The term “Anthropocene,” coined in the 1980s by the ecologist Eugene F. Stoermer and popularized at the turn of the twenty-first century by the atmospheric chemist and Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen, has been used increasingly in the past decade to highlight human activity as a geological force and to underscore the rapidly escalating impacts of human behaviors on the planet—sufficient, many have argued, to launch a new geological age. While geologists and environmentalists continue to debate the validity of Anthropocene as a formal designation, climate change; mass extinctions of plant and animal species; and widespread pollution of sky, sea, and land make clear the extent to which humans have shaped global ecologies.Footnote ¹ An understanding of Asia—home to more than half the world's population, an increasingly significant contributor to global carbon dioxide emissions, the site of the Third Pole,Footnote ² and an area acutely vulnerable to climate change and rising sea levels—is vital to an understanding of the physical, chemical, biological, and cultural processes that comprise the Anthropocene.

Asia and Asian studies are important to understanding the Anthropocene—not only because of Asian peoples’ long histories of transforming environments, not only because of Asian peoples’ long histories of environmental philosophies advocating harmonious human-nonhuman relationships, but also because of Asian peoples’ long histories of cultural products exposing and decrying environmental abuse and the vivid global responses to Asia's environmental crises. Increased engagement with the Anthropocene has the potential to enrich Asian studies greatly.

To be sure, scholars of Asia from a variety of disciplines have grown increasingly attentive in recent years to environmental destruction within and across national and regional borders in Central, East, South, and Southeast Asia. But as Mark Hudson (Reference Hudson2014) has pointed out, for a variety of reasons very little research in Asian studies focuses explicitly on Asia and the Anthropocene. This is particularly true of scholars of literature.

Several years ago, in Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures, I analyzed a number of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese literary treatments of damaged environments, pointing out the intercultural thematic and conceptual networks with numerous other texts from the region and around the world. In this study, I urged the field of ecocriticism (environmental criticism, literature and environment studies), which to date has focused disproportionately on Western examples, to open itself more fully to a broader range of languages and cultures.Footnote ³ I also encouraged scholars of East Asian literatures, who to date have focused primarily on how individual East Asian literatures (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Taiwanese) have celebrated harmonious human relationships with nature, to participate more actively in environmental criticism, and particularly comparative environmental criticism.Footnote ⁴

Building on Ecoambiguity, in the following pages I introduce the work of three writers—the Japanese poet Sakaki Nanao (サカキナナオ, 1923–2008), the Korean poet Ch'oe Sŭngja (최승자, 1952–), and the American documentary novelist Diane Wilson (1948–). Although not using the term “Anthropocene,” Sakaki, Ch'oe, and Wilson all address the global ecological impact of East Asian societies, depicting Japanese, Koreans, and Taiwanese, respectively, as reshaping not only local ecosystems but also environments around the world. Particularly instructive about their work are the different ways they interweave the local, the global, and everything in-between, illuminating the deep interconnectedness of societies and the importance of understanding phenomena such as environmental crises on a range of scales, from the local to the global. Although juxtaposing Wilson, an American shrimper, activist, and documentary novelist who attacked Formosa Plastics, with two East Asian poets (Sakaki and Ch'oe) might appear to be incongruous, it is precisely this sort of transnational and trans-genre approach that can help illustrate the particularities and commonalities inherent in processes of environmental destruction. Doing so highlights the global consequences not only of ecodegradation but also of environmental movements: environmental consciousness in Taiwan helped ameliorate the island's landscapes at the same time that it inadvertently led to the destruction of Gulf Coast communities in Texas.

But why focus on Japan, Korea, and Taiwan? Why not China and India, the world's two most populous countries, together housing one-third of humanity? China is the world's top emitter of carbon dioxide and a ceaseless builder of dams, mines, and oil wells on multiple continents, and its impact on regional (especially Southeast Asian) and global ecosystems currently receives far more press then does that of its Asian neighbors, apart from Fukushima.Footnote ⁵ For its part, India ranks third in carbon emissions, although still well behind China and the United States.Footnote ⁶ India not only is the site of the 1984 Bhopal catastrophe, the world's worst industrial disaster, but also is particularly vulnerable to climate change, with millions of its citizens threatened by increasingly severe droughts and cyclones, as well as by relentlessly rising sea levels. Nonetheless, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, like many other affluent countries, have likewise significantly impacted landscapes worldwide; focusing attention on these changes underscores global culpability in anthropogenic environmental degradation.

