In the nineteenth century, the Mekong, Red, and Chao Phraya river deltas in Southeast Asia underwent a massive expansion in agricultural settlement and engineering (Dao and Molle 2000). Contending with crocodiles and herds of wild elephants in addition to more prosaic insect and bird pests (Terwiel Reference Terwiel1989), settlers struggled successfully to make these deltas highly productive centers of rice and other agriculture. Such struggles, which were until very recently confidently labeled as “Man's Conquest of Nature,” used to be seen as representing Progress with a capital P. Historically, few men or women had doubts about the real struggle involved in making a living from Nature. In a lecture given in 1877, William Morris explained that “the race of man must either labour or perish. Nature does not give us our livelihood gratis; we must win it by toil of some sort or degree” (W. Morris Reference Morris2008, 1). Human evolution could thus be summarized as a story in which “Man struggled with nature, and he is conquering it gradually through his intelligence, inventiveness, and skill” (Sigerist Reference Sigerist1936, 597). Progress was the process by which Man Makes Himself, to cite the title of Gordon Childe's influential Reference Childe1936 book on archaeology. By the nineteenth century, the problem for socialists such as Morris was that “the fruits of our victory over Nature [have] been stolen from us” (W. Morris Reference Morris2008, 10); the basic necessity of “conquering” Nature was not disputed.
In the late nineteenth century, many people in the industrial world would no doubt have agreed with Morris's (Reference Morris2008, 9–10) evaluation that the human “struggle with Nature seems nearly over, and the victory of the human race over her nearly complete.” In the twentieth century, the “Great Acceleration” (Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill Reference Steffen, Crutzen and McNeill2007) after World War II seemed to extend this victory even further into numerous areas of human well-being. Today, however, “Man's Conquest of Nature” has taken on quite different and much more disturbing resonances. On the one hand, it has become apparent that humans really have dominated Nature to a degree unimaginable—even to prescient observers such as Marsh (Reference Marsh1864)—without recent advances in earth science, biochemistry, and computing (Ehrlich and Ehrlich Reference Ehrlich and Ehrlich2008; Goudie Reference Goudie2006). At the same time, this human impact on the environment has resulted in changes that are dangerously eroding the basic life support systems for humans and for many other species, exceeding what some scientists have called the “safe operating limits for humanity” (Rockström et al. Reference Rockström, Steffen, Noone, Persson, Chapin III, Lambin and Lenton2009). After “two hundred years of seeing humans at the center of existence,” writes Timothy Morton (Reference Morton2013, 115), “and now the objects [what would traditionally have been called ‘Nature’] take revenge, terrifyingly huge, ancient, long-lived, threateningly minute, invading every cell in our body.” Such changes are increasingly being experienced as collective pain and trauma associated with the “end of nature” (McKibben Reference McKibben1989). This trauma is profoundly ironic given that we have known for some time that we are living on borrowed Earth—using more planet than we actually have available.Footnote 1 Despite, or perhaps because of, this irony, we stand at a strange and unprecedented moment in history when we have suddenly realized just how much we have been messing up the planet at exactly the same time as we have begun to see what an unnatural and even “queer” mess Nature really is (Morton Reference Morton2010). The present historical moment is, in fact, so unusual that scientists have suggested that it marks a new epoch—called the “Anthropocene”—in which human domination of the earth's ecosystems has made human activity into a geological process (Crutzen Reference Crutzen2002; Steffen et al. Reference Steffen, Crutzen and McNeill2007, Reference Steffen, Grinevald, Crutzen and McNeill2011; Zalasiewicz et al. Reference Zalasiewicz, Williams, Smith, Barry, Coe, Bown and Brenchley2008).
The Anthropocene demands new ways of looking at Nature and the Human, and the humanities and social sciences have quickly taken on an active interest with Anthropocene studies in a way that was never the case for the Holocene. In one sense, this concern is extremely disrespectful to the Holocene, the epoch of stable climates that enabled the development of agriculture and civilization and yet which is rarely acknowledged by the humanities. For example, there is already an “Anthropocene Feminism,” explored in a 2014 conference at the Center for 21st Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin (see Center for 21st Century Studies 2014), but as far as I am aware there was never an explicitly “Holocene Feminism”—although much feminist research deals with “patriarchy” and other changes that developed with agriculture and the state in the Holocene. Like the concept of “globalization,” the Anthropocene can be approached in many ways, ranging from a geological framework to primarily social and cultural perspectives. The humanities have begun to critique what some observers regard as the “depoliticizing universalism implicit in the Anthropocene . . . by unearthing the strata of sexual [and other] difference buried beneath the supposedly singular subject of an undifferentiated ‘Anthropos’” (Rowan Reference Rowan2014). While on one level the present essay will add to this unearthing of difference by considering the Anthropocene from the perspective of Asia and Asian studies, I want to emphasize at the beginning that whatever cultural interpretations we give to the Anthropocene, there is little doubt that it marks a real crisis in sustainability, involving significant threats to the resilience of social-ecological systems and to human well-being and security (Chapin, Kofinas, and Folke Reference Chapin, Kofinas and Folke2009; Ehrlich and Ehrlich Reference Ehrlich and Ehrlich2013).
Where is Asia in the Anthropocene?
