Foreword: Placing the public(s) in revitalizing local and rural cultural heritages

Ecotravel has lately become a key venue for promoting economic growth in rural China. Yet in what form(s) can it be most effectively done to ensure the eco in the travel? What modes and attitudes, be they mental and physical, should we rely on to prepare the public for this deeply educational experience? As an environmental humanist, my field-trip study of rural revitalization around the city of Huzhou, Eastern China (conducted in 2014, 2017, and 2018, respectively) proves that an embodied and embedded strategy for going on this eye-opening, body-cleansing travel, when aided by fitting evocation of the local literary and agrarian heritages, can help the city-weary travelers foster a keen ecological awareness in addition to sight-seeing and rural cuisine. As an antidote to the overheated trends of urbanizing China, promoting such ecotravel helps avoid the pitfalls of commercial tourism routinely bent on seeking fast-track profits while being in denial of its own guilt in “intrusive” pollution and waste as well as misuse of natural resources. To depart from such tourist “beaten tracks,” Huzhou sets its eyes on a more sustainable mode of growth in tourism for its surrounding rural areas by revitalizing its cultural heritages enriched by astonishing scenic landscapes and by re-engaging an embodied appreciation of its local agrarian values. At the heart of this type of green tourism lies the local residents’ renewed awareness of lived experience of a biophysical ambience and a sense of urgency to restore and preserve the precious residuals of a time-honored notion known as human-land affinity (Rendi qihe 人地契合).

A case in point is the renovated farmhouses known locally as Yangjiale 洋家乐(literally translated as “dwellings of foreign bliss”), which is a cluster of traditional rural houses nestled along a small brook flowing through a pristine and lushly shaded gully off the side of the well-known resort town Moganshan 莫干山. These farmhouses were first sublet to a group of foreign entrepreneurs working in Shanghai-based finance and business corporations in 2007. Headed by a South African named Grant Horsfield, the group started refurbishing these largely run-down traditional houses and turning them into Spartan-like lodges for their bicycling trips over weekends. Their idea went viral overnight and the houses opened to enthusiastic throngs of travelers from across China and even overseas. In 2011, Horsfield was joined by his Hong Kong architect wife, Delphine Yip, and together they renovated the nearby stables for farm animals; by blending cutting-edge technological design with traditional methods for rural house-building (such as rammed-earth walls), they succeeded in building a top-line resort area named Naked Stables (Luoxingu 裸心谷) catering mostly to eco-friendly travelers and were awarded as China’s first globally recognized resort in sustainable tourism. Intriguingly, it has in part to do with the name “naked” (luoxin 裸心). Evidently, being naked in this context has nothing to do with human nudity, but everything to do with the human resolve to free one’s heart from all its trapping—to leave all one desires and possesses behind in the city and be exposed to the natural world solely and unreservedly!

As the couple’s fame and fortune took off, their spirit has likewise caught on briskly. Taking cue from Horsfield’s stress on ecotravel, the local townsfolks have now begun to turn their traditional farmhouses into low-carbon, little-waste guesthouses for travelers and weekend vacationers from nearby cities who are attracted here by its idyllic natural scenery and low travel costs. In the meantime, the more culture-minded local residents have revived and embellished the local ambience by virtue of the splendid local cultural heritage—indeed it resonates with the hypothesis of certain genius loci well-stocked with rich literary output and cultural abundance. It is well known that the Huzhou region is home to a star-studded constellation of literary talents and cultural luminaries during China’s long imperial past (Qingli Huzhou清丽湖州 2012). Moreover, its rolling hills, crisscrossed waterways, and vast unending stretch of fertile flatlands coalesce into one of the most luxuriantly supplied granaries in China. Yet the question remains: what is it that connects Horsfield’s sense of being “naked” to the invisible but ubiquitous ambience of the locale in this day and age? In what ways does his pursuit of a lifestyle without much material affluence shed light on our search for the true meaning of modern progress or the lack thereof in a rural setting? And, finally, how will our new awareness contribute to the well-being of the local as well as the global communities on this planet? This surely warrants a broader prospect.

It is important to note that Horsfield and his cohorts’ deliberate naming of “Naked Retreats” has everything to do with being visceral and corporeal as they embrace the true worth of the rural environment. The term means that we commit to a voluntary stripping oneself of all the comfort, convenience, and leisure we have grown accustomed to while living in a city, and a willing surrender of one’s bodily being to activities that force oneself to be on the move outdoors and coping with simple living conditions indoors. It also signals one’s acceptance of being directly exposed to the erratic turns of the local weather, being constantly mobile and physically vigilant and assertive in body and mind, and while doing so, consuming as little natural resources and leaving as few carbon footprints as possible. It spells out a solution of “beating a retreat” from the stress and hassle of the high-tech world in urban centers, not just by means of occasional escapades to rural places in search of peace and quietude, but by way of robustly retooling our physical conditioning and re-activate our overlooked and “underrated” sensory capabilities, such as smelling, hearing, touching, and tasting; in doing so, we can regain a sharper alertness and reconnect to the “raw ambience”—the sheer flow of the vital Qi—of the nonhuman lifeworld in which humans can partake of in a more holistic environment of health and stability.

