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What Chinese Think About Plants and the Environment: Ancient Ways and Future Survival

What Chinese Think About Plants and the Environment: Ancient Ways and Future Survival

Author(s): An Lan Zhang

Edition: 1

Copyright: 2021

Pages: 164

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$44.10

ISBN 9781792479519

Details Electronic Delivery EBOOK 180 days

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What Chinese Think About Plants and the Environment: Ancient Ways and Future Survival is a climate collapse/environmental focus book that re-members the central reality of systemic racism in our environmental challenges and injustices. We are seeing wildfire, extreme heat waves, and drought in Western states in the US, and historic flooding in Japan, Germany, and China. These are unprecedented environmental events. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed inequality in health care, housing, wealth, and other issues that people of color have long faced. Now we all see systemic racial inequalities embedded in the environmental crisis.

Both the created environmental problem -- racism -- and the natural environmental challenges are crucial issues we are facing together today. The two are one complex issue, and both have long been neglected. The COVID pandemic and the increasing natural disasters planet-wide show us that we are all global citizens. We are all in this together. If we cannot find a way to live together, we probably will die together.  

Plants are a barometer for our environment, and essential for human survival. This book presents the close relationship in China between plants, people, and environmental balance reflected in word structure, folk stories, and sayings. The book offers 36 brief chapters that highlight one plant per chapter that embodies lessons of collective survival. By using a national culture distant geographically from the United States, we see how human societies have survival lessons in common though in different idioms. We have essential survival skills to re-learn from each other.

The engagement with systemic racism in this book is through the critical apparatus at the beginning and end of chapters. At the beginning of each chapter, there are three pre-reading questions to build context-forming wonderings. At the end of each chapter are Author’s Thoughts, Prewriting, Writing, and Revising work. These resources offer teachers, students, and interested general readers focused tasks that engage, challenge, consult, and invite the coalition-building energies of interested readers trying to save our collective lives on this planet.

Preface

Section One: Trees and Leaves
CHAPTER 1 Apricots: Celebration of Holidays
CHAPTER 2 Bamboo: An Alternative to Plastic
CHAPTER 3 Dove Tree: Symbol of Peace
CHAPTER 4 Mei Plum: Beauty and Strength
CHAPTER 5 Osmanthus: Global Warming
CHAPTER 6 Pine: Continuity and an Evergreen Nature
CHAPTER 7 Plantain: Leaf Utensils
CHAPTER 8 Plum Blossom: Sisterhood and Oneness with Nature
CHAPTER 9 Silk Tree: Beauty of Nature
CHAPTER 10 Willow: Parting Gifts
CHAPTER 11 Wintersweet: Leisure in Winter
CHAPTER 12 Maple Leaves: Stop Plant “Migration”
CHAPTER 13 Mulberry Leaves: Social and Economic Injustice
CHAPTER 14 Sea Bilberry Leaves: Simple Food and Healthy Living

Section Two: Flowers and Fruit
CHAPTER 15 Azalea: Turning Trash into Treasure
CHAPTER 16 Chrysanthemum: Global Environmental Message
CHAPTER 17 Crab Apple Blossom: The Value of Naming
CHAPTER 18 Daphne: Everlasting Fragrance
CHAPTER 19 Daylily: Real Gold in Farms
CHAPTER 20 Hibiscus: Natural Netting
CHAPTER 21 Honeysuckle: Plant the Right Tree in the Right Place
CHAPTER 22 Hydrangea: Working Together
CHAPTER 23 Jasmine: Cooperation and Success
CHAPTER 24 Lily: Standing Together Is Stronger
CHAPTER 25 Lotus: Clean Rainwater
CHAPTER 26 Narcissus: Water Is Life
CHAPTER 27 Orchid: True Friends of the Environment
CHAPTER 28 Peony: Follow Natural Rhythms
CHAPTER 29 Rose of China: Keep Bio-Balance and Biodiversity
CHAPTER 30 Peach Blossom: Cherishing Nature
CHAPTER 31 Persimmon: Sharing Food with All
CHAPTER 32 Gourd: Sustainable and Compostable Materials
CHAPTER 33 Mandarin Orange: Simple Living Healthy Environment

Section Three: Seeds and Future Possibilities
CHAPTER 34 Red Sandalwood: We are All Interdependent
CHAPTER 35 Gingko: Ancient Environments and Future Survival
CHAPTER 36 Soapberry: New Ancient Ways

BIBLIOGRAPHY

An Lan Zhang

An Lan Zhang was educated in classical Chinese by her parents. Her mother was a high school Chinese literature teacher, and her father was a professor of language and law whose family lived in the same house near Beijing’s Forbidden City for 700 years until 1949. She holds a BA from China and an MA from the University of Massachusetts in language and culture. She is the author of Flowers in Chinese Culture: Folklore, Poetry, Religion. Three Pines Press, 2015. She is working on a new book about popular sayings and group identity formation. She is an independent scholar writing about how art and popular sayings are sites of cross-racial contesting of racialized group identity stories directly bearing on whether national cultures and global environments are more or less likely to survive through collective action rather than internecine strife.  