Placing Asia in the Anthropocene requires us to consider at least three topics: the role of Asia in histories of the Anthropocene, the social-ecological vulnerabilities generated by and experienced in Anthropocene Asia today, and the question of how the Asian experience might be used to build responses to the Anthropocene. Although many of the examples used here employ my own area of expertise in Northeast Asia, the basic focus of this essay is Asia as a whole. In this respect, before examining the above topics in more detail, it needs to be noted that the concept of the Anthropocene can be said to work against the regional and bounded ideas of Asia and Asian studies. One of the great strengths of area studies lies in its local contextualizations, yet the cumulative effects of global human activities over at least the past 200 years have resulted in changes to the basic biological, chemical, and climatic processes of the whole earth, changes that ultimately affect all humans. The Anthropocene is by definition a huge transformation of the global system; in the words of climate activist and writer Bill McKibben, it is the “biggest thing human beings have ever done” (Ireland Reference Ireland2013). Unlike other “big changes” that have been the subject of much debate in Asian studies (such as feudalism and modernity), there can be no doubt that the processes that comprise the Anthropocene are truly global and apply as much in Asia as anywhere else. Despite the global stage of the Anthropocene, however, its human players are embedded in local worlds, and the multiple, interconnecting scales of the Anthropocene are lived on the scale of everyday human experience in Asia as much as elsewhere.
As a subcategory of area studies, Asian studies developed and grew for reasons completely unrelated to the Anthropocene. This is, of course, true for most academic disciplines, and recent research on global environmental change has emphasized the need for new, inter- and trans-disciplinary approaches (Chapin et al. Reference Chapin, Pickett, Power, Jackson, Carter and Duke2011; Hudson et al. Reference Hudson, Aoyama, Hoover and Uchiyama2012; Nisbet et al. Reference Nisbet, Hixon, Moore and Nelson2010; Palsson et al. Reference Palsson, Szerszynski, Sörlin, Marks, Avril, Crumley and Hackmann2013).Footnote 2 Such new academic formulations are by no means easy to create, since they often work against existing power structures within disciplines (Hudson Reference Hudson2013). Area studies might in itself be considered as a very interdisciplinary endeavor, but the traditional “areas” within area studies have not yet developed discrete bodies of research on the Anthropocene or global—as opposed to regional—environmental change. One exception here is the Arctic, where debates and research on environmental change have newly reinforced its identity as an important macro-region. Long perceived as isolated from and marginal to the main currents of human history, the Arctic has now become the front line for many of the changes linked with the Anthropocene. The traditionally high resilience of Indigenous peoples in the Arctic has given them an important voice in both academic and public debates (Krupnik and Jolly Reference Krupnik and Jolly2002; Nuttall Reference Nuttall1998), and the Anthropocene in the Arctic is defined by both major impacts on everyday life (warming sea and air temperatures, melting permafrost, increased storminess and coastal erosion, the spread of persistent organic pollutants) and by passionate cultural responses as Indigenous peoples respond to new challenges. The huge amount of literature on global environmental change and the Arctic is summarized in the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (2005), which runs to over a thousand pages. The importance of the Arctic as a research area within the Anthropocene has occurred despite the fact that stratigraphic changes, such as those from urbanization and agriculture, are far less pronounced there than in many other parts of the world.
Although there is now a great deal of research on environmental change within Asia, there is very little that focuses specifically on Asia and the Anthropocene. A Google Scholar search produced only two titles with both “Asia” and “Anthropocene” in the title. Of these, one paper titled “Becoming Europe: Southeast Asia in the Anthropocene” concludes, “In many ways Southeast Asia has been recapitulating the economic and environmental transformation of Europe: completing in decades a process that took centuries in Europe” (Corlett Reference Corlett2013). Does this mean that the Anthropocene is simply another process by which Asia becomes more like “the West”? While this problem will be discussed further in the following section, it is fair to conclude that most observers probably view the Anthropocene in such Euro-centered terms. For their part, there are various reasons why Asianists may have been slow in thinking about the Anthropocene. We should remember that it is only relatively recently that world historical approaches have begun to place Asia in a broader context. Not so long ago, K. N. Chaudhuri (Reference Chaudhuri1990, 11) could complain, “The specialist historians of Asia, each examining his own narrow chronology and field, are often unable to see the structural totality of economic and social life and they are inclined to treat the experience of their own regions as unique or special.” Another reason is that the anthropogenic nature of landscapes in many parts of Asia—landscapes beautifully described in Chaudhuri's own Asia before Europe (1990)—is usually thought to be too obvious to need much comment. In other regions, such as Amazonia, this is less obvious, and research has worked toward understanding a landscape that initially seems like a pristine wilderness but is actually heavily impacted by human activity (Erickson Reference Erickson, Silverman and Isbell2008; Roosevelt Reference Roosevelt2013). A further factor is that comparative research on historical trajectories has tended to be truncated by a teleological obsession with modernity. In terms of historical change, Asia has often been seen as a foil to Europe and North America: more advanced than Europe for so long, in the modern era Asia is argued by some to have moved from being a “winner” to a “loser.” Pomeranz (Reference Pomeranz, McAnany and Yoffee2010) has critiqued this approach for China, arguing contra Diamond (Reference Diamond2005) that a very long-term perspective throws doubt on such simplistic interpretations. The discourse over whether Europe or the West is, or is not, “superior” to the rest has dominated the academy for a long time, but the concept of the Anthropocene changes the goalposts of this debate. What does it mean, for example, that according to Ian Morris (Reference Morris2010) “the West rules—for now”? Does it mean that the West has developed to the stage that it has been able to reduce the negative impacts of the Anthropocene, staying within the safe operating space for humanity? Clearly not: the “rule” of the West has simply been achieved with little or no thought to the real costs. In Ian Morris's (Reference Morris2010) own language, we are all “locked-in” to the Anthropocene, but it never seemed to matter that the B-side of the record of modernity is the very long-playing tune of the Anthropocene. Chakrabarty (Reference Chakrabarty2009) has already noted that the many human freedoms obtained at great cost since the Enlightenment have been paid for in fossil fuels that have, in turn, undermined many basic human securities, or at least will do so in the near future.