Admittedly, my use of the term “raw ambience” echoes with the Daoist transversal livelihood and the Buddhist non-being, but it resonates more with the kind of ensemble effect in which the human brain interacts not only with the organisms of all other organs of the human body, but through them, the biophysical surroundings that impact incisively on the human mind (von Mossner, 2017). In the 1990s, wave upon wave of ground-breaking discoveries were made in neuroscience and cognitive psychology, leading to revitalized methodologies for exploring the vibrant bond between human emotions and his or her reasoning mind. The outcries of “philosophy in the flesh” and “embodied mind” issued by cognitive scientists boldly pronounced a death sentence on the Cartesian mind-body binarism (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). Before long, ideas about the salient role of an “embodied and embedded” human consciousness began to forge a vigorous interface with related fields such as environmental sciences, cultural geography and, not in the least, arts and humanities. They surely pushed, if not directly ignited, a ground swell in the humanity field to reset their paths in the new direction of “post-humanism,” “new materialism,” “eco-feminism,” and “environmental humanities.” This is precisely why there is now resurging interest in the “environmental turn” of humanity studies in exploring human cognition with an intense focus on the role of human affect in learning about both the human and nonhuman lifeworld, particularly in ecocritical study of affect, cognition, and epistemology—they happen to be the focus of my current research. By means of the “environmental turn,” I approach the concept in its two key dimensions: first, it stands for the importance of always knowing the human brain’s infinite ties to its biophysical surroundings, which are inseparable and undeniable, hence the environmental modality as a part of human cognition. Second, it follows that human affect is given a pivotal part to play in cognition in the sense that any informed study of land, landscape, and human habitat must be first and foremost embodied and embedded. In simpler terms, it entails that, in dealing with the nonhuman world, humans must rely on their bodily organs, in manifold and unison, to undertake fully exposed and animated contact to be adequately receptive and perceptive toward the physical surroundings (Lakoff/Johnson, 3-45). This is precisely where we all can resonate with the “naked” effect in Horsfield’s “retreating” endeavor!

We humans are known to have loved the “beauty of nature” for as long as we’ve owned written records of history, but in recent research findings on the environmental history of China, scholars have revealed an “ingrained” tendency to peruse the mountains and waters (Shan shui 山水) in certain pictorialized and mentalized manner that is likely to distance the viewers from the landscape itself and appreciate it as mere mind-soothing scenic beauty (much like eye-candy) that one needs only sporadically for stress relief. This has prompted many scholars to dub the tendency as “ecophobia” (恐惧生态症)—the aesthetic mode that retiringly stimulates, but often miscues illusions of loving scenery beauty via eyesight alone and being sedately withdrawn from any visceral contact with the lifeworld (Elvin, 2004; Estok, 2011). In other words, only eyesight and no other human sensory organs are involved in this nature-loving act and, as long as the human mind elevates the visually captured image to an abstract or aesthetic level, the human viewer does not even have to take a single step outdoor to be physically at the site of the original scenery. To me, what lies deep in this ecophobic mind-set is the humans’ penchant to privilege our eyesight over other sense organs when dealing with the biophysical world. Sometimes, this privilege is savored to such an indulgent extent that it can misguide or even blindsight the rest of our senses and the brain—as is proven true with the invention of VR! Since Western-led modern values set foot in China around 1840, we have made it possible for this function of “visual thinking” to short-circuit the full and integrating processing of human cognition, and without the essential sensory reactions through hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting, the human perception of the biophysical surroundings is bound to be partial, incomplete, falsifying, and ultimately resulting in a total disconnect! It is therefore beyond any doubt that this sort of visual thinking lies at the root of what many scholars have discovered as the symptoms of “psychic numbing” when they tend to look away from the mounting danger of environment crises (Slovic & Slovic, 2015).

