John Lee's, David Fedman's, and Lisa Brady's essays persuasively show the value of studying environmental issues on the Korean peninsula. Each of the essays carefully explains how drives led by individuals and entities, such as the state, engineered nature for human needs, security, and later economic growth. In so doing, they show how these drives simultaneously altered nature and remade institutions, systems, and cultures that influenced people's agency and identity and reshaped forms of consciousness. By judiciously making visible the agents and social forces behind the reconstitution of nature, the essays collectively introduce diverse approaches to the study of environmental issues in Asia and elsewhere. Most of all, they demonstrate that transnational environmental history on the Korean peninsula can no longer be overlooked when dwelling on and debating major historical and theoretical issues in Korean, Asian, and environmental studies.
These essays are so valuable to the three fields because they show how the intersection of environmental and social changes commonly occurred through human-led drives to shape and reshape landscapes from the premodern to the modern period. I refer to landscapes as “a man-made system functioning and evolving not according to natural laws but to serve a community—for the collective character of the landscape is one thing that all generations and all points of view have agreed upon. A landscape is thus a space deliberately created to speed up or slow down the process of nature” (Berger Reference Berger2002, 151). Alan Berger writes that “the word landscape is today commonly defined as a temporal composition of man-made spaces on the land, not static natural scenery” (151). Landscapes are created spaces on lands that embody and materialize a set of relations between things. Those “things” are nature, the built environment, and humanity. The investigation of the relationship between these things and the establishment of a new space or landscape discloses the forces behind the degree and pace of changes in nature. It is also a platform to study broad themes, such as the exercise of power, social and economic exchange, and the formation of subjectivity and agency. Landscapes are the prisms through which to reflect on the influences between people and nature.
The alteration of the environment on the Korean peninsula, as these essays show, occurred through the exploitation of nature by the creation and manipulation of landscapes. Karatani Kojin (Reference Karatani2014, 19) has pointed out that it is “deceptive” to view and interpret these alterations and exploitations as simply the result of “a relation of man and nature.” Karatani alludes to what I call systems of mediation, which include modes of production and exchange, as the main forces that facilitate the relationship between humans and nature and thus help determine the outcomes from that relationship. Making sense of the relationship between humans and natures requires, in particular, studying different modes of exchange that have arisen and fallen over time. More specifically, according to Karatani, tracing different modes of exchange and their structuring influence gives way to determining and understanding social and environmental change.
No other system of mediation than capitalism—with its forms of exchange and production, according to Marx—has played such a pivotal role in mediating people's interaction with nature. Instead of focusing on industrialization in the urban, Marx first looked to agriculture in the rural to explain how people under capitalism fundamentally altered nature's composition by disrupting its cycles and rhythms and any forms of balance. Writing in the midst of the second agricultural revolution (1830–80), Marx pointed out that capitalist agriculture “disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil” (Karatani Reference Karatani2014, 18). He pointed out further that as farmers intensively raised agricultural goods for the production of commodities and exchange, capitalist agriculture ruptured and upset the “natural balance of soil and humans” (18). This balance between soil and human or nature and people also eroded through primitive accumulation as small-scale cultivators were separated from lands that they had intimate knowledge of—knowledge that was used to manage a balanced relationship between humanity and nature. Production and exchanges through capitalism not only rearranged nature and ruined its fertility, but also reconstituted people's identity, consciousness, agency, and social relations—especially those working on agricultural lands. Rearranging nature and agriculture for economic purposes led to the rise of different systems, practices, and discursive structures through which individuals became exposed to influences and forces that were behind the alternation of their social being. Overall, capitalism as a system of mediation produces different types of production and exchange that help order relations between people and nature, which become part of an elaborate landscape that sets the conditions and limits for the evolution of natural and human-constructed processes.