As a generalization, it can also be said that Asian studies has been slow to incorporate the new ideas and understandings of Nature that are needed to begin thinking further about the Anthropocene. Until recently, “Nature” within Asian studies had been predominantly approached in terms of perceptions of the natural world in the various national and religious traditions of the region (e.g., Bruun and Kalland Reference Bruun and Kalland1995; Callicott and Ames Reference Callicott and Ames1989). Common religious and cultural heritages—particularly from Buddhism, Daosim, and animism—that seemed to counter the Western Human-Nature dichotomy encouraged many authors to propose commonalities in Asian approaches to Nature. The assumption that Asian cultures were somehow “closer to Nature” proved remarkably tenacious despite abundant evidence to the contrary. The ways in which particular cultural traditions perceive Nature are important in building resilience and navigating pathways to sustainability (Berkes Reference Berkes2008). All human societies have cultural traditions through which they relate to the natural environment. We know from ethnographies of the circumpolar region that world-views about Humans in Nature can be extremely long-lasting and possess elements that are shared over large areas (Zvelebil Reference Zvelebil, Bailey and Spikins2008). While such world-views may emphasize the need for balance and “harmony” within Nature, they rarely guarantee that a sustainable economy is followed in practice (Krupnik Reference Krupnik1993). Furthermore, such world-views cannot be directly equated with the modern concepts of sustainability and environmentalism (Harkin and Lewis Reference Harkin, Lewis, Harkin and Lewis2007).
Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether “Asian views of Nature” can really help build sustainability, it needs to be noted that there has recently been a fundamental shift in our understanding of how we might categorize the natural environment. Not so long ago, it all seemed much easier: in Japan, for example, “Nature” meant cherry blossoms, the changing seasons, and frogs jumping into ponds. Such idealized views of Nature found in Japan and other Asian nations have always been ambiguous (Thornber Reference Thornber2012). The link between class and aesthetic ideas about Japanese Nature has been critiqued by several authors (Kada et al. Reference Kada, Tanaka, Aoyagi-Usui, Arakaki, Watanabe, Hoffman and Bauer2006; Martinez Reference Martinez and Robertson2005). However, our growing scientific ability to see and measure Nature has shown us that it is a much messier and uncannier thing than we ever imagined (Morton Reference Morton2010, Reference Morton2013). Our growing awareness of ecological linkages shows that Asian Natures/Cultures are not limited to Asia; in fact they are everywhere. After the March 2011 disasters in Japan, the western United States has been impacted by radioisotopes from Fukushima and by tons of tsunami debris with attached organisms (Gewin Reference Gewin2013). Cesium isotopes from Fukushima have been used to show that Pacific bluefin tuna move between Japan and California in as little as one month (Madigan, Baumann, and Fisher Reference Madigan, Baumann and Fisher2012). The fact that our understanding of “ecological linkages” is just beginning is shown by a recent project in North Carolina looking at bacteria in the human navel. The research identified 2,368 bacterial species, 1,458 of which may be new to science. One participant in the study had a bacterium that had previously only been found in soil from Japan—where he had never visited (Fischer Reference Fischer2012). Asian studies scholars have only just begun to think about the implications of such new views of Nature (see, e.g., Miller, Thomas, and Walker Reference Miller, Thomas and Walker2013; Walker Reference Walker2009).
Asia and Histories of the Anthropocene
As Europe and North America became increasingly industrialized in the nineteenth century, Asia was reimagined as an economically backward region. By contrast, earlier observers had seen Asia—China in particular—as in many ways superior in economic production. In 1776, Adam Smith noted that China was one of the “best cultivated, most industrious, and most populous, countries of the world” (cited in I. Morris Reference Morris2010, 40). William Godwin's Reference Godwin1820 essay Of Population used China as representing the maximum level of possible cultivation and population density. Smith, Godwin, and other “pre-Anthropocene” writers would almost certainly have seen China as the genesis of the Anthropocene had they then possessed such a concept. Present science, however, assigns that role not to China but to Europe. The short film Welcome to the Anthropocene, which opened the UN's Rio + 20 summit in 2012, underlines in graphic form the proposed European origins of the new epoch (Edgeworth, forthcoming). While this European origin is probably accepted by a majority of scholars, several alternative theories for the beginning of the Anthropocene give an important role to Asia. In terms of the long history of the Anthropocene, it may not matter too much whether it began in England around 1800 and then expanded to Asia over the following two centuries. Two hundred years is a blink of an eyelid for what Timothy Morton (Reference Morton2013) calls “hyperobjects”—the artifacts of the Anthropocene that are massively distributed in time and space.Footnote 3 However, this debate is important because it helps us understand how we got into the current mess we are in: was it really something that began in England in 1800 or does it have broader roots in the human story? Attempts to date the Anthropocene in Asia before 1800 are interesting because they clearly show that Asia was by no means a stagnant backwater region awaiting Western modernization, but had always been part of a basic global process of human ecosystem domination.
