Perspectives

For a long time, the British Empire saw the climate and the regional political strongholds of northeast India as insuperable obstacles to conquest.

The essay suggests that what is absent from the scientific discourse on the Anthropocene is a postcolonial perspective that points out the fact that we are not talking about generalizable social, economic, and cultural structures and belief systems, but that instead we are describing very specific political, economic, and discursive regimes of power.

Rural villagers in China have a sophisticated awareness of the risks they face due to pollution, yet they often feel that they are helpless to improve their situation.

The exploitation of the cheap manual labor provided by Adivasis and the appropriation of their indigenous environmental knowledge has enabled and equally influenced environmental governance at the Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary since colonial times.

After traders from East India Company discovered Assam’s wild tea plants in the early decades of the nineteenth century, the commodification of this resource in the eastern border of Bengal radically transformed the ecological condition of the region.

Bengal’s essential character as a fluid landscape was changed during the colonial times through legal interventions that were aimed at creating permanent boundaries between land and water, with land given priority.

Conservation areas within the Korean demilitarized zone generate new “natures” that are deeply political and enmeshed in evolving relations among humans and nonhumans, as seen using the example of migratory cranes.

This paper discusses one especially vigorous wing of the satoyama revitalization movement in Japan: the mobilization to recreate forests that produce highly valued matsutake mushrooms.

Self-sufficiency has become a dominant priority of rural sustainability in Japan. The paper examines a community mapping initiative that empowers regional residents to rediscover the character of their depleted surroundings.