Water and the Costs of System Sustainability

Elvin, Chapter 6

Subtitled: "Dihydrogen Monoxide and China", because having a silly name like that made it interesting.

Actually, I think by Chapter 6, Elvin had perhaps warmed up a bit to this whole "writing a book" thing and was getting better at making interesting points.

To sum up a few major points:
- The upper class was the only group within cities to get the good water; the lower class people were further downstream where there was a higher concentration of pollutants. (116)
- The "controlled flooding" that seemed to happen fairly frequently in the nineteenth century led to actual battles; nobody wanted to be on the side that flooded. (116)
- Efforts to maintain the elaborate irrigation systems were solid; everyone got in on it because everyone would suffer if things went wrong. (118)
- Maintaining China's irrigation and water-control systems was expensive in terms of labor, money, and resources. (119)
- "And while hydraulic systems are hydrologically unstable, they are also economically inherently static." (Elvin, 120) ~ Just... it's a funny sentence. He's so serious, and it comes out as absurd. It's the best thing he says in the entire chapter.
- Dredging was necessary to keep water flowing. (122)
- There was fierce competition for water; China's environment could only offer so much, and there was either too much or too little in most places.
- Elvin then uses "faustian", a term that the Oxford English Dictionary defines rather uselessly.
- Page 124 can be summed up rather simply: Despite the fact that better water-management systems existed, it was too expensive in terms of manpower and money to change technologies, even if the new system would be more effective.
- Also, there would not have been such sediment problems if they hadn't deforested China. Just had to say it.
- Maintenance of these systems though, as defunct as they might be, was a community effort and a matter of survival. (124).
- "Essentially, what had been happening was that the increased loads of sediments carried by the Miju River, because of land clearance and deforestation upstream, had raised its bed, and made it necessary both to keep dredging it and building the dikes higher and higher... by some time not too far into the Qing dynasty, a substantial proportion of the course of the Miju immediately south of the gorge was running above the level of the rooftops of houses on the surrounding land, as it still does today." (126) This is the most interesting thing that Elvin says; due to mankind's meddling with nature, a riverbed was raised above the surrounding land rather than cutting a new gorge or canyon into the earth as would normally happen.

Honestly, that's about as far as I got. I think Elvin did a much better job at getting interesting information across this chapter, or else I just got used to his repetitive system of speech. Whichever.

War and the Logic of Short-term Advantage

Elvin, Chapter 5

On page 89, Elvin mentions: "The horse appeared some time probably in the early second millenium BCE... Divination based on the shoulder blades of large animals, or the undershells of turtles, and interpreting the cracks that appeared when they were pierced with a heated instrument.... The technique was most refined along the east coast. There was thus no single key factor that emerged in one priviledged place." (Elvin, 89)

Now, perhaps I'm wrong, but I think this makes absolutely no sense. What does the domestication of the horse in China have to do with divination by piercing hard parts of animals with hot rods, and then what do both of those have to do with military advantage? Seriously, Elvin just wrote whatever came to mind, didn't he? His next paragraph begins with "Let us anchor these comments in some evidence" (Elvin, 90) and he still fails to anchor anything in evidence.

P. 90: "It also instructed subordinate states/ That their enfeoffment was good fortune's basis", firstly, why on earth would he spend a whole page mentioning the rhyme scheme of the poetry and his system for marking it if he isn't going to use it. Secondly, the definition of enfeoffment as in the Oxford English Dictionary. (Wow, they're as bad as Elvin...)

On a slightly more serious and less rant-y note, I'm mostly confused about where Elvin is taking this. It feels as though he's cramming a lot of non-sequiturs into one chapter.

There seems to be a vague thread of logic that he's following, most notably that the rise of the agrarian city led to the rise of militarization, which led to the concept of war. At least, I think that's what he's trying to say. The key phrase seems to be "the militarized urban-agrarian state". But where the domestication of horses in China and the divination via animal bones fit in, I still don't know.

Humans v. Elephants: The Three Thousand Years War

Elvin, Chapter 2

First off, I have to say that I love the title. It sounds hugely important and very fancy. Indeed, the subject of the chapter is interesting. It's a pity the writing is a bit dry and circumspect.

Elephants are hardly the only animal to suffer through generations of farmers struggling against nature, trying to find some sort of balance that allows them to eat. Unfortunately, the events related in this chapter were hardly about balance; it was all about surviving. The Chinese farmers didn't care if the Elephants went extinct; they merely cared if their crops would survive or not.

It's not that the individual's attitude today is all that different, but there are a lot more conservationist groups that would get in the way.

Landmarks and Time-marks

Elvin, Chapter 1

Boxy China (p.4) looks like a confusing apartment complex, but does successfully make a point.

Page 7's discussion of the sale of children during economic crises is interesting; obviously it happened, but what was the result when nobody could afford to buy children?

The Retreat of the Elephants

Introductory Remarks

"classical Chinese culture was as hostile to forests as it was fond of individual trees." (Elvin, xvii)

On page xxiii, Elvin seems to be suggesting that Western influence is unimportant?

The "Introductory Remarks" are confusing and seem in general to be an overwhelming and rather over-complicated form of a table of contents. I mean, if we're going to read the whole book, then this section really doesn't have a unique purpose; the table of contents or index could have done the work in a far more comprehensible way.