If the steam engine is indeed central to the Anthropocene, as suggested by Crutzen (Reference Crutzen2002), then Asia can be said to have entered that era only a few decades after England. The nineteenth century saw the expansion of the railway to the Middle East, India, and beyond. In Japan, the Saga domain in Kyushu had built a model steam train by 1855, and by the early Meiji era, there was a growing network of steam trains that were burning coal, a substance that had already become one of Japan's major exports (Ericson Reference Ericson2014). Both railways and later roads for automobiles transformed traditional landscapes across Asia. In Thailand, roads and railways increased wood consumption and deforestation, enabling easy access to previously remote regions that were quickly developed for farming or industry (Sponsel Reference Sponsel and Balée1998). The steam train and steam ship revolutionized access to Asia for scholars of the region, a process nicely symbolized by American zoologist Edward Morse, who started scientific archaeology in Japan by famously discovering the prehistoric Ōmori shell middens from his train window on his first journey from Yokohama to Tokyo in 1877.Footnote 4
According to the economic historian Kaoru Sugihara, early industrialization in East Asia was labor intensive and at first relied less on fossil fuels (Austin and Sugihara Reference Austin and Sugihara2013). Coal, however, already had a long history of usage in China, perhaps reaching back as early as the Neolithic (Watts Reference Watts2010, 180). By the Tang era, coal was an important fuel for iron and other industries: “North China had become deforested in the course of the T'ang dynasty; and the [late Tang-early Song] revolution in pig iron production was made possible by the use of coal” (Elvin Reference Elvin1973, 85). Coal was also used for cooking and heating (Elvin Reference Elvin1973, 183). Coal had similarly been widely used for industry and heating in early modern England (Thomas Reference Thomas1983, 244–45). In both China and England, it is unclear if this fossil fuel use had any appreciable impact on carbon dioxide levels, but this would comprise an important topic for future research on Asia and the Anthropocene.
Working back in time, an alternative view of the beginning of the Anthropocene (or at least of major anthropogenic ecosystem transformation on a global scale) assigns a central role to China, or more precisely to European desires to trade with China. In attempting to find a western route to China that avoided the Islamic empires of the Middle East, Columbus inadvertently ran into the Americas. The initial result of this encounter was an apocalyptic series of disease pandemics that reduced native populations by as much 90 percent. This demographic collapse transformed native ecologies and landscapes. While the woodlands of eastern North America had previously been managed by fire to produce parklands, the massive drop in human population led to an equally massive grow-back of forests. Ruddiman (Reference Ruddiman2005) has argued that the carbon dioxide from this new forest growth was enough to transform the global climate, forcing the world into the Little Ice Age.
Although fossil fuel use and other causal factors of the Anthropocene are not equally shared by all global populations, there is no doubt that the socioeconomic processes resulting in the Anthropocene derive from global hegemonies and convergences that developed relatively recently in human history. The term “Homogenocene” was coined by Samways (Reference Samways1999) and popularized by Mann (Reference Mann2011). Humans have always migrated and expanded their living environments, transferring plants and animals, sometimes by accident, over long distances. In the Holocene, Asian farmers began a process of agricultural expansion that led to a broad zone of farming peoples stretching across Eurasia into the Pacific from Greenland to Hawai‘i (Bellwood Reference Bellwood2004). It was Columbus who made this a truly global process. Not only did the world become interconnected for the first time in human history, but the “Columbian Exchange” of people, plants, and animals made ecosystems increasingly similar. As well as homogenization, the new links stimulated economic expansion on a new scale: mercury from Idrija in Slovenia and Almadén in Spain, for example, was used at the Potosí mine in Bolivia to produce sliver that was then shipped to China to support the Ming economy (Crosby Reference Crosby2004; Mann Reference Mann2011). European colonial expansion from about 1500 to 1800 commercialized many resources such as beavers, sea otters, whales, and cod and introduced new species such as cattle, wheat, and sugar cane. The result was a massive loss in biodiversity in affected ecosystems. Lightfoot et al. (Reference Lightfoot, Panich, Schneider and Gonzalez2013) use the work of environmental historian John Richards (Reference Richards2003) to argue that this process of early modern colonialization suggests an earlier history for the Anthropocene than the one usually supported.
Some archaeologists have argued for an even earlier beginning of the Anthropocene, based on the history of human modification of landscapes. An especially significant process of landscape change was the widespread extinction of megafauna and other animals after about 50,000 years ago. The exact role of humans in this process continues to be debated (e.g., Norton et al. Reference Norton, Kondo, Ono, Zhang and Diab2010), but from the perspective of long-term impacts on ecosystems, Braje and Erlandson (Reference Braje and Erlandson2013) argue that this “sixth mass extinction event” is so important that further research is needed on whether it should be included in any definition of the Anthropocene.Footnote 5 Using burning, weeding, pruning, and other land management techniques, humans have always transformed the places where they live to make habitats that were thought to be more suited for human life. McNeely and Sochaczewski's (Reference McNeely and Sochaczewski1995) four major ecocultural revolutions proposed for Southeast Asia are applicable to many other parts of Asia: control of fire, animal and plant domestication, irrigation agriculture, and the rise of global markets. The more sedentary human populations became, the greater their environmental transformations (Nishida Reference Nishida1986). Human sedentism also benefited many nonhuman animals and plants that can be argued to have used human landscape transformations to support their own living environments (see, e.g., Bleed and Matsui Reference Bleed and Matsui2010). The following Neolithic transition to agriculture and urbanization marked further massive transformations of socio-ecological systems. Although wet-rice farming in East Asia is often said to be more sustainable than the combination of wheat and sheep and goats common in western Eurasia (Yasuda Reference Yasuda and Yasuda2001), it has been argued that rice farming was a major preindustrial source of atmospheric methane, a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (Fuller et al. Reference Fuller, Van Etten, Manning, Castillo, Kingwell-Banham, Weisskopf, Qin, Sato and Hijmans2011; Mitchell et al. Reference Mitchell, Brook, Lee, Buizert and Sowers2013).