And why literature? After all, literature rarely offers comprehensive remedies, much less proposes official policies to prevent future or remediate current damage to peoples and landscapes. Yet it is important to recognize that, as Lawrence Buell (Reference Buell2005, vi) has pointed out, “For technological breakthroughs, legislative reforms, and paper covenants about environmental welfare to take effect, or even to be generated in the first place, requires a climate of transformed environmental values, perception, and will. To that end, the power of story, image, and artistic performance and the resources of aesthetics, ethics, and cultural theory are crucial.” Taking Buell's argument one step further, literature and other art forms can not only help shape legislation that requires changes in behaviors, but also work to change consciousness in the absence of public policy. In particular, texts such as Sakaki Nanao's poem “Ancestors of the Japanese” (Nihonjin no senzo, 日本人の先祖, Reference Sakaki Nanao[1986] 1989); Ch'oe Sŭngja's poems “Rhapsody of Yŏŭido” (Yŏŭido kwangsigok, 여의도 광시곡, Reference Ch'oe Sŭngja1984b) and “Went to the sea in winter” (Kyŏul e pada e kassŏtta, 겨울에 바다에 갔었다, Reference Ch'oe Sŭngja1984a); and Diane Wilson's documentary novel An Unreasonable Woman: A True Story of Shrimpers, Politicos, Polluters and the Fight for Seadrift, Texas (Reference Wilson2005) reveal the global consequences of local and national behaviors. Wilson's narrative also provides an explicit model of sustained commitment to protesting such behaviors.Footnote ⁷

Ch'oe Sŭngja made her mark in the aftermath of the 1980 Kwangju uprising. Incorporating vulgarisms and other rough language, her verse departs from the typical Korean “female poetry” of earlier decades, and its depictions of powerful women “stranded in dignity” provided the foundation for a new Korean feminism. On the other hand, much of Ch'oe's poetry brims with despair, featuring individuals who compare themselves to mold, urine stains, maggot-infested bodies, and syphilis germs (Kim Reference Kim and Lee2003, 461–62).

Unlike much environmental literature, which specifies place, Ch'oe Sŭngja's “Went to the sea in winter” is silent as to the geographical origins of the pollution it describes. The text opens with the poet describing her wintertime visit to the “polluted sea” (오염된 바다), where she observes gulls and a female corpse that gives birth and then floats along like plastic. But the poet gives no indication as to the location of this ocean—the waters she describes could just as easily be off the coast of Korea as off the coast of China, Brazil, or Spain. In contrast, the poet is very clear as to the expansive reach of this polluted sea; the children born into this sea spread out and pollute specific landscapes around the world:

“Winter” does not speak explicitly of the children who gush out of this woman as eventually themselves polluting ecosystems. But the references to weaving “tenacious spider webs” (질긴 거미집을 치고) in Pietermaritzburg (KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa), noted for its timber and aluminum production, and Odendaalsrus (Free State, South Africa), with its long history of gold mining, suggest that as the woman's offspring become adults, they transform lands far from the site of their birth. The mention of peeling eggs in Philippine soil intimates that the woman's grown children are similarly disturbing natural habitats there. In Paris and Berlin her offspring spread venereal disease and give birth to children who likely will follow the same trajectory as their parents, continuing and expanding the radius of the cycle by scattering to other lands, damaging ecosystems on a vast scale, and bearing even more children.

In contrast to “Winter,” Ch'oe's “Rhapsody of Yŏŭido” speaks not of people dispersing abroad to reshape environments far from home but instead of East Asians consuming the world from the “comforts” of home. And it is the land, the island of Yŏŭido, rather than the female body, that has become uninhabitable. This poem argues that incessant consumption and production on Seoul's largest island—home to South Korea's stock exchange; National Assembly; and headquarters of numerous corporations, banks, and broadcasters—injure both people and the nonhuman. Like much Korean verse on devastated environments, from its opening section “Rhapsody” integrates portrayals of human anguish with scenes of damaged landscapes. In addition, the poem concludes its first, fourth, and sixth (and final) sections with ironic declarations about Yŏŭido's status as “bread of heaven” (chŏnsang ŭi ppang, 天下의 빵).

For its part, the first section wraps up with:

while the fourth section concludes:

“Rhapsody” converts the biblical “bread of heaven”—said to have been sent down by God to nourish starving people both physically (e.g., Exodus 16; Psalms 78, 105) and spiritually, in the form of Jesus (e.g., John 6)—into a polluted, fermenting, swelling mass. By doing so, it accentuates the enormity of environmental destruction: Koreans have devastated the one thing that can save them, both physically and spiritually. They might believe this island is the “bread of heaven,” in that it has brought wealth to so many, but they have transformed it into something that quickly risks becoming the hellish world of shantytowns and trash so graphically portrayed in the Turkish writer Latife Tekin's (1957–) novel Berci Kristin çöp masallari (Berji Kristin: Tales from the garbage hills, Reference Tekin1984), published the same year.

