The book is written in the backdrop of the environmental impacts of and future requirements
from the natural environment for rapid economic growth that has characterized recent economic
history of China and India especially over the past few decades. The environmental impacts of
such rapid economic changes have been more frequently than otherwise degrading in character.
Environmental impacts of economic activities create degraded natural ecosystems by over
utilization of nature's provisioning ecosystem services (from Himalaya to the Ocean) as well
by the use of the natural environment as sink for dumping of unmarketable products or unused
inputs of economic activities. Such processes affect wide range of ecosystem processes on which
the natural environment including human population depend on.Critical perspectives cast by
various chapters in this book draw attention to the various ways in which space and power
interact to produce diverse geographies of sustainability in a globalizing world. They also
address the questions such as who decides what kind of a spatial arrangement of political power
is needed for sustaining the environment. Who stands to gain (or lose) what when where and
why from certain geographical areas being demarcated as ecologically unique fragile and
vulnerable environments? Whose needs and values are being catered to by a given ecosystem
service? What is the scope for critical inquiry into the ways in which the environment is
imagined represented and resisted in both geopolitical struggles and everyday life? The book
provides insights to both academics from diverse disciplines and policy makers civil society
actors interested in mutual exchange of knowledge between China and India.