There is no doubt that anthropogenic landscapes have very long and substantial histories in many parts of Asia (Aikens and Lee Reference Aikens and Lee2013). Although the Anthropocene is usually described in terms of the accumulation of anthropogenic strata (Zalasiewicz et al. Reference Zalasiewicz, Williams, Fortey, Smith, Barry, Coe and Bown2011), observations on Southeast Asia by Pelzer (Reference Pelzer1968) also emphasize the role of the removal of Holocene topsoils through deforestation and agricultural erosion. The histories of anthropogenic landscapes in Asia, and the social systems that produced them, are of great importance in understanding the rapidity of the transformations of the Anthropocene epoch. However, if the Anthropocene is to be understood as a process of global climate change caused by human activity, then current research leaves little doubt that this process has expanded enormously over the past few decades. When I first visited Asia (the Middle East) in 1982, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were about 341 parts per million, but have now reached 400 parts per million.Footnote 6 A recent reconstruction of the environmental impacts of the medieval Mongol empire suggests just how large this increase really is. Although the Mongol conquests killed perhaps thirty million people and resulted in considerable areas of forest regrowth on abandoned farmland, Pongratz et al. (Reference Pongratz, Caldeira, Reick and Claussen2011) calculate that the corresponding reduction in atmospheric carbon dioxide was only 0.183 parts per million. Many regions of preindustrial Asia retained very high population densities despite periods of war and unrest—including the An Lushan Rebellion, the Mongol expansion, and the fall of the Ming—that killed tens of millions of people. These dense populations certainly formed a prelude to the Anthropocene, or what Foley et al. (Reference Foley, Gronenborn, Andreae, Kadereit, Esper, Scholz and Pöschl2013) call the “Paleoanthropocene,” yet were not sufficient to transform global climate until the rise of fossil fuel economies in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Asia and the New Vulnerabilities of the Anthropocene
Just as it is hard to know where to place the human in the changing landscape of the Anthropocene, it is difficult to know where to situate Asia in the history and geography of the proposed new epoch. What actual impact is the Anthropocene having on Asia and vice versa? How is the Anthropocene affecting the vulnerability and resilience of Asian populations? To begin to consider these questions, let us first consider what we might mean by “impacts.” The Anthropocene is both a global process of anthropogenic climate change and a local laying down of industrial strata in cities, roads, dams, and other infrastructure. Zalasiewicz et al. (Reference Zalasiewicz, Williams, Steffen and Crutzen2010, 2229) argue that the second of these factors is less important than the first, since “If construction stops or slows, for whatever reason, then natural geomorphologic processes will rapidly re-establish themselves, as shown by the fate of ‘lost’ cities such as Angkor in Cambodia.” From a human welfare perspective, however, it is difficult to separate out these factors. Any prolonged cessation of industrial production and construction, however inescapable in the long term, would almost certainly be viewed by humans as a collapse. Furthermore, if we consider the Anthropocene from the perspective of human well-being, then both climate change and industrialization work to increase risks to population health, despite the initial gains in life expectancy obtained from modern science (McMichael Reference McMichael2014). Anthropocene impacts thus need to be studied as a complex balance between growth, equality, and well-being.
Asia comprises a huge, diverse region, and there is no single story regarding Asian vulnerability and resilience to the Anthropocene. In agricultural zones, the Anthropocene trajectory can be described as one in which peasant societies gradually became modernized, in many cases moving into industrial production in urban centers. After World War II, this trajectory received especially big stimulants from the Green Revolution of the 1960s and the shift of European and North American industrial production to Asia and Latin America from the 1990s. This whole historical process has been one in which social and economic systems became increasingly standardized and homogenous, reducing the diversity of traditional ecological knowledge, and decreasing resilience—although it should not be forgotten that many local actors have worked to resist globalizing state and corporate projects and to maintain social and ecological diversity (see, e.g., Alcorn et al. Reference Alcorn, Bamba, Masiun, Natalia, Royo, Berkes, Colding and Folke2003; Hudson Reference Hudson2004; Lansing Reference Lansing2006; Scott Reference Scott1998; Xu and Melick Reference Xu and Melick2007).
Recent research in sustainability science has emphasized the importance of analyzing linked or “coupled” social and ecological systems as a single unit, often termed a “social-ecological system” (Berkes and Folke Reference Berkes and Folke1998). Social-ecological systems are open systems with multilevel governance (Chapin et al. Reference Chapin, Kofinas and Folke2009). Macro-areas such as “Asia” are not usually seen as important levels of governance within social-ecological systems, but are significant to the extent that they affect external engagements and reproduce internal legacies and path dependencies. Globalization provides an increasingly significant component to the governance of social-ecological systems. Although it must be remembered that long-distance connections within these systems are not new, recent globalization has increased the scale of environmental impacts. As a result, the Anthropocene is increasingly experienced across Asia as an erosion of resilience that damages ecosystem services without concomitant equitable improvements in human well-being. This is an Asia-wide process, but China is undoubtedly one dark center of the late Anthropocene. The current and projected impacts of environmental deterioration in China are not easy to over-exaggerate, and the everyday impacts are especially severe for those millions of Chinese who experience the ensuing pollution (Watts Reference Watts2010). Priority given to poorly controlled industrial production has damaged rivers and agricultural land. In 2013, the Chinese government itself reported that 3.33 million hectares of cropland were too contaminated to grow food safely (Larson Reference Larson2014). Although representing only 2.5 percent of China's arable land, this is a huge area equivalent to almost three-quarters of the cultivated land in Japan. Farming in China is also being impacted by air pollution, which has become so bad that its effects on agricultural growth have been compared to a nuclear winter (Kaiman Reference Kaiman2014). Although the carbon footprint of most Chinese and indeed Asia as a whole is well behind averages in North America and Europe, China is a huge country characterized by a perfect storm of high population densities, weakly controlled capitalism, restrictions on political activism, and cultural traditions that emphasize the utility of natural resources (cf. Elvin Reference Elvin2004; Watts Reference Watts2010).
