This article uses a case study of the Qin Empire to explore the ecology of an agrarian political system, analysis that has become possible because of the archaeological excavation of Qin administrative documents. Qin's power derived from photosynthesis, and its empire mobilized this energy and used it to conquer territory and expand its productivity. The state's power was based on its ability to extract taxes in grain from its subjects, store it in granaries, and then use it to feed laborers working on state projects. Grain and most other taxable materials were too bulky to move very far, so the government relied on a subcontinent-wide system of information gathering and processing that allowed officials at the capital to make decisions about local resource use. Qin's centralized bureaucratic system became the standard model of political organization in China, so it offers clues into the effects subsequent empires would have on their environments.

This paper reviews current knowledge on the geography, climate, flora, and fauna of Shaanxi's Guanzhong 關中 Basin, a region that has been particularly well studied because it was a capital region of the Zhou, Qin, Han, and Tang dynasties. Humans have so thoroughly transformed the region that it is hard to imagine that it was ever full of wild plants and animals. And since much of the English-language scholarship on the Zhou period focuses on the texts and ideas of urban elites, it is easy to forget that most people were rural farmers living in environments full of wild plants and animals, and that many places had no humans at all. Scholars in various fields have produced abundant new information on the environments of ancient China, making it possible to reconstruct climate and ecology far more accurately than was possible before. This research shows that, contra older claims that ancient North China had a subtropical climate, the climate of the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods was only slightly warmer and wetter than the present. The most important factor in the transformation of the region's ecosystems has been humans, not climate. We will focus on the pre-imperial period because various lines of evidence suggest that the first millennium b.c.e. was a period of population growth in which agricultural societies wiped out many of the natural ecosystems of lowland North China. Only by reconstructing what North China looked like thousands of years ago will we be able to understand how humans came to be the dominant force in the region's ecology.

Pigs have played a central role in the subsistence and culture of China for millennia. The close relationship between pigs and people began when humans gradually domesticated wild pigs over 8,000 years ago. While pigs initially foraged around settlements, population growth led people to pen their pigs, which made them household trash processors and fertilizer producers. Household pigs were in daily contact with people, who bred them to fatten quickly and produce larger litters. Early modern Europeans found Chinese pigs far superior to their own and bred the two to create the breeds now employed in industrial pork production around the world, including China. In recent decades, industrial farms that scientifically control every aspect of pigs’ lives have spread rapidly. Until recently, most Chinese people ate pork only on special occasions; their ability in recent decades to eat it regularly exemplifies China's increasing prosperity. Meanwhile, vast areas of North and South American farmland are now devoted to growing soybeans to feed hundreds of millions of pigs in China, and the methane, manure, and antibiotic resistance they produce creates environmental and health problems on a global scale.

Human activity has eliminated many of the natural lowland ecosystems of the Middle and Lower Yellow River Valley, and has modified the rest, making it difficult to understand what species are native to the region. As a step towards the reconstruction of these lost environments, this paper employs zooarchaeological and other evidence to identify the native mammals of the region. We provide basic ecological information about these animals and discuss controversial or difficult cases in more depth. Our goal is not only to study China's environmental history, but also to make clear that conventional understandings of species ranges are based on the distributions of animals in the modern period, when many had already been eliminated from large areas by human activity.

Approximately two billion people lack access to medicines globally. People living with HIV, cancer patients, those suffering from tuberculosis or malaria, and other populations in desperate need of life-saving medicines are increasingly unable to access existing preventative, curative, and life-prolonging treatments. In many cases, treatment may be unavailable or inaccessible for even some of the most common and readily treatable health concerns, such as hypertension. In the developing world, many of the factors that contribute to making the world’s most vulnerable and marginalized populations particularly susceptible to illness also operate to restrict their access to medicines. As a result of dramatic economic inequities and widespread poverty, it is not profitable for most originator pharmaceutical companies to develop new medicines for sale in developing markets or to lower the cost of existing drugs so that they are affordable for the majority of these populations.