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Download the app today. Hi everybody from Wundere. Welcome to another episode of Tides of History. I'm Patrick

Wyman. Thank so much for being here with me today.

Humanity's relationships to the environments in which we live have changed a bit

over the hundreds of thousands of years since Homo sapiens first appeared in the fossil record.

We've gone from being foragers and hunters for most of us. since Homo sapiens first appeared in the fossil record.

We've gone from being foragers and hunters

for most of our existence to farmers,

then industrial laborers, and now service workers

and urbanites concentrated in the densest cities ever built. In the process, we've wiped out native plants and animals on a massive scale,

replacing existing environments with the suites of domesticates and built landscapes that better suit our needs.

Now, that's an oversimplification, course but it captures the broad essence of the

human journey to the present day. Now in that journey China occupies a

central place at least for the moment it is still the world's most

populous country and it's been home to untold millions of people over the past

several thousand years, all of whom have lived in and modified its environment to

suit their needs. China is also one of the few places on the

planet where the complex of activities and mechanisms that we call the state was independently

invented and as the past century or so has shown, the state is capable of environmental change on a planet altering scale.

Today's guest is an expert on the intersection of those two things, human ecology and the state.

Brian Lander is the Stanley J Bernstein, assistant professor of history and

environment and society at Brown University. He's the author of numerous articles and book chapters,

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