One characteristic of the late Anthropocene is the spreading global impact of Asian environments and environmental policies. Some of these impacts are “side-effects” of developments within the region, such as the growth in megacities and other urban conglomerates in China and Southeast Asia (Bai, Shi, and Liu Reference Bai, Shi and Liu2014). Deforestation continues to be a major problem across much of Asia, as it has been historically (Chew Reference Chew2001). Other impacts are from Asian resource extraction beyond Asia. Fishing provides a good example of the latter. Both China and Japan, and to a lesser extent Korea, are major distant-water fishing nations. China has developed a specialized technology for distant-water fishing over the past decade and has massively expanded its catch, with Africa now being the place where Chinese fleets catch the most fish (Pauly et al. Reference Pauly, Belhabib, Blomeyer, Cheung, Cisneros-Montemayor, Copeland and Harper2014). Chinese and other fishing fleets require huge amounts of fuel. A 2005 study estimated that fisheries used about 1.2 percent of global oil production, burning 12.5 times more energy than that contained in the edible protein of the fish that were caught (Tyedmers, Watson, and Pauly Reference Tyedmers, Watson and Pauly2005).
At a time of increasing concern over global food security, the acquiring of farmland overseas is a growing trend. Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states are the main players here, but China, India, and South Korea have also been very active. Asia accounts for a third of recent grabbed land, but some Asian countries have also become major land grabbers (Rulli, Saviori, and D'Odorico Reference Rulli, Saviori and D'Odorico2013). The controversy surrounding these “land-grabs” is exemplified by the 2008 plan of the Daewoo Corporation to lease 3.2 million acres of farmland on Madagascar to grow half of the maize required by South Korea. Since this plan would have meant that South Korea controlled half of Madagascar's arable land, an outcry led to the resignation of the Madagascan president and the canceling of the deal (Klare Reference Klare2012, 190). Food security is, of course, the nominal objective of these activities, but real food security requires sustainable governance of the storage, distribution, and consumption as well as the production of food (Fazzino Reference Fazzino2004). “Land grabbing” is having a major impact in Asia and beyond, but is often as much about short-term corporate profits and political corruption as real security.
Resource use across and beyond Asia is not only increasing but is fast becoming a frantic “race for what's left” (Klare Reference Klare2012), with all the ensuing dangers of military conflicts over scarce materials (Chalecki Reference Chalecki2013; Welzer Reference Welzer2012). East Asia is a major global consumer of mineral resources, ranging from iron and copper to rare earths. China in particular has become the world's leading consumer of iron, copper, aluminum ore, and coal and the second-largest consumer of petroleum (Klare Reference Klare2012, 17). Large companies with close state ties, such as the Aluminum Corporation of China (Chinalco), play a major role in mining operations in Africa and elsewhere. China now accounts for over 95 percent of rare earth mineral production, a market share it obtained in large part by overlooking environmental risks to lower production costs (Klare Reference Klare2012, 157–58).
Despite the need to separate out the various levels of governance within social-ecological systems in order to foster resilience, the Anthropocene marks a “folding of the human into the air, into the sea, the soil and DNA” (Dibley Reference Dibley2012, 139) that makes it more and more difficult to separate out “Asia” from the rest of global society. On the purely economic level, it should not be forgotten that part of the blame for China's environmental destruction lies with the United States and other (post)industrial countries that moved exports to China in the 1990s. According to Kelly and Jacobs (forthcoming), as much as one-third of China's current carbon dioxide emissions can be traced to the production of goods for export to the United States and Europe. Lin et al. (Reference Lin, Pan, Davis, Zhang, He, Wang, Streets, Wuebbles and Guan2014) have estimated that as much as a quarter of sulfate pollution over the western United States derives from export-related Chinese air pollution. The impacts of the Anthropocene are complex but look set to make Asian populations more vulnerable than ever. At the same time, the idea of the Anthropocene has finally shown us what was already obvious to anyone who looked: Asian social-ecological vulnerabilities are not limited to Asia.
Asia and Responses to the Anthropocene
Although we have been living in the Anthropocene for over 200 years, its accumulating impacts have resulted in growing ecological and social vulnerabilities at the same time as a relatively sudden realization that we are indeed deep in the embrace of the new epoch. How can we begin to think critically about the problems of the Anthropocene? What can we do to reduce the vulnerabilities of the epoch and its global transformations? The latter question in particular might seem to go beyond the normal purview of Asian studies, but any placing of Asia in the Anthropocene needs to take account of the region's long-standing role as the site of responses or even proposed solutions to environmental crisis.
As noted above, Adam Smith and other Enlightenment writers had an intuitive sense of China's heavy impacts on its natural environment.Footnote 7 By the late twentieth century, however, Asia was increasingly seen as a region where humans lived in some sort of mystical harmony with Nature. In this context, “Asia” has primarily meant the Buddhist, Daoist, and animist cultures of South, Southeast, and East Asia, but since it has usually been the idea rather than the reality of ecological harmony that has been important here, I shall provisionally refer to a generic “Asia” and “Asian Natures” in this section.