What Chinese Think About Plants and the Environment: Ancient Ways and Future Survival is a climate collapse/environmental focus book that re-members the central reality of systemic racism in our environmental challenges and injustices. We are seeing wildfire, extreme heat waves, and drought in Western states in the US, and historic flooding in Japan, Germany, and China. These are unprecedented environmental events. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed inequality in health care, housing, wealth, and other issues that people of color have long faced. Now we all see systemic racial inequalities embedded in the environmental crisis.

Both the created environmental problem -- racism -- and the natural environmental challenges are crucial issues we are facing together today. The two are one complex issue, and both have long been neglected. The COVID pandemic and the increasing natural disasters planet-wide show us that we are all global citizens. We are all in this together. If we cannot find a way to live together, we probably will die together.  

Plants are a barometer for our environment, and essential for human survival. This book presents the close relationship in China between plants, people, and environmental balance reflected in word structure, folk stories, and sayings. The book offers 36 brief chapters that highlight one plant per chapter that embodies lessons of collective survival. By using a national culture distant geographically from the United States, we see how human societies have survival lessons in common though in different idioms. We have essential survival skills to re-learn from each other.

The engagement with systemic racism in this book is through the critical apparatus at the beginning and end of chapters. At the beginning of each chapter, there are three pre-reading questions to build context-forming wonderings. At the end of each chapter are Author’s Thoughts, Prewriting, Writing, and Revising work. These resources offer teachers, students, and interested general readers focused tasks that engage, challenge, consult, and invite the coalition-building energies of interested readers trying to save our collective lives on this planet.

Preface

Section One: Trees and Leaves
CHAPTER 1 Apricots: Celebration of Holidays
CHAPTER 2 Bamboo: An Alternative to Plastic
CHAPTER 3 Dove Tree: Symbol of Peace
CHAPTER 4 Mei Plum: Beauty and Strength
CHAPTER 5 Osmanthus: Global Warming
CHAPTER 6 Pine: Continuity and an Evergreen Nature
CHAPTER 7 Plantain: Leaf Utensils
CHAPTER 8 Plum Blossom: Sisterhood and Oneness with Nature
CHAPTER 9 Silk Tree: Beauty of Nature
CHAPTER 10 Willow: Parting Gifts
CHAPTER 11 Wintersweet: Leisure in Winter
CHAPTER 12 Maple Leaves: Stop Plant “Migration”
CHAPTER 13 Mulberry Leaves: Social and Economic Injustice
CHAPTER 14 Sea Bilberry Leaves: Simple Food and Healthy Living

Section Two: Flowers and Fruit
CHAPTER 15 Azalea: Turning Trash into Treasure
CHAPTER 16 Chrysanthemum: Global Environmental Message
CHAPTER 17 Crab Apple Blossom: The Value of Naming
CHAPTER 18 Daphne: Everlasting Fragrance
CHAPTER 19 Daylily: Real Gold in Farms
CHAPTER 20 Hibiscus: Natural Netting
CHAPTER 21 Honeysuckle: Plant the Right Tree in the Right Place
CHAPTER 22 Hydrangea: Working Together
CHAPTER 23 Jasmine: Cooperation and Success
CHAPTER 24 Lily: Standing Together Is Stronger
CHAPTER 25 Lotus: Clean Rainwater
CHAPTER 26 Narcissus: Water Is Life
CHAPTER 27 Orchid: True Friends of the Environment
CHAPTER 28 Peony: Follow Natural Rhythms
CHAPTER 29 Rose of China: Keep Bio-Balance and Biodiversity
CHAPTER 30 Peach Blossom: Cherishing Nature
CHAPTER 31 Persimmon: Sharing Food with All
CHAPTER 32 Gourd: Sustainable and Compostable Materials
CHAPTER 33 Mandarin Orange: Simple Living Healthy Environment

Section Three: Seeds and Future Possibilities
CHAPTER 34 Red Sandalwood: We are All Interdependent
CHAPTER 35 Gingko: Ancient Environments and Future Survival
CHAPTER 36 Soapberry: New Ancient Ways

BIBLIOGRAPHY

An Lan Zhang
An Lan Zhang

An Lan Zhang was educated in classical Chinese by her parents. Her mother was a high school Chinese literature teacher, and her father was a professor of language and law whose family lived in the same house near Beijing’s Forbidden City for 700 years until 1949. She holds a BA from China and an MA from the University of Massachusetts in language and culture. She is the author of Flowers in Chinese Culture: Folklore, Poetry, Religion. Three Pines Press, 2015. She is working on a new book about popular sayings and group identity formation. She is an independent scholar writing about how art and popular sayings are sites of cross-racial contesting of racialized group identity stories directly bearing on whether national cultures and global environments are more or less likely to survive through collective action rather than internecine strife.