Micah Muscolino

Micah Muscolino is a leading expert on the environmental history of modern China. By examining the enduring entanglement of the human and natural worlds, his research traces the roots of contemporary environmental dilemmas in China and beyond. His most recent book Remaking the Earth, Exhausting the People: The Burden of Conservation in Modern China (University of Washington Press, 2025) combines archival research and oral history interviews to uncover how, from the 1940s to the 1960s, state-led campaigns to conserve water and soil transformed the arid, erosion-prone environment of China’s Loess Plateau and the lives of rural men and women. He is also editor the forthcoming volume Revolutionary Natures: Grassroots Environmental Histories of China’s Mao Era (University of Washington Press, 2026), a groundbreaking collection of essays that reassesses the environmental history of China’s Mao era – a period often reduced to a story of unchecked ecological devastation – in terms of multiple, overlapping histories of struggle, sacrifice, and adaptation. His previous works include Fishing Wars and Environmental Change in Late Imperial and Modern China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2009) and The Ecology of War in China: Henan Province, the Yellow River, and Beyond, 1938-1952 (Cambridge University Press, 2015). 

 For a full biography, please visit Prof. Muscolino’s History Department Page.