005) asked a pressing question of the growing subfield of political ecology: where is the ecology? Walker’s point was that much of political ecology scholarship could be better described as the study of environmental politics. He argued that ecology, while still central to political ecology research, risked fading into the background of political-ecological analysis. Writing a decade later, Turner (2016) argued that ecologically engaged scholarship in political ecology remained “active and fertile,” particularly highlighting work on what he called the “politics of ecology” that sought to understand how truth claims in environmental science come about, and to what effect. Studies in this vein have shown how common concepts like carrying capacity (Sayre 2008), ecosystem services (Kull et al.2015), and restoration (Lave 2012) are shaped by politics and reflect social norms in particular times, places, and contexts.

Jesse Rodenbiker’s Ecological States: Politics of Science & Nature in Urbanizing China offers a new and outstanding contribution to this work. Rodenbiker shows that ecology is not just shaped by politics; it is a core platform through which the state exercises power and control. In Rodenbiker’s words, the “Chinese state wields ecology to shape nature, society, and space” (3). This approach takes ecology seriously as a mode of inquiry, analyzing how key concepts become popularized and accepted (andin some cases, fall out of favor), and how concepts in turn are marshaled by state actors to expand ideological and territorial control. In doing so, Rodenbiker builds on Yeh’s (2009) critical analysis of “ecological construction” policies in rural China, while shifting the focus to peri-urban ecological zones that characterize China’s rapid urbanization drive underPresident Xi Jinping’s “New Era.”

Indeed, beyond its contributions to political ecology,Ecological States deepens our scholarly understanding of two major state-led campaigns shaping contemporary China: the campaign to build an “ecological civilization,” and the campaign to urbanize one hundred million rural citizens. Rodenbiker shows how these state projects operate under similar “eco-developmental” logics that understand human–environment relations as something that can be“optimized” (p. 12) by scientists and planners – an optimization deemed necessary for a green and modern society. In the place of rural landscapes, then, “the state produces scientifically optimized landscapes” (21) that present a kind of technical form of beauty, or sublime. This association between ecology and beauty, Rodenbiker shows, is deeply embedded in Chinese state–scientific approaches to environmental and spatial management since the Mao era, and it articulates with the notion that rural–urban systems and ecological land uses can be technically managed and engineered. An optimized, beautified landscape has its pinnacle in “ecological civilization” – a term that has become ubiquitous, but one that Rodenbiker’s historiographical analysis reveals to be based on achieving rational, technical, and urbanized society. For Chinese scientists and planners, Rodenbiker shows, ecological society is urban society.

Ecological States is also concerned with how these understandings of ecology are operationalized and their effects on the social trajectories of newly urbanized citizens. Here, Rodenbiker builds on work on local state entrepreneurialism inChina (Hsing 2010, Zhang & Wu 2022) to show how municipal governments use ecological protection zoning and comprehensive urban–rural planning processes to extend control over rural land – techniques and governance mechanisms that he calls “ecological territorialization” (p. 77). This is a hugely important finding. Rather than reducing the ability of municipal governments to extract land revenue – as one might expect given that land is supposedly set aside for protection – the expansion of ecological zones has become a primary means for local government revenue generation. Rodenbiker’s analysis of how local officials maximize control and fiscal benefit by dispersing land use rights and responsibilities to other “organizations” (79) offers instructive insights for studies of the local state under these new ecological and urbanization campaigns.

Rodenbiker’s examination of China’s politics of ecology also extends to its effects on the rural populace – not just as victims, but as active agents who seek to better their positions amidst transformative change. Rural citizens, he finds, strategically perform the eco-developmental aesthetic by portraying their rural lives and spaces as a“rural nostalgia” for tourists (145). He examines cases of rural villagers who increased their compensation for their (soon-to-be demolished) village homes by negotiating volumetric “sky fees” and subsurface housing fees based on space above and below their houses (118). Yet these sometimes-successful strategies respond to a territorializing force that displaces and uproots rural people – a loss not just of housing, but of livelihood, social bonds, and connection to the land. Rodenbiker relates these painful stories eloquently and respectfully.

The reviews in this forum reflect on these and many other insights contained in Ecological States, a testament to the scope and depth of its analysis. Scholars of urban planning, migration, ecological restoration, and urban and environmental governance will find something new and thought-provoking in these pages. Given my own positionality, it is Rodenbiker’s contributions to an ecologically engaged political ecology, and the approach that this offers to the study of China, that makes EcologicalStates such a compelling and essential read, and one that will provide a road map for many scholars interested in these questions.

References

Hsing, Y., 2010. The GreatUrban Transformation: Politics of Land & Property in China. OxfordUniversity Press, New York.

Kull, C.A., Arnauld de Sartre,X., Castro-Larrañaga, M., 2015. The political ecology of ecosystem services. Geoforum 61, 122–134.

Lave, R., 2012. Fields andStreams: Stream Restoration, Neoliberalism, and the Future of EnvironmentalScience. University of Georgia Press, Athens, GA.

Sayre, N.F., 2008. The genesis, history, and limits of carrying capacity. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 98, 120–134.

Turner, M.D., 2016. Political ecology II: Engagements with ecology. Progress in Human Geography 40,413–421.

Walker, P.A., 2005. Political ecology: Where is the ecology? Progress in Human Geography 29, 73–82.

Yeh, E.T., 2009. Greening western China: A critical view. Geoforum 40, 884–894.

Zhang, F., Wu, F.,2022. Performing the ecological fix under state entrepreneurialism: A case study of Taihu New Town, China. Urban Studies59, 1068–1084.

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Tyler Harlan is Associate Professor and Chair of Urban and EnvironmentalStudies at Loyola Marymount University. He researches the political economy and uneven socio-environmental impacts of China's green development transformation, as well as the implications of this transformation for other industrializing countries.

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