War, like capitalism, is a powerful system of mediation. Wars feature schemas, resources, and components that collectively serve as a connective tissue that links people and nature and through which landscapes have been created, radically disrupted, and annihilated. This connective tissue has generated and spread violence, which, in war, serves as the primary force behind the birth and alternation of landscapes. Each of the essays in this forum, for example, has shown that the violent extraction of resources, like timber and coal, for war has routinely led to the ruining of environments while other works, such as Micah Muscolino's (Reference Muscolino2015) study on floods caused by dikes on the Yellow River being broken by Chinese Nationalist armies in the late 1930s, have revealed the cultural damage and social wreckage of communities caused by war-induced disasters.
Violence between people and the environment flows and materializes in ways that have been immediately felt and experienced in wars. More than just having their effects in the now and causing changes in the instant, wars have also unleashed changes that have led to a slow process of violence. That is, wars have created degrees of mediation that have led to the release of an onslaught of violence against the environment and people that occurs over a span of time and space—a process that Fedman aptly introduces as slow violence in his article. The concept of slow violence, according to Rob Nixon (Reference Nixon2011, 2), very much departs from traditional ideas of violence:
By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. Violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility. We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales.
Temporally and spatially, slow violence as a concept links the past and the present and connects spaces that appear to be separate and distinct.
Slow violence, in large part, starts from a process of valuation.Footnote 1 The pressures and needs of war, for example, continuously change the value of concepts, practices, and things. Parts of nature, such as air, forests, and waterways, have often acquired new value as vital materials for winning battles. From the premodern to the modern era, forests during wars, as the three essays in this forum demonstrate, were revalued as resources for construction and energy. Wartime deforestation and reforestation projects repurposed forests for military, political, and economic gain. The revaluation of nature, as the essays further explain, frequently led to aspects of people's everyday lives being revalued and consequently becoming a target of discipline and change. Lee, Fedman, and Brady show that revaluing parts of nature caused daily practices to be rethought and reformed in premodern and modern Korean history.
As wars ignite a process of valuation, new and changed values of nature and culture reshape the relationship between humanity and nature. These values cultivate feelings and sentiments, or forms of affect. These affects, in turn, play a crucial role in influencing and determining people's approaches to and handling of nature and everyday life. They have often moved people to perform violent acts that unleash changes and thus ignite processes of transformation and slow violence.
Value-induced slow violence has commonly appeared in struggles between protecting a vernacular landscape and building an official landscape:
A vernacular landscape is shaped by the affective, historically textured maps that communities have devised over generations, maps replete with names and routes, maps alive to significant ecological and surface geological features. A vernacular landscape, although neither monolithic nor undisputed, is integral to the socioenvironmental dynamics of community rather than being wholly externalized—treated as out there, as a separate nonrenewable resource. By contrast, an official landscape—whether governmental, NGO, corporate or some combination of those—is typically oblivious to such earlier maps; it writes the land in a bureaucratic, externalizing, and extraction-driven manner that is often pitilessly instrumental. (Nixon Reference Nixon2011, 17)
Violence forms and spread through clashes between the vernacular and official landscapes. Seen and experienced immediately, the violent effects and consequences of these clashes are also released and felt over a longue durée. The wartime collision of landscapes has often started a process of slow violence through which (1) a gradual attack against the natural ecological order has caused a steep decline in the diversity of an ecosystem; and (2) the rhythms of communities and people's everyday lives have been ruptured, unsettled, and ultimately transformed over an extended temporal frame.
The three essays in this forum feature stories about the historical clash between vernacular and official landscapes and the rise of slow violence under war. They furnish a comprehensive approach to environmental history, which is to “deepen our understanding of how humans have been affected by the natural environment through time, and conversely and perhaps more importantly in view of the present global predicament, how they have affected that environment and with what results” (Worster Reference Worster1990, 1089). Lee's, Fedman's, and Brady's articles remind us that deepening these understandings requires research that carefully pays attention to systems of mediation that are behind the relationship between people and nature and the configuration of and conflicts between landscapes. The essays, in the end, show the importance of focusing on both the material and the ideological elements within systems of mediation to explain environmental and climate change and their impact on society.