Asia has, of course, appeared in Western environmental writings in both pastoral and apocalyptic tropes. Many apocalyptic views of Nature in the region map the trajectory of modernization, ranging from Japan in the early postwar era (Huddle and Reich Reference Huddle and Reich1975) to China today (Watts Reference Watts2010), although some accounts, such as Ehrlich's (Reference Ehrlich1968) dystopian description of an overpopulated India, lean toward an earlier, Orientalist view of Asia as a hothouse of peasant masses. Equally influential pastoral views of Asia, from at least F. H. King's Reference King1911Farmers of Forty Centuries to the Vietnamese village at the beginning of Oliver Stone's Heaven and Earth (1993) have typically emphasized the long history of human links with the land, what the geographer Harold Brookfield (Reference Brookfield1984) called “landesque capital,” as well as the role of religions such as Buddhism in nature conservation (e.g., Sponsel Reference Sponsel and Balée1998).
In the United States, Asia has taken an especially important place in the environmental imagination through a long series of writers from Thoreau to Gary Snyder to Kim Stanley Robinson.Footnote 8 A major transformation in North American views of “Asian Nature” began on the West Coast in the 1950s. Previously, California's perceived proximity to the Orient had been seen in negative terms as a source of disease and infection (Nash Reference Nash2006), but this changed with a growing interest in the spiritual and ecological teachings of Asia, pioneered by writers and scholars such as Kenneth Rexroth and Alan Watts. This new focus on Asian religions and world-views—termed a “Pacific Shift” by Thompson (Reference Thompson, Callicott and Ames1989)—was founded upon a critique of materialism and can be said to have involved the structural opposition between the “West” as material and industrial and the “East” as spiritual and ecological. The growing trend toward the acceptance of Asian Natures in the West was further stimulated by White (Reference White1967) and other critiques of how Western civilization and, especially, Christianity had historically worked to destroy the environment. That such ideas remain influential today is clear from the role of Buddhism in the writings of Timothy Morton, who has undoubtedly become one of the most influential scholars of the Anthropocene in the humanities.
Recent research in ecology and sustainability science has given us a clear idea of many of the goals of social-ecological system stewardship required to build resilience (Chapin et al. Reference Chapin, Kofinas and Folke2009). The more difficult problem is how to generate the necessary social and cultural changes. The fact that what we might call Asian “eco-spirituality” has been important in Western responses to global environmental change gives Asian studies an important voice in such debates. Of course, many aspects of “eco-spirituality” were found in animistic traditions outside Asia, and the fact that Asia was privileged in this respect probably reflects long histories of Orientalist imaginings of the East.Footnote 9 Does this mean that Western interest in Asian Natures and spirituality has simply been an escapist fantasy? The relationships between environmentalism, identity, and politics are always complex (e.g., Yeh Reference Yeh2013), yet like “wilderness” in the United States, “Asian Natures” can provide an “open space” (Williams Reference Williams2004) for diversity and debate. By themselves, Buddhism, Shinto, or other Asian views of Nature cannot provide ready-made answers to the environmental crisis. The whole idea of Asian “harmony” with Nature was already being criticized in the 1970s. Perhaps the biggest objection was a practical one: even if the West really was able to adopt Asian environmentalist ideas on a broad scale, those ideas were clearly not enough to prevent wide-scale destruction of the environment in practice—however “pro-Nature” Asian religions and worldviews were in theory. Other critiques have focused on the impact of Western colonialism and capitalism on Asian uses of Nature (Hargrove Reference Hargrove, Callicott and Ames1989; Shiva Reference Shiva1991). All of this means that that are no “quick fixes” to the Anthropocene in Buddhism or other types of Asian eco-spiritualism. What we need instead is a range of ideas, structures, and practices that help build resilience and reduce uncertainty and vulnerability using local structures of social memory and governance (Berkes Reference Berkes2007; Chapin et al. Reference Chapin, Kofinas and Folke2009, Reference Chapin, Pickett, Power, Jackson, Carter and Duke2011; McIntosh, Tainter, and McIntosh Reference McIntosh, Tainter and McIntosh2000; Walker and Salt Reference Walker and Salt2006). The question thus becomes whether Asian world-views can help in this process.
The very idea that Asian religions or world-views might be used to respond to global systems of environmental change could be considered as a contradiction in terms. However, one of the most pressing environmentalist concerns today is how to combine local with global views of Nature, or what Heise (Reference Heise2008) calls combining “Sense of Place” with “Sense of Planet.” In this sense, Asia clearly has a role to play in the environmental imagination (Buell Reference Buell1995) of the Anthropocene. In the last part of this section, I want to make a brief comparison of two very different writers—Yasuda Yoshinori and Gary Snyder—who have both attempted to place “Asian Natures” within broader geographical/cultural frameworks that they argue might support a more sustainable future.
