Description
Book SynopsisChina’s nouveau riche are purchasing billions of dollars of furniture built from endangered African rosewood. Responding to Western powers’ attempts to stop the trade, Annah Zhu uncovers Chinese initiatives to plant rosewood responsibly and shows how these efforts offer a new path forward for environmentalism in a world no longer ruled by the West.
Trade ReviewRead[s] like dispatches from a foreign correspondent: intrepid, open-minded, and sympathetic to her subjects. [Zhu’s] skill as an interlocutor makes for poignant reading. -- James Herndon * Asian Review of Books *
An ambitious and visionary global ethnography as exquisite as its subject matter—rosewood. Zhu reveals the intricate political, economic, and ecological dynamics of supply and demand, conservation and logging, and above all the epic contention between two paradigms of environmentalism that will shape the future of another endangered species—humanity. -- Ching Kwan Lee, author of
The Specter of Global ChinaThis book presents the fascinating story of the global connections forged by the rosewood trade between China, Madagascar, and Western conservationists. Zhu carefully analyzes and deftly critiques assumptions about conservationists, consumers, and loggers, and provides a much more nuanced account.
Rosewood is a must-read for anyone concerned about the social and ecological impacts of the illegal wildlife trade. -- Rosaleen Duffy, author of
Security and ConservationContrasting Chinese and Western imaginaries of forests, Annah Lake Zhu takes readers along on her own transformative journey between the United States, Madagascar, and China.
Rosewood is a beautiful and necessary read, opening the path to nothing less than a cultural revolution in environmental conservation. -- Philippe Le Billon, author of
Wars of Plunder: Conflicts, Profits and the Politics of ResourcesAnnah Lake Zhu’s
Rosewood deconstructs the chasm between Western and Chinese understandings of the value of rosewood and other endangered species. Transnational environmental groups seek futilely to protect rosewood against poachers and corrupt environmental officials in remote Madagascar parks, while Chinese craftsmen and consumers seek to liberate its beauty through carved furniture that affirms the greatness of China’s cultural heritage. The book makes the provocative case that cultural relativism holds the key to conserving global biodiversity, as an increasingly dominant non-Western approach locates sustainability in engineered utility rather than utopian preservation. Fearless, challenging, and engagingly written,
Rosewood is required reading for anyone concerned with global biodiversity collapse. -- Judith Shapiro, author of
Mao’s War against Nature and coauthor of
China Goes Green: Coercive Environmentalism for a Troubled PlanetZhu explores the difference between the prevailing Western approach to protecting endangered species, which advocates trade bans and other protections, and the Chinese one, which promotes cultivation and sustainable use…Drawing on her fieldwork in Madagascar and China, Zhu advocates for a deeper and more sympathetic understanding of China’s view on endangered species and natural resources more broadly. Her book will no doubt be controversial, but it is an important and necessary contribution. -- Temwani Mgunda * China Dialogue *
