The twelfth-century handscroll painting, titled Xishan wujin tu, or “Streams and Mountains without End,”¹ rendered a Chinese vision of an ideal landscape: it depicts a spiritual and ecological cosmology predicated on the notion of “the fusion of heaven and humanity” (tianren heyi). The harmonization of energy (qi) is actualized by a balanced interplay between the invisible force ying and its material manifestation yang. This painting visualizes the Northern Song Dynasty painter Guo Xi’s (1020–1090) aesthetic theory of “moving step by step, observing from side to side” (bubuyi, mianmiankan).² For the ancient Chinese, the natural world was not a mere external and material phenomenon, but rather an interfused conglomerate of the environment, the body, and the mind.

This artistic vision has both sustained China’s aesthetic tradition and inspired Gary Snyder’s poem “Endless Streams and Mountains” in the collection, Mountains and Rivers without End. However, it would seem that such a vision has come to an end in the current age of climate change. Behind the façade of the world’s glitzy modernization and development in the late twentieth century are toxic landscapes, displaced communities, and rising numbers of endangered species. Take air pollution as an example. As the world’s No. 1 carbon dioxide emitter, outdoor air pollution contributes to the deaths of an estimated 1.6 million people every year in China.

The endgame story of nature and its manifestations in various eco-disasters are not exclusively Chinese, however. Global industrialization has also contributed plenty of such anthropogenic eco-disasters, for example, the Bhopal Gas Tragedy in India. They compel humanists to theorize critical or aesthetic strategies vis-à-vis global eco-disasters. In effect, the emergence of Anglo-European or global environmental humanities³ is a collective, humanist response to this realization.

The term “environmental humanities” covers a multidisciplinary movement that includes history, philosophy, literature, film and media studies, and religious studies in order to “address anthropogenic factors contributing to the understanding and reassessment of dramatic environmental change.”⁴ Joni Adamson notes the gradual recognition of the importance of the humanities in environmental studies and writes, “scientists, policy makers, and business and educational leaders have begun to recognize the indispensability of humanities.”⁵ In the 2012 report of the Responses to Environmental and Societal Challenges for Our Unstable Earth (RESCUE) initiative,⁶ commissioned by the European Science Foundation and Europe’s intergovernmental Cooperation in Science and Technology program, the humanities are placed in the spotlight. The science on global climate change has been settled for decades, at least among the scientific community. Not only do the facts fail to motivate action (the U.S. pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement, despite its already watered-down requirements), but the facts themselves are subject to constant attack by pseudo-scientists and reactionary political and media figures. However, a photo of a lonely polar bear on a chunk of ice or a documentary about penguins struggling to keep their children alive in Antarctica can inspire action because they inspire emotion. Philosopher Donald Davidson⁷ argued that actions are caused by an agent having a belief combined with a desire. Science provides the belief (ideally), but it is art that provokes the desire. The environmental historian Sverker Sörlin even went as far to say that “hopes are tied to the humanities”⁸ by pointing out that the humanist thinkers participated not only in the first phase of the environmentalist movement,⁹ the concern for the place of humanity in the more-than-human world far preceded the onset of the industrial revolution where the environmental crisis began to be identified. In fact, the roots of the environmental humanities, argued by the scholars of indigenous studies and postcolonial environmental justice, “may be traced back to some of the earliest cosmological narratives, stories and symbols among the world’s oldest cultures.”¹⁰ Humanities scholars in our current time continue to contribute to the conversation and discuss solutions to environmental problems, which tend to be viewed as belonging to the compartment of natural sciences and engineering. In contrast to the scientific approaches, humanist thinkers understand that environmental problems are not simply technological or policy issues. Rather, they are implicated in a world where cultural symbols, political systems, and religious values still rule the way people produce, consume, and govern their lives. Hence, the current environmental crisis is a crisis of human habitus, narrative, and imagination.

In examining the root crises of humanity that are leading to a planetary system collapse, humanist methodologies tend to be hermeneutic and phenomenological. Humanities afford interventionist channels to help forge “new environmental imaginaries, formulat[e] new discursive practices, and mak[e] changes in economic and political structures.”¹¹ In addition, the humanist approach also encourages interdisciplinary integration, which often involves global, transnational, comparative, or deep-time perspectives. For example, the digital Humanities for the Environment (HfE) projects are on the forefront of experimenting with the collaborative production of environmentally relevant knowledge on a global scale.¹²

Chinese Environmental Humanities: Practices of Environing at the Margins is a collaborative humanities project which brings together 16 scholars from anthropology, literary criticism, aesthetics and cultural criticism, ecocinema, ecomedia, religion, and minority and translation studies. The chapters directly or indirectly engage what I call “the discourse of environing at the margins,” which is defined as consideration of modes, aesthetics, ethics, and politics of environmental inclusion and exclusion, however the margins are conceptualized. Such a discourse evokes the Chinese term for the English word “environment”: huanjing. As will be elucidated in the section on keywords found in the introductory chapter, huanjing can be understood as a type of environmental/material practice (tending to one’s own surroundings or territory, especially at the borders) that cannot be detached from the premodern politics of boundary making in historical China. As such, the practice of huanjing as “environing” or “place-ma(r)king” inevitably becomes intertwined with questions of onto-epistemology, aesthetics, identity, politics, and ethics concerning the self in relation to the other. Instead of viewing huanjing as a noun (“environment”), I repurpose this term as a verb phrase with the “verb-object” structure to interrogate contemporary literary and artistic forms, concepts, or practices of environing at the margins where the self and other are contested. Such a practice of environing at the margins (however that center and margin are figured) as a Chinese Environmental Humanities (CEH) mode of critical inquiry conceives a correlating “ethics at the margins” that addresses issues of marginality as the result of environing practice. “The discourse of environing at the margins,” recuperated from the premodern word huanjing, remains relevant in both China and beyond, and becomes even more poignant in the current era of globalization where we begin to see nation-state or transnational corporations encircling/marking territories and fencing off marginalized groups. “The discourse of environing at the margins” contributes to CEH and global EH that aims to question the past and present “normative dimensions of current environmental practices.”¹³ By questioning normative practices, EH “open[s] up wider possibilities for redefining environmental scholarship beyond, in between, or outside of disciplinary conventions.”¹⁴