Yet “Rhapsody” is not concerned solely with what Koreans have done to themselves and this single island at the center of Seoul. The poem concludes:

The phrase “this world” (이 세계/世界) could refer to the world of Yŏŭido, or the world of Seoul, or even the world of Korea. But it just as easily could refer, and more likely does refer, considering the reference to the “sacred heavens,” to the world more broadly. In other words, Yŏŭido is a relentless consumer, chewing, leaving its mark on everything, regardless of origins. For now, the island's glittering skyscrapers are nourished by a different structure—a world already reduced to bones—but the poem's use of the term “remaining” (남은 뼈) suggests that this will be only a temporary solution, that soon the hubristic island, and the world, might be left with nothing.

The Japanese poet Sakaki Nanao's “Ancestors of the Japanese” (Reference Sakaki Nanao1989) speaks more explicitly than either Ch'oe Sŭngja's “Rhapsody of Yŏŭido” or her “Went to the sea in winter” of consumers reshaping both their own and distant landscapes. An environmental activist as well as a creative writer and translator, Sakaki enjoyed a close friendship with the American poet Gary Snyder (1930–), who called him, somewhat erroneously, “one of the first truly cosmopolitan poets to emerge from Japan” (Snyder Reference Snyder1987, ix); Sakaki included Snyder and other foreigners in Buzoku (The Tribe), a countercultural group that he and the environmental writer Yamao Sansei (山尾三省, 1938–2001) led in Japan in the 1960s and 1970s. Much of Sakaki's poetry decries Japanese destruction of environments on multiple scales. For instance, “Ancestors” depicts Japanese as irradiating their nation's second-largest island and northernmost prefecture of Hokkaido, living “in flower gardens of oil and plastics,” and, echoing Ch'oe Sŭngja's figurative language, “suck[ing] to the bone [骨までしゃぶる] the woods called National Forests / the treasures of all.” But Sakaki's poem also has Japanese purchasing from Korea such luxuries as highly prized and formidably expensive matsutake mushrooms and from China millions of poisonous snakes valued as love potions.Footnote ⁸ Moreover, it has Japanese—not satisfied with sucking the bones of their own national forests—invading the Amazon: “Even [the products of local forests] being insufficient on the other side of the ocean / seeking toilet paper / they infest the Amazon jungle / swarms of Japanese cockroaches.” That the Japanese are razing the Amazon for the raw materials to manufacture toilet paper, a much greater daily necessity than the mushrooms and snakes they take from Korea and China, points at least in part to their desperation; the nation's forests, the poem suggests, cannot keep up with the demand even for something so central to daily life, perhaps because they have been so decimated by decades of ceaseless consumption.

The penultimate stanza of “Ancestors” opens up to a broader range of devastated ecosystems:

Japanese allegedly work for the future, determined to create a more comfortable life for their children, but in so doing they bequeath to their descendants a cesspool not unlike that featured in Ch'oe Sŭngja's “Rhapsody,” polluting rivers, lakes, and oceans as well as the earth (大地) itself. Sakaki's poem does not specify where these damaged ecosystems are located, whether in Japan, elsewhere in Asia, or on other continents, but this is precisely the point: Japanese have razed not only their own woodlands, even those designated as National Forests, but also Amazonian jungles, and in fact have polluted a variety of landscapes worldwide. The chemicals with which they overburden the earth, both directly and indirectly, seep into the water, destroying proximate and distant rivers and lakes and eliminating coral reefs far beyond national shores. “Ancestors” concludes with Japanese calling at once for “more koalas” and “more missiles,” all in the name of “the glorious Japanese constitution / for the happy cultured life” (文化的な生活の為). In addition to highlighting the inseparability of Japanese “culture” and damaged environments, Sakaki's poem also preempts any claim that this culture is attractive, much less illustrious. It emphasizes that a society founded on destruction, no matter how glorious its achievements, is not sustainable. Sakaki's poem gives no alternatives. It portrays Japanese justifications of wrecking ecosystems to create culture as at best misguided and at worst diabolical.Footnote ⁹

