About this issue
This issue of RCC Perspectives offers insights into similarities and differences in the ways people in Asia have tried to master and control the often unpredictable and volatile environments of which they were part. In these histories, nonhuman actors such as capricious rivers, fluid delta regions, monsoon rains, and wild animals play an important role. In some instances, the power of nature facilitated colonial rule and exploitation; in others, it helped to subvert political control. The essays gathered here present new environmental scholarship that speaks across political boundaries, draws new connections between regions and time periods, and tells unexpected stories about the manifold relationships between nations, people, and their environment.
How to cite: Münster, Ursula, Shiho Satsuka, and Gunnel Cederlöf (eds.), “Asian Environments: Connections across Borders, Landscapes, and Times,” RCC Perspectives 2014, no. 3. doi.org/10.5282/rcc/6331.
Content
- Introduction by Ursula Münster, Shiho Satsuka, and Gunnel Cederlöf
Unstable Environments
- The Journey of Sand: How the Yellow River Has Shaped Lankao County by Ling Zhang
- Commodified Land, Dangerous Water: Colonial Perceptions of Riverine Bengal by Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt
- Gangetic Floods: Landscape Transformation, Embankments, and Clay Brick-Making by Vipul Singh
- Monsoon Landscapes: Spatial Politics and Mercantile Colonial Practice in India by Gunnel Cederlöf
Colonial Environments
- Governing the “Wasteland”: Ecology and Shifting Political Subjectivities in Colonial Bengal by Iftekhar Iqbal
- Colonial Rule versus Indigenous Knowledge in Bengal’s Western Frontier by Sanjukta Das Gupta
- Invisible Labor: Adivasi Workers in the History of South Indian Forest Conservation by Ursula Münster
Entangled Environments
- Bonding with the Nonhuman World: Why People Feed Wildlife in Japan by John Knight
- The Flight of Cranes: Militarized Nature at the North Korea–South Korea Border by Eleana Kim
- Mosquitoes, Malaria, and Malnutrition: The Making of the Assam Tea Plantations by Arupjyoti Saikia
Uncertain Environments
- Doomed to Suffer in Silence? Living with Pollution in Industrialized Rural China by Anna Lora-Wainwright
- The Satoyama Movement: Envisioning Multispecies Commons in Postindustrial Japan by Shiho Satsuka
- Sustainability at Dead-Ends: The Future of Hope in Rural Japan by Bridget Love