Strange nature scene from Chinese children's book

Andy Switky of IDEO shares this fun illustration from an English-Chinese book that a colleague bought for his young son. "The Nature" page includes such natural features as a nuclear power plant and giant dam. Click the image to enlarge.

David Pescovitz is Boing Boing's co-editor/managing partner. He's also a research director at Institute for the Future. On Instagram, he's @pesco.

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noen

That may be true tp1024 but western civilization has long considered itself as separate from Nature. “This world is not our home” and such. This is especially true among evangelicals where the belief is that we have been given God’s creation in order to have dominion over it. Environmentalism is seen as a pagan heresy.
Big Dave

Coal power stations do have cooling towers.

look at Drax in the uk

http://www.draxpower.com/explore_drax/power_station/?id=1719
Simon Greenwood

Something I noticed in Taiwan when I visited was that the Taiwanese certainly like their nature to be well managed: I went to places like Yangminshan, the mountain in the middle of Taipei, which is essentially a country park, Dongshang River Park, which is a beautifully manicured riverside in Ilan County, and a ‘flower park’ whose name I didn’t get as it was all in Mandarin, which was several acres of well attended fields of different flowers.
Similarly I came across a website about climbing in Hong Kong, which has some incredible cliffs and mountains, but which are hardly visited by the Chinese, who would apparently prefer to get the tram or escalator up the Peak.
Antinous

Unstable isotopes are God’s creatures, too.
David Newland

This looks ironic only to New World folks who have had the privilege of imagining “nature” as a space without people in it.

Truth is, if nature has a future, it’s as a massively managed space, whether we like it or not.
deathcakes

#7 posted by jeffro , March 3, 2008 11:22 AM

Why would a nuclear power plant have smokestacks? I think the word you were looking for is coal.

Damn, beaten to it. By quite a way…
chronophobe

More than likely, “the Nature” is just a poor translation of “the Landscape” or “Rural” or something.
Moon

The Chinese certainly don’t have that privilege, David Newland!

It might also be an Engrish problem. Maybe that isn’t exactly the right translation.
veffekt

This is not a chinese picture book, but a picture book translated into Chinese. Children’s books with images are generic or demonsrate some aspect of culture from the source language. You can find out the source by looking in the credits of the book. Perhaps European? I swear I have seen that image before. (I research visual cognition in young learners between cultures so sadly enough, I read a lot of “my first thousand words” in various languages. It is great when you come across something that visually represents the culture. In most languages, it is about cheap production so ‘localizing’ the book into the target language achieves that.
Takuan

I meant, what would a child raised in industrial smog, crowed dirty buildings and masses of people think of an image of “nature” like that?
http://earth.esa.int/ers/ers_action/Beijing_China_SAR_IM_Orbit_39150_20021016.jpg
sniegowski

Translation is a little off. Think, “Great Outdoors” instead of “The Nature”. It seems in the writer’s mind, blending mountains, villages, harbors, ocean, boats, damns, rivers, and yes – even power plants are all part of the great outdoors.
ErikO23

so the Simpsons actually live in Springfield, Guangdong Province, China?
bonedad

Stylewise, that seems to me to evoke The Simpsons’ Springfield, albeit a much more rural version.
jeffro

Why would a nuclear power plant have smokestacks? I think the word you were looking for is coal.
newman100

Yeah, that’s probably a coalfire plant. Nuclear would have a big dome instead of tall stacks.
noen

#7 and #8 are hereby banned from posting to Boingboing. I mean, we have standards to maintain you know and if you don’t know what a cooling tower is then… I mean really…
Marvin100

TP1024 has it. If a honeycomb is natural, so is an apartment complex or an abortion clinic.

Or plastic.

Or my poor, besieged liver.
ErikO23

@ #7 and #8-

http://www1.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/42335/2/istockphoto_42335_nuclear_power_plant_belvedere_nj.jpg
ToastyKen

Sniegowski had it right in that the title is really more like “The Great Outdoors”.

Regardless, the concept of “nature” IS a bit different in China. When you go to a national park in the US, it tends to just have trees and grass and rocks. When you go to a national park in China, you’ll generally see pagodas and temples sprinkled throughout the landscape. The same goes for paintings of natural scenery. They’re pretty much considered part of the land.

That said, we’re generally talking about pagodas, not cooling towers. :)
Rob Cruickshank

Nuclear power would also explain the giant ducks. You don’t get that with coal.
ribaldi

@ 11

Actually, å¤§è‡ªç„¶ is nature.

http://www.mandarintools.com/cgi-bin/wordlook.pl?word=å¤§è‡ªç„¶&searchtype=chinese&where=whole&audio=on
Takuan

I wonder what a small child growing up in Beijing would make of this image?
MarlboroTestMonkey7

The picture lacks floating dead river dolphins, sunken cities (big dam byproduct) and the great firewall of China -wouldn’t it look quite striking on paper?-. Maybe I can draw it tomorrow during lunch…
Takuan

I wonder what a small child growing up in Beijing would make of this image?
noen

@ Takuan
Patriotic pride. There are a lot of signifiers of progress. The atomic power station, the suspension bridge, the floodgate, that boat looks like a double hull design. All point to a “Look at what our glorious revolution hath wrought” style propaganda familiar to any American.
Shangui

å¤§è‡ªç„¶ does indeed mean “nature” or “Nature.” “The great outdoors” would be a very misleading translation both of the way the term is used in current Chinese and how it developed historically. I think some of you might be getting mislead by the å¤§ here but å¤§è‡ªç„¶ is a common term. The nuclear power plant is indeed labeled as æ ¸åç«™, so it is NOT meant to be a coalfire plant.

I don’t think this image would be at all odd to the average person growing up in the PRC (or Taiwan for that matter). Industrialization has long been a point of national pride and nature has not traditionally been seen as the polar opposite of man-made. Remember, Chinese landscape paintings almost always include either human people or buildings. A pagoda is no more or less “natural” than a power plant.
tp1024

You have a strange concept of nature.

Nature is, basically, everything. That includes trees, cows, grass, rivers and mountains and also humans and thus human artifacts. Wouldn’t you agree that a molehill is part of nature? Or a dam built by a beaver? Or anthills? So why wouldn’t a house, a dam or a power plant be part of it? Being “nature” doesn’t mean it has to be pretty (also because beauty lies in the eye of the beholder).

So, yeah, a nuclear power plant or a motorway are as much part of nature as meadows (also human artifacts!) and forests (consisting of pines planted in regular spacing). Pretty or not.