For the authors of these papers, as is true for many of us, there is a special urgency associated with the acceleration of environmental degradation and its negative impact on individual human lives to which we bear witness in Asia and elsewhere. While truly “natural” disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis are strikingly devastating, it is the destruction of environments from anthropogenic sources that are often the most frustrating. That is, we believe that because human beings caused the problems, we should be able to fix them, and, indeed, as humanists it is axiomatic that we are committed to improving the human condition. Over the past few decades, however, there has been a growing awareness that human interaction with the natural environment may be creating a world, for the most part, unfit for human habitation. It is out of this awareness that the term “Anthropocene” has emerged, describing that epoch during which human activity has reached such a level of intensity that it has had a discernable impact on the earth itself. Thus, as these writers suggest, it is imperative for us as regional specialists to engage in conversations across disciplines and geographic areas that provide opportunities to increase our understanding of the Anthropocene in Asia in all of its local and global dimensions.

While there is much to appreciate about each of these papers, and while it is understood that this collection is meant only to open a much-needed dialogue, it is, nonetheless, difficult to overlook their almost exclusive focus on East Asia, belying the very title of the collection. As a cultural anthropologist who has spent over two decades observing many of the problems alluded to in these papers in Indonesia, I would like to call attention to a few major arenas of anthropogenic environmental degradation in the archipelagic nation whose causes and impacts reach far beyond Southeast Asia to the rest of Asia and, indeed, the rest of the world: the rainforests, coral reefs, mining sites, and dams. My intention here, then, is not only to bring Southeast Asia into the conversation, but more importantly to acknowledge the interconnectedness of these impacts within all of Asia and globally.

In one sense, the idea of an Anthropocene implies that isolation from these problems no longer exists, and that with increasing globalization, they impact even the most out-of-the-way places on earth. Accordingly, I rely here both on my own ethnographic research in a rather remote Indonesian maritime village and on more high-profile examples from across Southeast Asia. My own research site is Greater Balobaloang, a small coral islet in the Sabalana Archipelago, where the approximately 600 Bugis villagers gain their livelihoods through a combination of coconut silvaculture, interisland shipping and trade, and artisanal fishing. While the growing and harvesting of coconuts is understood to provide supplemental income for many of the families, most money is earned from the sea aboard wooden cargo ships and fishing boats. My own studies include boat construction, and in recent years rampant deforestation across Indonesia has contributed to increased scarcity and higher prices for the timbers historically prized by boat builders. As one consequence, we are likely witnessing the demise of the independent fisher entrepreneur. No longer able to accumulate and “bank” timbers until they have enough to build their own boats, many are turning to buying manufactured fiberglass fishing boats, the materials for which are both toxic and imported, on credit from bosses for whom they are obligated to work until the debt is paid off. Likewise, the increasing cost of building cargo ships is forcing individual ship owners to borrow more at exorbitant interest rates from moneylenders who then claim part of each cargo until ships are paid off. Regionally and globally, of course, deforestation is being driven by international demands for tropical hardwoods that, ironically, the ship owners continue to carry as cargos, knowingly involved in the growing scarcity of the resource.

Meanwhile, since the early 1990s, fishers from nearby islands have responded to increased global demand and higher prices for seafood by turning from sustainable fishing methods, primarily hook and line and casting nets, to blast and cyanide fishing. With the complicity of corrupt officials, these fishers are attracted to “easy money,” while bosses have gotten rich by exporting the most valuable live fish to large urban markets in Southeast and East Asia. In the process, the Sabalana Archipelago, the world's eleventh largest coral reef and part of the Coral Triangle—known to be the region of the greatest diversity of marine species in the world—is being destroyed at an accelerating rate and will take years, if ever, to recover (Ammarell Reference Ammarell, Adams and Gillogly2011, Reference Ammarell, Feinberg and Mawyer2014).

Moving beyond the island-village of Balobaloang, the coastal and riverine fisheries across Southeast Asia have suffered from these same destructive fishing practices as well as from runoff from urban waste, mine drainage and runoff, and the runoff from clear cutting of forests. Along coastal reefs, these sources of pollution suffocate corals, thereby destroying the habitat for fish and shellfish. Additionally, vast stretches of coastal mangrove forests—critical habitat for fish and shellfish—have been ploughed under to create corporate shrimp farms. Once the shrimp farms are polluted by antibiotics and fecal matter, they are abandoned and new ones are developed to meet the increasing demand primarily among consumers in the United States. Returning to Indonesia, multinational corporations from China, the United States, and other countries are profiting from foreign demands for nickel, copper, gold, and other minerals while taking advantage of lax environmental regulations and the government's complicity in the displacement of indigenous peoples.

Indeed, Southeast Asia as a whole is one of the regions of the world that will bear some of the most significant damage from climate change. A 2010 report by the World Bank concludes that “Vietnam is likely to be one of the most significantly impacted nations in the world from climate change, due to its very long coastline, high dependence on agriculture, and relatively low levels of development in rural areas” (McElwee Reference McElwee2010, xiii). In particular, the Mekong Delta is predicted to be among the most heavily populated places in the world to be severely impacted by climate change. And while sea levels rise and storm surges increase in intensity, warming from climate change is already melting the glaciers of Tibet and the Himalayas, portending an ominous future in which water volumes in the Mekong and Irrawaddy rivers (as well as in rivers of South Asia) are greatly reduced even as their deltas become more susceptible to inundation from the sea. Compounding this are a growing number of dams being constructed in the watersheds of the Mekong and other mainland rivers, perhaps the most devastating being those being built by China in the Upper Mekong and Laos in the Lower Mekong, which, if completed, are predicted to radically affect the flow of Cambodia's Tonle Sap and negatively impact important fisheries in Vietnam and Cambodia.

While this list is by no means exhaustive, it is meant to provide examples from the perspective of Southeast Asia of the multiple levels of interconnectedness that characterize the Anthropocene. Simultaneously, it might serve to remind us that for too long we as scholars have ignored opportunities, and even devalued the importance of working with colleagues across disciplines and sites of research, thereby blinding us, among other things, to the ubiquity and magnitude of the environmental problems that now loom before us. It behooves us, then, to remember our own interconnectedness as both Asianists and as citizens of the world as we set about locating Asia in the Anthropocene.