Since in the current global environmental and climate crisis East Asia will play a major role in negotiating solutions, it is vital to understand East Asian cultural variations in approaching and solving environmental challenges in the past, present, and future. The interdisciplinary volume Nature, Environment and Culture in East Asia. The Challenge of Climate Change, edited by Carmen Meinert, explores how cultural patterns and ideas have shaped a specific understanding of nature, how local and regional cultures develop(ed) coping strategies to adapt to environmental and climatic changes in the past and in the present and how various institutions and representatives might introduce their ideas and agendas in future environmental and climate policies on national levels and in international negotiating systems.

Ecologists have long based their conceptual frameworks in the natural sciences. Recently, however, they have acknowledged that ecosystems cannot be understood without taking into account human interventions that may have taken place for thousands of years. And for their part, social scientists have recognized that human behavior must be understood in the environment in which it is acted out. Researchers have thus begun to develop the area of “human ecology.” Yet human ecology needs suitable conceptual frameworks to tie the human and natural together. In response, Cultural Values and Human Ecology uses the framework of cultural values to collect a set of highly diverse contributions to the field of human ecology. Values represent an important and essential aspect of the intellectual organization of a society, integrated into and ordained by the over-arching cosmological system, and constituting the meaningful basis for action, in terms of concreteness and abstraction of content as well as mutability and permanence. Because of this balance, values lend themselves to the kinds of analyses of ecological relationships conducted here, those that demand a reasonable amount of specificity as well as historical stability. The contributions to Cultural Values and Human Ecology are exceedingly diverse. They include abstract theoretical discussions and specific case studies, ranging across the landscape of Southeast Asia from the islands to southern China. They deal with hunting-gathering populations as well as peasants operating within contemporary nation-states, and they are the work of natural scientists, social scientists, and humanists of Western and Asian origin. Diversity in the backgrounds of the authors contributes most to the varied approaches to the theme of this volume, because differences in cultural background and academic tradition will lead to different research interests and to differences in the empirical approaches chosen to pursue given problems.

East Asian societies continue to react to developments occurring in the Western part of the world as well as influence development elsewhere due to the global reach of East Asian economies and the increased political weight of East Asian societies. These systems have distinctive features often connected with local social and cultural traditions. However, these traditions are constantly being reinterpreted, and the changing meanings attached to them must be taken into account. Recent Social, Environmental, and Cultural Issues in East Asian Societies is an essential research book that explores various social, environmental, and cultural issues challenging modern East Asian cultures and their implications on society. Featuring a wide range of topics such as local identity, social risk, and government policy, this book is ideal for researchers, policymakers, sociologists, managers, anthropologists, politicians, diplomats, academicians, and students.

This highly acclaimed, 'bold and refreshing' collection of essays takes a critical look at Asians' perception of their natural environments as well as at Western views of Asia in this respect.

Embodied Memories, Embedded Healing critically engages with the major East Asian cultural knowledge, beliefs, and practices that influence environmental consciousness in the twenty-first century. This volume examines key thinkers and aspects of Daoist, Confucianist, Buddhist, indigenous, animistic, and neo-Confucianist thought. With a particular focus on animistic perspectives on environmental healing and environmental consciousness, the contributors also engage with media studies (eco-cinema), food studies, critical animal studies, biotechnology, and the material sciences.

Much has been written about the wealth of nations, the history of unequal distribution and zones of affluence and deprivation within and between societies. This book explores why some Asian nations are more prosperous than others through an examination of how their interaction with and utilization of resources has changed over the centuries.

Here, Western environmental philosophers and some of our most distinguished representatives of Asian and comparative philosophy critically consider what Asia has to offer. The first section provides an ecological world view as a basis for comparison. Subsequent sections include chapters by leading contemporary scholars in Chinese, Japanese, Indian, and Buddhist thought that explore the Western perception of Asian traditions—the perception that Asian philosophy is a rich conceptual resource for contemporary environmental thinkers.

This volume discusses environmental change, natural resource exploitation and the prospect for ecological sustainability in Southeast Asia. The contributors including sociologists, geographers, anthropologists, economists, political economists and historians, presents the findings of recent archival and field research mainly from ongoing programmes of team research based in European universities and institutes. Among the themes discussed are European and indigenous perceptions of the environment; historical processes of environmental change; the politics of resource use; ecotourism and development; deforestation and smallholding land-use strategies; migration and environmental degradation; disease environment and human geography; demography, sustainability and resource exploitation.

A nuanced look at how nature has been culturally constructed in South and Southeast Asia, Nature in the Global South is a major contribution to understandings of the politics and ideologies of environmentalism and development in a postcolonial epoch. Among the many significant paradigms for understanding both the preservation and use of nature in these regions are biological classification, state forest management, tropical ecology, imperial water control, public health, and community-based conservation. Focusing on these and other ways that nature has been shaped and defined, this pathbreaking collection of essays describes projects of exploitation, administration, science, and community protest. With contributors based in anthropology, ecology, sociology, history, and environmental and policy studies, Nature in the Global South features some of the most innovative and influential work being done in the social studies of nature. While some of the essays look at how social and natural landscapes are created, maintained, and transformed by scientists, officials, monks, and farmers, others analyze specific campaigns to eradicate smallpox and save forests, waterways, and animal habitats. In case studies centered in the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Thailand, Indonesia, and South and Southeast Asia as a whole, contributors examine how the tropics, the jungle, tribes, and peasants are understood and transformed; how shifts in colonial ideas about the landscape led to extremely deleterious changes in rural well-being; and how uneasy environmental compromises are forged in the present among rural, urban, and global allies. Contributors: Warwick Anderson Amita Baviskar Peter Brosius Susan Darlington Michael R. Dove Ann Grodzins Gold Paul Greenough Roger Jeffery Nancy Peluso K. Sivaramakrishnan Nandini Sundar Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing Charles Zerner

Results of an international, multi-year, collaborative project designed to transcend orthodox thinking about environmental conservation. In documenting the way that many societies conserve resources in the course of everyday activities, the contributions to this volume question formal, state-led conservation interventions. The planned character of such interventions reintroduces and is often doomed by the vision of a dichotomy between society and environment.