Covering the ancient period through to the 21st century, this book examines how landscapes have changed across East Asia over time. Featuring examples of a variety of landscapes, from the riverine and agricultural to the urban and aesthetic, this books thus presents a comprehensive review of East Asian environmental history. The eleven chapters, written by an international team of leading scholars, provide analysis of a wide range of spatial, temporal, and thematic considerations. Seeking to use the concept of landscape to evaluate the opportunities and constraints faced by East Asian communities, it also explores the relationship between landscape transformation and human agency. In so doing, it aims to survey the current methodology and scholarship in the field and demonstrate a new approach which encompasses socio-economic and cultural history, as well as GIS-based geographical studies. Providing an in-depth examination of landscape change across the sub-regions of China and Japan, this book will be useful to students and scholars of Asian History and Environmental Studies.

This edited volume engages with some of the most dynamic themes in current research on East Asian environmental history, including agricultural science, war and the environment, imperial forestry, oceanic history, and the history of energy. Chapters in this book supply an overview of environmental history as a rapidly expanding field, continuing to generate valuable insights into the mutually constitutive relationship between human societies and the biophysical environment. The book is divided into three parts: Part I consists of three chapters related to land use, while Part II includes five chapters that focus on water, a topic of perennial concern among environmental historians of East Asia, especially as it relates to irrigation, food production, and marine fisheries. Part III consists of two chapters, discussing the impact of new technologies on air quality, in addition to the history of energy in East Asia, which has emerged as an important area of inquiry at the intersection between both environmental history and the history of science and technology. Perspectives on Environmental History in East Asia: Changes in the Land, Water, and Air will appeal to students and scholars of East Asian studies, environmental history, and environmental sciences.

As environmental history has developed as growing sub-discipline within the study of history, great emphasis has been placed on the importance of adopting an interdisciplinary approach. Indeed, as Environmental History in East Asia shows, by drawing on research and methodologies from the fields of science, technology, geography, geology and ecology, we are able to develop a much richer understanding of a region’s history. This book provides a comprehensive examination of environmental history in East Asia, ranging temporally from the Ming dynasty to the 21st Century and spatially across China, Japan and Taiwan. Split into four parts, the chapters cover a wide range of fascinating topics, comparing environmental thought and policy in the East and West, the transformation of the landscape, land resource utilization and impact of agriculture and disasters and diseases across the region. A diverse selection of case studies are used to illustrate the chapters, including the role of Daoism, Qing pasturelands and 21st century swine flu. Truly interdisciplinary in approach, this book will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Asian environmentalism, environmental history, Asian anthropology, Asian development studies and Asian history more generally.

Forests, Water and People in the Humid Tropics is a comprehensive review of the hydrological and physiological functioning of tropical rain forests, the environmental impacts of their disturbance and conversion to other land uses, and optimum strategies for managing them. The book brings together leading specialists in such diverse fields as tropical anthropology and human geography, environmental economics, climatology and meteorology, hydrology, geomorphology, plant and aquatic ecology, forestry and conservation agronomy. The editors have supplemented the individual contributions with invaluable overviews of the main sections and provide key pointers for future research. Specialists will find authenticated detail in chapters written by experts on a whole range of people-water-land use issues, managers and practitioners will learn more about the implications of ongoing and planned forest conversion, while scientists and students will appreciate a unique review of the literature.

Suitable for use in courses on ethnic studies or gender studies Rethinks interaction between Han Chinese and non-Han cultures Considers how religion has adapted to the challenges of modern Chinese history Describes rituals and ritual specialists largely unknown to Western readers Combines historical and ethnographic methodologies

This book provides an in-depth examination of the growing Asian tourism market and consumption in Arctic destinations. Through five parts, the book covers Asian mobilities consumption as an extension of Arctic international politics, the transportation sector and green cruise tourism, and ethnicity, culture, and history. It contributes to further understanding of the impacts of increased tourism in these polar regions by exploring climate change, debates around emerging economies and global power roles in the political, socio-economic, security and legal issues of the Arctic and Antarctic and associated polar strategies and policy. By drawing on a range of disciplines and with contributions from experts in Arctic destinations or who are associated with the Arctic, it further provides a holistic framing of emerging demand and mobility patterns of Asian tourists in a polar context. Asian Mobilities Consumption in a Changing Arctic will be valuable reading for students and academics across the fields of tourism, economics, sustainability, development studies as well as other social science disciplines.

The Regional Handbooks of Economic Development series provides accessible overviews of countries within their larger domestic and international contexts, focusing on the relations among regions as they meet the challenges of the twenty first century. The series allows the non-specialist student to explore a wide range of complex factors-social and political as well as economic-that affect the growth of developing regions in Asia, Europe, and South America. Each Handbook provides an overview chapter discussing the region's economic conditions within an historical and political context, as well as 20 or more chapter-length essays written by recognized experts, which analyze the key issues affecting a region's economy: its population, natural resources, foreign trade, labor problems, and economic inequalities, and other vital factors. In addition, the volumes offer useful support materials, including a series of appendices that include a detailed chronology of events in the region, a glossary of terms, biographical entries on key personalities, an annotated bibliography of further reading, and a comprehensive analytical index.

Views on the dynamics of tropical forests are changing rapidly with the recognition that their environment is variable on the decadal to century scale. Fluctuating climatic conditions partly determine tropical forest structure, species composition and dynamics. Tropical communities are also highly contingent in space and time with respect to site and historical factors. Tropical forests have experienced to some degree this disturbance regime in the past, but climatologists are now predicting increasingly frequent extreme events in the new century. The combination of increasing deforestation and land-use conversion by man plus an increasingly variable environment means a situation that could be very difficult to manage.

Ecology is an attempt to understand the reciprocal relationship between living and nonliving elements of the earth. For years, however, the discipline either neglected the human element entirely or presumed its effect on natural ecosystems to be invariably negative. Among social scientists, notably in geography and anthropology, efforts to address this human-environment interaction have been criticized as deterministic and mechanistic. Bridging the divide between social and natural sciences, the contributors to this book use a more holistic perspective to explore the relationships between humans and their environment. Exploring short- and long-term local and global change, eighteen specialists in anthropology, geography, history, ethnobiology, and related disciplines present new perspectives on historical ecology. A broad theoretical background on the material factors central to the field is presented, such as anthropogenic fire, soils, and pathogens. A series of regional applications of this knowledge base investigates landscape transformations over time in South America, the Mississippi Delta, the Great Basin, Thailand, and India. The contributors focus on traditional societies where lands are most at risk from the incursions of complex, state-level societies. This book lays the groundwork for a more meaningful understanding of humankind's interaction with its biosphere. Scholars and environmental policymakers alike will appreciate this new critical vocabulary for grasping biocultural phenomena.