As the scale of the global biodiversity crisis percolates into the popular consciousness, there remains a tacit assumption that the sixth mass extinction event in our planet's history is an inadvertent biproduct of certain human activities. Brian Lander's environmental history of early China drives home the point that, far from an unintended consequence, simplifying ecologies was the goal of the consolidating political forms that coalesced into the agricultural and hydrological state that culminated in the Qin empire. Simplifying ecologies, moreover, went hand in hand with homogenizing diverse human cultures. In his telling, the seeds of this process can be traced to over six millennia ago. It matured into the Qin innovation of imperial China, the core practices of which remain very much with us down to the present day, at ever greater scales and degrees of intensity.
The King's Harvest is the environmental history of a region that came to...