Yasuda Yoshinori (b. 1946) is a Japanese scholar who has built upon his research specializations in geography and archaeology to develop an explicitly environmentalist perspective in numerous books and papers. Yasuda's early works focused on Japan and the animistic forest cultures of the Jōmon and other native societies in the Japanese archipelago (Yasuda Reference Yasuda and Yasuda2001). Although Yasuda's work was widely criticized in the 1990s for its nationalistic approach, over the past decade he has attempted to expand his vision beyond Japan to a broader region around the Pan-Pacific Rim. The “ecotopia” of the vegetarian and non-milk-drinking civilizations around the Pacific Rim is contrasted with the aggressive, meat-eating, milk-drinking civilizations of Euro-America and Han China (Flenley and Yasuda Reference Flenley and Yasuda2008; Yasuda Reference Yasuda2002). Yasuda's writings are an elegy for a lost Japanese/Pan-Pacific Nature, which never existed in the dualistic form he imagines. In this respect, Yasuda follows many Japanese public intellectuals before him in a primitivist and essentialist approach that ignores differing approaches to Nature and modernity that exist in Japan. Yasuda's work can thus be said to reflect a tension between the hybridity of Japanese culture that derived from colonial and other encounters and the search for an essentialist purity that is so common in Japanese responses to that hybridity.
The American poet Gary Snyder (b. 1930) has developed a very different body of writing from the primarily historical approach of Yasuda, yet Snyder has also situated his work within the concept of a shared Pacific Rim culture (Gray Reference Gray2006). Like Yasuda, Snyder's work can be seen as a quest for an authentic ecological identity rooted in the history and traditions of the Asia-Pacific. However, in contrast to Yasuda, Snyder is more open to cultural difference; his poems and translations aim at a common vision, shared at least across the Pacific Rim, whereas Yasuda's writings are largely critical of the Judeo-Christian West and Han China without really interrogating the nature of his Japanese/animist alternative. Yasuda does not concern himself so much with actual places or actual links to the land, but rather with ideas of culture about the land. If the current question facing us is, “which concepts and narratives from the environmentalist inventory will move environmentally oriented thought into the future, and which ones shackle environmentalism to outdated templates?” (Heise and Carruth Reference Heise and Carruth2010), then Yasuda's narratives still seem to keep us back in the past.
Despite these differences, Yasuda and Snyder have both been popular and influential writers in their respective worlds. Both can be seen as coyote trickster figures, messengers who go against tradition to stimulate debate and change. The popularity of both writers derives from their creation of a space of environmentalist imagination that is perceived as differing from and therefore providing a critique of global/capitalist Natures. The writings of both Yasuda and Snyder pre-date the arrival of the Anthropocene as an explicit frame of reference, and it remains to be seen how their Asian eco-spiritualities will resonate with the new discourse of the Anthropocene. Given the historical importance of Asian world-views in this area, however, there is a need for Asian studies to develop new research on links between religion and sustainability and on how ideas about Asian eco-spirituality have influenced people in Asia and the West.
Conclusions: Building Resilience in and from Asia
While the whole idea of the Anthropocene may seem like a triumphalist vindication of an all-conquering human race, it also foregrounds the real possibility of a collapse of global civilization. Ehrlich and Ehrlich (Reference Ehrlich and Ehrlich2013) outline potential scenarios, reminding us that the ecological effects of even a “small” nuclear war (for example, between India and Pakistan) remain the “quickest and surest route to a collapse” (cf. Ehrlich et al. Reference Ehrlich, Harte, Harwell, Raven, Sagan, Woodwell and Berry1983). Although the image of Asian “harmony” with Nature remains a powerful one, the reality is that the region has a very long history of ecosystem transformation by humans. Agriculture (especially wet-rice farming), deforestation, urbanization, advanced structures of economic production and exchange, and coal use in premodern China all had major impacts on the environment. Although this essay has emphasized the significance of the invention and diffusion of the steam engine and fossil fuels starting around 1780, there is nevertheless a very real sense in which the Anthropocene has deep and environmentally damaging roots in Asia. The long history of human impacts on the environment in Asia provides us with a unique opportunity to analyze what are the really important thresholds in the Anthropocene.
The antiquity of the Anthropocene in Asia might seem to lie in stark contradiction with the traditions of Asian environmental philosophy that have been very influential (though not necessarily successful) in building responses (or at least ideas about possible responses) to environmental change. Human societies develop processes of adaptive learning that respond to local social-ecological conditions and build systems of local knowledge and governance to strengthen resilience to change (Chapin et al. Reference Chapin, Kofinas and Folke2009). By definition, these process occur within specific social-ecological contexts and are not therefore immediately transferable to other regions. Systems of adaptive learning that have developed in the regions of Asia would not be directly applicable to other regions, however successful they were in their original context. Furthermore, the real challenge for building resilience is to foster systems that can respond to uncertainty and the unexpected (Folke, Colding, and Berkes Reference Folke, Colding, Berkes, Berkes, Colding and Folke2003). For these reasons, Buddhism or any other Asian philosophy of Nature cannot provide an immediate answer to the problems of the Anthropocene. If, however, the goal of Asian and other area studies is to “document the existence, internal logic, and theoretical implications of the distinctive social and cultural values, expressions, structures, and dynamics that shape the societies and nations beyond Europe and the United States” (Szanton Reference Szanton and Szanton2004, 2), then the study of Asia can certainly contribute to our understanding of the local contextualization of systems of adaptive learning, providing us with case studies of long-term strategies for sustaining diversity, memory, and crisis response within Anthropocene social-ecological systems.
Acknowledgments
I thank Julia Adeney Thomas, Jeffrey Wasserstrom, and Jennifer Munger for proposing and organizing the panel in Philadelphia; Matt Edgeworth, Steven Ericson, and Rowan Flad for replying promptly to requests for information; and the two referees for their comments on the manuscript. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the University of Ljubljana, and I am grateful to Professor Andrej Bekeš and the other faculty of the UL Department of Asian and African Studies for their support. Research for this paper was supported by Alaska EPSCoR NSF award #EPS-0701898 and the State of Alaska; the JSPS Core-to-Core Program for Advanced Research Networks; and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Canada.
