"The environmental conditions of a country are the most powerful evidence of its government's legacy." This is one of Mr. Donald Hughes' arguments in his book What is Environmental History, in which he specially quoted relevant sayings of Mencius, the ancient Chinese philosopher who was second only to Confucius. Views of the past can be applied to the present, and those in the West can be used as references in the East. Ever since the drawing of boundaries between modern nation-states and their social transitions, especially after more and more countries and regions entered industrial civilization, the environment has gone through rapid and radical changes as human beings have intensified their utilization and exploitation of natural resources and human movement, transport and logistics have increased. In this process, the responsibility for environmental management which had been shouldered by individual, family, community or local government was gradually taken up by the national government in a centralized and specialized way as a part of its national responsibility. By doing so, the state has become a larger and more crucial player in remolding the ecological and social order through environmental governance.

It is of great significance to the modernization of China's system and capacity for governance, which currently receives much attention from the general public in China, that we review and inspect such transformation in depth and compare different regions and countries' methods for dealing with environmental changes by reviewing the histories of the UK and the US and examining the realities in China. Therefore, PKU's Institute of Area Studies organized a cross-disciplinary workshop titled "Environmental Changes and State Governance: From Experiences of the UK and US to the Reality in China" in an attempt to search for commonalities and differences between environmental governance practices of different modern states by juxtaposing and comparing the West and the East, the past and the present, in the hope of providing beneficial inspiration for China's current development of its ecological civilization.

Regarding the current environmental crisis, the experts at the workshop expressed their belief that China, with a history of 5,000 years of civilization, originally had an agricultural production system that was in harmony with nature. Then, during the 1970s and 1980s, the so-called "green revolution," which started in the West and focused on fertilizers, pesticides, agricultural machinery, and the hybridization of crop seeds, was introduced into China. This was a kind of industrialized agriculture, which, in the process of the "miracle" of increasing grain yield, caused irreversible damage to soil and the environment in which humans and other species live. Establishing an ecological civilization and achieving sustainable development requires people to reflect on this industrialized agricultural method. This is a responsibility that people nowadays cannot avoid.

The earth's current environment mainly faces three fundamental pressures: over-population, market-based competitive development among various countries, and the low-quality concepts and consumption patterns of human beings. In this regard, the fundamental reasons for poor environmental protection lie in the inability to form internationally unified rigid regulation, the common psychology of expecting to get through crises by sheer luck, and the disconnect between the promotion of humanity and environmental conditions. When it comes to the identification of specific countermeasures, there are differences between passive and active, rigid and flexible, external and internal.

There is also a view that the emergence and evolution of human civilization depends on two basic conditions: natural conditions and knowledge conditions. The destruction of the former has led to new trends of thought, research, countermeasures and actions for environmental protection and sustainable development; the misuse of the latter, in particular the misuse and abuse of the latter’s scientific and technological knowledge, have not attracted enough attention. At present, scientific and technological risks are becoming more and more serious, and there are many serious loopholes in human security protection measures. Humankind is facing unprecedented challenges. Only by launching a new scientific and technological revolution, industrial revolution, distribution revolution and national governance revolution can we effectively deal with the challenges.

Seen from a country's practice of dealing with environmental crises, the US environmental governance has gone through three important stages, from the founding of the nation to the era of progressivism, and from the period of progressivism to the 1960s; it is now in the third stage. In these three stages, the US moved from the early age of laissez-faire to the second stage with the establishment of the idea of the “American commons,” and then to the third stage, in which the management of citizen behavior in the form of national legislation was strengthened. The core driving force behind the three-stage transition was the changing environment and consequently changing environmental knowledge, rather than the wishful thinking of a certain power group or the will of several groups. The UK, as the country that pioneered the industrial civilization, took the lead in enjoying its achievements, savoring its bitter fruits, and embarking on a path of modern environmental governance. Over the past 100 years, the British environmental governance strategy has undergone a transformation from independent governance to full cooperation. This change shows that, on the issue of environmental governance, man-made systems, concepts, and even civilization itself are breaking through prejudices and accumulated grievances and are undergoing a fundamental transformation. As a result, a new type of civilization different from industrial civilization is being bred and growing in the countries where industrial civilization first took the lead.

Some of the experts at the workshop also analyzed the concept of the environmental management state, that is, a modern country that emphasizes the responsibility of controlling and managing nature, resources and related behaviors, and uses its capital and professional knowledge to adjust or establish a new ecological and social order, thereby defining its relationship with its citizens, society and with other countries. There is a view that, in the construction of ecological civilization, central high-level departments should consider the policy preferences of local leaders, and ensure the interactions between “give and take” in the process of policy agenda setting. However, there is also another point of view, namely, that the government is not omnipotent. In the 1960s and 1970s, an environmental pollution crisis broke out, and scientism, rationalism, and anthropocentrism were further questioned and criticized, and ecologism and holism were promoted. In environmental protection, the government, the market and a narrowly defined concept of civil society “coexist and restrain each other.” Environmental law has a distinctive personality. It adapts to the moral, orderly pattern and realistic needs of the era of ecological civilization, guarantees the life of “nature” (ecological balance), and ensures that “people” can live safely and healthily with freedom, dignity, and meaningfulness.