“The ability to respond skillfully to subtle environmental cues is becoming a lost art” in China (p. 204), Dee Mack Williams writes in Beyond Great Walls. In this book, the author describes the grassland enclosure movement in Inner Mongolia in the context of ongoing economic reforms. A proliferation of fence wire on the Mongolian steppe signals the privatization of pasture, the end of an egalitarian ideology, and the concentration of natural resources into the hands of elites that accompany environmental degradation in the grassland environment. Although Williams does not dispute the degraded state of the land, he does contest both Chinese and Western authoritative interpretations of its meanings and causes. The author brings together culture, politics, history, and nature at international, national, and local scales to compare Mongol herders’ sensibilities with those of Han and Western scientists. Claims of desertification are political and bureaucratic, he argues, and there are no undisputed facts in this changing landscape.

Mongol marginalization is at the heart of grassland disputes, and Williams describes four aspects of herder marginality: geographically they are positioned on the frontier with Russia; culturally they lack the confidence, resources, and social skills to communicate with the Han; economically they are impoverished; and politically they receive only intermittent state services (p. 93). Williams describes herders as “ecologically underprivileged” (p. 156), by which he means that herders are likely to have poor grazing lands and to experience their marginal status in embodied ways: Herders tend to suffer from unintended consequences of alcohol use, chronic cold stress, hunger, and loss of limb and life in cold-related incidents.

Han discourses on nomadism blame herders for environmental degradation along axes of space and time (p. 30). The spatial strategy blames peoples far from Beijing who are assumed to be ignorant, irrational, backward, and uncooperative. The temporal strategy blames the policies of the previous Qing, Nationalist, and Maoist governments. At the Shenyang grassland research station where Williams based his fieldwork, Han scientists believe that traditional Mongol herding is the true cause of grassland degradation and that sedentarization and enclosure are the appropriate remedies. At the international level, Western scientists influence the direction of resource management in China through capitalist markets, funding for agriculture, and development agencies. These experts do not distinguish between Han and herders and thus also blame Mongol pastoralism without ever speaking to herders themselves.

Discourses of science help mask Han-Mongol antagonisms, and Williams demonstrates that Mongol notions are often accurate where scientists’ theories fail. He refutes three Han beliefs: that knowledge of the grassland environment is objective, that the current government is not culpable for degradation of the grasslands, and that state policies are saving the grasslands. He also objects to Western scientists’ ideas that cultural understandings of environmental change are less significant than political-economic models, that privatization is a solution to resource degradation, and that Western science enables us to understand resource management in far away and unfamiliar places.

Whereas the research station praises its Han scientists, saying “heart blood has become sweet dew, the desert has become an oasis,” herders restate this verse as “an oasis has become a desert under the management of the research station” (p. 47). Williams explains why herders are reluctant to confront scientists and bureaucrats. Inner Mongolians have lived through a century of state violence and political insecurity, and the landscape is marred by the residue of state incursions: deforestation from the Great Leap Forward, Cold War military structures, the waste and terror of the Cultural Revolution, religious shrines demolished by Red Guards, the high walls of the research station representing Han chauvinism and scientific elitism, and the proliferation of fence wire representing the enrichment of some herders at the expense of others. “The heart has residual fear,” explains one elderly resident, inscribing these characters in the sand with a stick (p. 88).

Mongol herders have their own science and symbolism of land, however. Landscapes that Han classify as barren, Mongols see as alive and beautiful. Whereas Han view cultivation as “opening up the wasteland,” Mongols view it as “shattering the land” (p. 71). Mongols appreciate a wider variety of landscapes and identify a greater diversity of sand and grass types and landscape uses than biologists do. Herders are also more likely to view the land as resilient. Even sand has an economic utility because it can be woven into wool to increase its heft. About the enclosure around the research station itself, Williams writes, “Han scientists perceive that the land has still not recovered, but Mongol herders perceive only a capricious hoarding of community resources” (p. 185).

Williams theorizes that historical materialism is not sufficient for understanding environmental marginalization; we also need culture in our analysis. Although one finds it difficult to critique anything in this beautifully conceived and crafted work, Williams’s use of the culture concept is worth mentioning. In his analysis of ideas of nature in imperial China, he writes “the natural environment was conceived primarily in the context of political harmony the Emperor, as Son of Heaven, was responsible for maintaining harmony between Heaven and Earth” (p. 38). If Chinese acted according to a sense of natural harmony, and if culture was monolithic and mapped neatly onto ethnicity, there would be no grassland degradation. In Williams’s usage, political economy is disarticulated from culture, which is primarily a category for the symbolic or aesthetic.

One great joy in this book is Williams’s ability to narrate the life stories of Mongol herders. Beyond Great Walls is a pleasure to read and an important intervention in environmental anthropology. It will intrigue those with interests in political ecology, environmental justice, and the anthropology of China.