Uncovers China's tangled legacies of environmental destruction, resistance, and conservation This volume offers a groundbreaking reassessment of the environmental history of Mao-era China, a period often reduced to a story of unchecked ecological devastation. Bringing together leading voices in Chinese environmental history, Revolutionary Natures reveals a far more complex reality. Through vivid case studies, the contributors show how policies of rapid industrialization collided with material scarcity, grassroots resistance, and the unruly agency of nature itself. From forests planted and felled in the same decade to wetlands transformed by labor campaigns, the chapters reveal the contradictions of an era when deforestation, pollution, and biodiversity loss coexisted with nascent conservation efforts and early experiments in sustainability. Drawing on local archives, oral histories, and even the perspective of nonhuman actors such as trees, rivers, and wildlife, the book places nature at the center of the revolutionary experience. Rather than a single narrative of environmental destruction, Revolutionary Natures illuminates multiple, overlapping histories of struggle, sacrifice, and adaptation. In doing so, it not only complicates assumptions about socialism, development, and ecology but also traces the roots of today’s environmental dilemmas in China and beyond. This volume sets a new standard for the study of modern China and global environmental history, offering critical insights into the legacies of revolution, the politics of scarcity, and the enduring entanglement of human and natural worlds. "This unique and much-needed contribution to environmental history and PRC studies brings together young scholars who are doing cutting-edge research on China’s environment in the mid-twentieth century. Revolutionary Natures shows that there were no easy solutions to China’s midcentury dilemmas and raises glimmers of hope even as it details sad episodes of destruction."―Ruth Rogaski, author of Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland "Provides needed nuance and grassroots detail, combined with big-picture vistas, on the dramatic environmental history of Mao's China. This is cutting-edge work on a crucial topic from an excellent cast of scholars."―J. R. McNeill, author of Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Modern World "This exciting volume brings together two cutting-edge, bottom-up approaches to the Mao era: grassroots history and the history of nonhumans. The introduction presents a very valuable state-of-the-field for Mao-era environmental history, while the diverse case studies offer a gold mine of thought-provoking examples."―Sigrid Schmalzer, author of Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China Micah S. Muscolino is professor and Paul G. Pickowicz Endowed Chair in modern Chinese history at the University of California San Diego. He is author of, most recently, Remaking the Earth, Exhausting the People: The Burden of Conservation in Modern China . Contributors: Nicole Elizabeth Barnes, Peter Braden, Xuexin Cai, Niall Chithelen, Xiangli Ding, Kyuhyun Han, Ben Kletzer, Brian Lander, Paul Pickowicz, David Pietz, Victor Seow, Brian Spivey, Julia C. Strauss, and Bingru Yue