Ch'oe Sŭngja's “Went to the sea in winter” not only describes the offspring of the corpse the poet observes floating in the polluted sea as wreaking havoc in Africa, Asia, and Europe, but also claims that “now and then, on a night so long, so wearisome, they will stir up a revolution / invariably, abortive revolutions.” The poet is unclear as to the nature of such revolutions—do these offspring provoke local peoples to rebel against abusive treatment? But regardless of their origins, these revolutions seem fated to fail, local peoples subdued, silenced. In narratives such as the Vietnamese writer Minh Chuyen's (1948–) “A Father and His Children” (Reference Minh Chuyen, Lien, Waugh, Waugh and Lien[2005] 2010a) local peoples lose even the courage to speak. This short story centers on Tran Van Ngo, whose family has been devastated by Agent Orange. Ngo was poisoned in 1970 when American planes sprayed Agent Orange on the forest where his troops were garrisoned; his children and grandchildren suffer from debilitating birth defects. Although Ngo writes a letter to the president of the American company that produced Agent Orange, urging him to take full responsibility and compensate the millions of families who have lost loved ones, he ultimately burns the document; he also refuses to join the lawsuit against the companies that provided the toxic chemicals to the American military, fearing that he will simply “multiply the animosity between Americans and Vietnamese” (128).Footnote ¹⁰

In contrast, local peoples are anything but silent and revolutionaries are anything but defeated in Ishimure Michiko's Sea of suffering and the pure land: Our Minamata disease (Kugai jōdo: Waga Minamatabyō, 苦界浄土：わが水俣病, Reference Ishimure Michiko[1969] 2004), Japan's best-known creative work on Minamata disease, one of Japan's “Four Big Pollution Diseases” (yondai kōgaibyō, 四大公害病).Footnote ¹¹ In addition to describing the horrors mercury poisoning wreaked on individuals, communities, and landscapes, Sea of suffering also outlines Ishimure's relentless struggle against corporate and government officials, one that after many years resulted in compensation payments to thousands of the afflicted (although many continue to fight for recognition and compensation), and Minamata's reinvention as a model environmental city, becoming in 2001 an official Japanese Eco-town.Footnote ¹²

Sea of suffering makes clear Chisso's reach beyond Japan, speaking of the company's controversial history in colonial Korea, including its factories in Hŭngnam and damming of the Yalu River between China and Korea.Footnote ¹³ The narrator discusses the plight of Koreans under Japanese control more generally, referencing Korean deaths in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In her afterword, Ishimure (Reference Ishimure Michiko[1969] 2004, 255–56) also condemns Chisso's clandestine attempt in the late 1960s to export to Korea containers of poisonous mercury effluent. But Sea of suffering says little about how Japanese are shaping ecosystems farther from home.

Diane Wilson's An Unreasonable Woman (Reference Wilson2005), on the other hand, reveals the devastating impact of a Taiwanese company—Formosa Plastics Corporation (台灣塑膠公司), the world's second-largest (after the Japanese Shin-Etsu Chemical Company, 信越化学工業株式会社) producer of polyvinyl chloride (PVC)—on ecosystems both in Taiwan and in the United States, particularly along the Gulf Coast. An accidental environmental activist, Wilson describes how the United States provided the Taiwanese businessman Wang Yongqing (王永慶, 1917–2008) with a development grant with which he established Formosa Plastics in 1954. The company's plants soon wreaked havoc on the ecosystems of Taiwan, depicted in the text as a “poor polluted island” (230). As a reporter informs Wilson:

Wilson eventually has the opportunity to visit Taiwan, where she speaks with her Taiwanese counterparts, activists protesting Wang Yongqing's proposed new plant, and learns more about the island's environmental history. A professor of chemical engineering at National Taipei University contrasts for her the Portuguese name for Taiwan—Ilha Formosa (Beautiful Island)—with the reality of a land where industrial roads have opened forests to logging, agriculture, and development, leading to soil erosion so serious that “half of the island slopes like baggage falling off of a donkey's back” (338). The air pollution is inescapable, Wilson writing that in Houchin, “The factory's noise and the roar of 150 chimneys that flared smoke and ash and God knows what chemical made the villagers’ windows and doors rattle. It was perpetual morning, for it never got dark and nobody slept, and when it rained, Houchin's rain was yellow acid rain” (342). Every river Wilson visits is more polluted than before, largely because Formosa Plastics shuts off its wastewater pipes when facing inspection by the Public Health Agency. But the courage and persistence of the Taiwanese activists inspires Wilson, and after returning home she speaks of taking on “a Taiwan-born intensity on zero discharge” (353).