To redress this cognitive short circuit, we need to rewire the human cognitive processing by means of a visceral, multisensory registering of our surroundings—namely, “through the total person rather than, as in specialized undertaking, primarily the eyes and the brain”. These words are from Yi-fu Tuan, the China-born American geographer who once famously required his students to go on an hours-long field trip just to wander around in the open fields and woods of rural Wisconsin. Not surprisingly, Tuan (Tuan, 1977) has given us the notion of synesthesia—calling for a fully active and integrated use of all our sensory capacities to get the feel of some topographical knowledge, and urges us to embrace our affective affinity with the biophysical environs we inhabit and to reinforce it as the ground for attaching, by corporeal connectivity, ourselves to the bodily existence of animals, plants, and other forms of life—an approach again resonating with Horsfield’s design of Naked Retreats in its inception.

Yi-fu Tuan’s “topophilia”—his signature term referring to humans’ endearing bond to land—sheds crucial light on the interfacing of human dwellings with social and cultural experiences and seeks to uncover how the human affect feeds and regulates disparate microcosms of built equilibrium and their intrinsic ethical claims. Taking cue from his synesthesia, we explore how the existential notion of “dwelling” enables humans to build shelters that at once blend in with adjacent biotic milieu, shelter human occupants, and nurture sustained human living. Notably, we observe how Tuan’s thought draws vitally from a deep fount of ancient Chinese wisdom on the human-land affinity. One vital force that welds Tuan’s human survival to ecological well-being is a planetary ethic which harks back to the ancient Chinese idea of Rendi qihe, a holistic mingling of human habitat amid the biophysical environs. What brings about this harmonious melding is an enmeshing of social relationships, communal values, and traditional rites and ceremonials kept in tune with the diverse geological and atmospheric settings. Tuan’s favored term “belongingness” typically posits meanings in such communal values as kinship networking, rules of social acceptance, and proprieties of ceremonials and rites. We thus “place” Tuan in the historical context of an ecological shift that coincided with the rise of human geographers who in the 1970s intervened on the strength of affect, memory, and literary imagination against an over-the-top “quantitative revolution” of the social sciences. A case in point is how Tuan uncovers and details the human emotive bond that serves to trigger, drive, and maintain a cohesive affinity between the artifactual, that is, the architectural design, and the experiential, which includes functional awareness and environmental perception fostered through “rooted” habituation. Such perceptions of the genius loci attest the fact that experience of placing bears witness to distinct social roles, capacities for action, and access to resources and that being placed is essential to communal development, social engineering, and empowerment within a socio-ecological grid. And we are yet again reminded how emphatically Horsfield answers to that with his vision on “nakedness” of rural retreats.

As Hua Li states, in the age of Anthropocene, humans have become a geological force, mapping out and imposing their own designs of habitation on the face of the planet Earth and causing drastic and profound changes to climatic, seismic, and biotic conditions in an unprecedented way (her essay heads off the collected essays below). One main obstacle we scholars must overcome in remedying humans’ disconnect to the environment is the apathy of our own corporeal sensibility bonded to the nonhuman lifeworld and the gradual abandonment of our narrative ability to articulate the process of placing—the placing of ourselves as voices uttering and communicating among diverse publics. As humanists and social scientists, we are frequently alarmed by the hubristic cheers heard so often in public media for what humanity has accomplished in harnessing and mastering the natural forces and resources; thus, we have cause aplenty to feel ashamed about our own reluctance to ask the long-overdue question: “how much is too much in this quest for civilizational progress?!” What we normally allude to as “the natural world” is nearly irrelevant due precisely to the fact that the “manufactured landscapes” are shaping up the bulk of our human habitat at the expense of lifelines supporting all other species (Liu, 2014). Rather than dream about a “return to nature” or “back to the pastoral,” we now face the risk-filled, disaster-prone human conditions as a result of these refashioned landscapes and are forced to grapple with vital stakes involved in further pursuit of the so-called human betterment so as to make necessary interventions whenever and wherever we can; or else, we would become the unintended culprits for causing irreparable losses to the nonhuman lifeworld, which would in its turn imperil the future prospects of our children and children’s children. These are among the most pressing issues compelling me to continue doing research on the long history and deep complexity of Chinese art of landscape and garden in connection to China’s ecological well-being, and I believe they should also serve as our rallying call to advocate and cherish humans’ planetary roots and earth-bounded evolution in their effort to grow and prosper amid the habitats they share with millions of other species on this planet. Spurred on by this urgent mission, we take up such issues in this special collection as speculating on technological mayhem of our near future (Hua Li); documenting the healing impact of acoustic, bodily, and other sensory forms of environmental activism (Jing Wang and Xian Huang); critiquing water-themed literature and film to tease out the transformative power of imagined waterscape (Winnie Yee); and post-disaster relief and therapeutic placing for victims of environmental crises (Jing Zhao and Shubhda Aurora). As the guest editor of this special issue, it is my sincere hope that in a humble way our little voices are able to converge in a vibrant chorale of public awareness on revitalizing our cultural heritages for the sake of healing our shared environment.