Significant but not surprising, however, is that Wilson spends even more time in An Unreasonable Woman on the damage Formosa Plastics has inflicted on the United States. The reporter, cited above, who told her about Wang Yongqing continued:

In other words, a Taiwanese company—funded and sanctioned by the United States—destroyed ecosystems both in Taiwan and in the United States; the text identifies Texas as the state with the nation's worst toxic air pollution, with lung cancer death rates higher than the national average (75). The communities most affected by the disease—or at least certain members of those communities, and contrary to Formosa's and the government's expectations—fight back.Footnote ¹⁴ But Wilson's documentary novel makes clear just how much has been lost.

Ultimately An Unreasonable Woman does not limit itself to Taiwan and the United States. There are several references to Bhopal, including in the epilogue, where Wilson speaks of her thirty-day hunger strike in 2002, in solidarity with the people there; she continues to distribute information on Bhopal during visits to the Union Carbide (now Dow Chemical) plant in Seadrift, Texas.Footnote ¹⁵ Nor does this documentary novel speak only of the damage wreaked by Formosa Plastics; it also strongly condemns both other global chemical giants and the national and local authorities who enable pollution and spend inordinate resources attempting to intimidate those struggling against it:

These are sentiments with which Ishimure Michiko and countless environmental activists the world over can easily relate.

Noteworthy about the works discussed above by Ch'oe Sŭngja, Sakaki Nanao, and Diane Wilson, as well as those by Ishimure Michiko, Kadammanitta Ramakrishnan, and Minh Chuyen, is their emphasis on the devastation of individuals and individual communities, however broadly defined, not (yet) of the entire planet. They thus differ from apocalyptic novels such as the Japanese writer Abé Kōbō’s (安部公房, 1924–93) Inter-ice age 4 (Daiyon kanpyōki, 第四間氷期, Reference Abé Kōbō1959), which depicts a world in which climate change and genetic engineering have radically transformed human society, rising sea levels have buried continents, and people have been replaced by a new species created from aborted human fetuses, and the Chinese writer Wang Lixiong's (王力雄, 1953–) three-volume Yellow peril (Huang huo, 黄祸, Reference Wang1991), which opens with the breaching of dikes along the Yellow River at the beginning of the twenty-first century and concludes with human civilizations and much of the nonhuman destroyed not long thereafter. Nevertheless, as Wilson laments in Diary of an Eco-Outlaw (Reference Wilson2011, 28), there is: “No end point. And I came to believe that there was no such thing as fixing a problem. Problems just reinvented themselves or dabbed a couple dozen curlicues on their test-tube heads and renamed themselves.” But she also makes clear that this is no excuse to stop fighting.

Examining together creative works separated by culture, language, and geography but connected by a concern with the human reshaping of the planet's ecosystems, in other words with the Anthropocene, has much to contribute to the environmental humanities, an emerging transdisciplinary field that is becoming a key part of the liberal arts and an indispensable component of the twenty-first century university. The environmental humanities foster a deeper appreciation of how different societies engage with the environment and how disparate communities address ecological changes and crises. They also enable a better understanding of the transnational and transtemporal processes that have caused societies around the world and throughout history to routinely damage both proximate and distant landscapes, despite vast differences in cultures, attitudes toward nature, and the local ecosystems they inhabit. The environmental humanities make us more aware of the many ways diverse societies have grappled with phenomena that are grounded in specific cultures and histories but that also resonate with those of other places and peoples and have widespread regional if not global implications. This diverse field works toward breaking down barriers of isolation, insularity, and exceptionalism, demonstrating that although human societies, the environments in which they live, and the dilemmas facing different peoples and ecosystems are distinctive, they are not unique.

Ideally, the environmental humanities not only draw on the expertise of individual humanists who themselves are engaged in interdisciplinary work on peoples and cultures from around the world but also bring together scholars from across the humanities and related social sciences, from anthropology, architecture, art history, economics, ethics, history, literature, philosophy, politics, psychology, religion, sociology, and urban planning, to collaborate on specific environmental problems, whether local or half a world away, as well as broader environmental concerns. Just as important to the environmental humanities is cooperation among humanists, social scientists, scientists, and engineers in working toward ameliorating if not resolving environmental problems locally, regionally, and globally in our era widely recognized as the Anthropocene. Bringing scholars of literature, history, and related fields more deeply into conversation with biologists, chemists, physicists, and engineers promises to transform how we address the threats to our environment. The environmental humanities are vital not simply in communicating the findings of scientists and social scientists to the broader public, as often is argued, but also, and even more important, in promoting actual cultural and ecological change by helping us develop deeper, more nuanced understandings of the fluid relationships between peoples and environments in specific places and moments, as well as over time and across space. It goes without saying that scholars of Asia have much to contribute to this important enterprise.