This chapter explores Japan’s environmental history within the context of the Pacific world and its natural and human-fashioned features. Japan’s history is intertwined with the rhythms of its Pacific environment in physical and cultural ways. In this manner, the Pacific Ocean serves as a “connective force,” as one historian has described it, with far more tensile strength than the brittle cultural coherency of East Asian or Western civilization. The Pacific world provides coherency to Japanese history in ways that are often neglected but that relate to Japan’s modern industrial successes and its likely Anthropocene tragedies. By analyzing Pacific tectonics, Pacific highlands and lowlands, Pacific hydrography, Pacific climates, and Pacific politics and culture, this chapter demonstrates that the Pacific Ocean is not only a “connective force” of Japan’s history but also the energy source that powers much of it as well.

“Achieving Modernity by Studying in the Philippines” shifts from educational tours to study abroad, exploring the experiences of Chinese students in the Philippines. It argues that Chinese parents and students increasingly viewed the Philippines as an attractive alternative to Japan and even the United States and Europe. Japanese military aggression soured Chinese desires to study in that country, and World War I and World War II effectively curtailed opportunities to study in Europe. The Philippines also had many advantages, like geographical proximity and English-language education, that made it a draw in its own right. However, the Philippines during this time was under American colonial occupation, so this chapter also addresses whether Chinese were interested in the Philippines as a unique model of modernity or a colonial derivative. It seeks to complicate the picture of agency under occupation by showing how Filipino agents along with American colonials funneled money toward education, forestry, infrastructure, public health, and other elements of a “modern” state. It stresses that Filipinos played a critical role in transforming the archipelago, and many Chinese observers accepted the Philippines as a unique and inspirational form when molding their own such model.

In early human societies, community norms specified where and how living resources should be used within sacred groves and in exploited places. Many rulers of ancient and medieval societies issued decrees reserving game and other wild resources for royalty and limiting peasant uses. Colonial rulers criminalized Indigenous uses of wild species and privatized and commercialized landscapes. Intensive exploitation led to the depletion and extinction of many species and laid the foundation for formal conservation. Concern about deforestation in colonial India led to early forest reserves. The utilitarian disciplines of wildlife management, forestry, range management, and soil science arose in response to threats to living natural resources due to conquest, including intensive exploitation, habitat alteration, and the introduction of non-native species. These disciplines focus on the exploitation of economically valuable species to protect a long-term supply. Early forest reserves in the USA were set aside to regulate the use of forest resources.

This chapter focuses on the reconfiguration of land tenure and authority in Marovo Lagoon, a rural area subject to widespread and destructive industrial logging. Women as a social group are known to be largely excluded from formal negotiations regarding logging, and this chapter considers the extent to which this can be traced to a flawed legislative framework, to patriarchal kastom or the erosion of women’s rights by colonisation. Drawing on archival and ethnographic work, it demonstrates that missionaries and colonial officials recognised some idealisations of masculine authority while disregarding other forms of influence, facilitating a simplification of the land tenure system that has enabled some male leaders to consolidate their control over resources. The reproduction of particular idealisations of masculine authority over land continues today, and simultaneously constitutes land control as a masculine domain. While contemporary inequalities can be partially traced to the structural features of the property system, they also emerge from long-term processes of colonial intrusion, capitalist development and the erosion of important aspects of gendered attachments to land.

This chapter presents a co-produced research that took place since 2009 between interdisciplinary scientists and herders from a Sami reindeer community in northern Sweden. This research was conceived in response to a participatory mapping program, the Reindeer Husbandry Plan (RHP), led by the Swedish Forest Agency. The RHP is based on a digital tool compiling and mapping habitat use by reindeer herding communities. Mapping land use, even with participatory methods, is a powerful tool which could lead to the best or the worst, despite initial good intentions. Knowing how zoning and mapping the best available pastures was a complex issue in a changing subarctic environment, we wondered how the RHP would succeed in such a difficult enterprise. How could Sami herders map 'good pastures' which can suddenly become bad, while less good pastures, can, according to circumstances, become the best choice? The purpose of the co-produced project was to include the complexity of Sami herders’ knowledge and worldviews, their land management and their science of the snow, into the RHP, while developing an original methodology to map the use of winter grazing lands by Sami reindeer herders in northern Sweden.

Farming has experienced a major revolution in post-war Britain. The advent of artificial fertilisers and powerful pesticides transformed agriculture, which, combined with financial subsidies, greatly increased food production starting in the 1950s. These changes proved devastating for farmland wildlife. Hedges were removed to increase field sizes, ponds were discarded, autumn ploughing and use of silage devastated wildflower meadows. Many species of plants, invertebrates and birds declined dramatically as a result of these ‘improvements’. Drainage, water abstraction and pollution from fertilisers virtually exterminated many freshwater organisms, including amphibians, over much of the countryside. The marine environment has not been unscathed, with ongoing damage from offshore fish farms and bottom trawling. Dense conifer plantations, initiated after the First World War, have wrecked precious habitats such as heathlands and have precipitated declines of rare species dependent on them. The primary objective of agricultural intensification, a move towards self-sufficiency in food production, has not been met and has actually decreased as the human population has expanded.

Millions of Germans helped to transform much of North America during the 19th century, and smaller numbers did similar things across Latin America, in parts of Africa, Asia, Australia, Eastern Europe and especially Imperial Russia.As they did that, they also built and moved across networks of communication, trade, and transportation that expanded over generations. The nodal points in these extra-European networks wereoften transcultural places filled with varieties of Germans who were frequently being or becoming German plus other things.At the same time, across polycentric German-speaking Europe there were many centers, places of belonging, that often tied together people across vast regions.Many of these centers had a global reach; even when they remained modest in size and can be difficult to find on political maps, they frequently held great significance for people’s mental maps.Often discounted today, it was the notion of a German cultural community, or Kulturgemeinshaft, which recognized commonalities across the many differences that tied these disparate people and their orientations together and provided many with considerable cultural capital as they went abroad.

After 2012, Prime Minister Abe prioritized agricultural reform as a signature objective of the structural reform, or “third arrow,” component of Abenomics. But while the Abe reforms have enhanced competitive market signals in the farm sector and accelerated the long-term political decline of conservative LDP politicians, farm bureaucrats, and Japan Agricultural Cooperatives (JA) – the “farm lobby” – in the policy process, the lobby remains a significant obstacle to more sweeping change. To illustrate these points and the ongoing tug-of-war between neoliberal reformers and the farm lobby, this chapter explores some of the successes and failures of the government’s agricultural agenda against the backdrop of a deepening demographic and economic crisis in the countryside.

This chapter provides the fundamentals of the relation between energy and climate change, presenting: (i) The scientific evidence that climate change is occurring; (ii) How human use of energy resources contributes to climate change; (iii) How current patterns in global energy use are expected to affect future levels of greenhouse gas emissions. It then outlines the current and expected future impacts of climate change, and presents strategies that can be followed to both mitigate and adapt to the worst expected impacts. To conclude, the chapter discusses the global institutional process to respond to climate, including successes and remaining challenges.

In 1934, the US federal government launched a project to plant shelterbelts of trees across the Great Plains to protect the land from the drying and erosive force of the wind during the Dust Bowl. There were initial hopes that the belts would moderate the climate of the region. The decision to launch the project was based, in part, on Russian experience of forestry and shelterbelts in the steppes that dated back to the early nineteenth century. One of the conduits for Russian and Soviet expertise was a Russian–Jewish émigré, Raphael Zon, who was the director of a forestry experiment station in St. Paul, Minnesota. This chapter analyzes: Russian experience of forestry and shelterbelts in the steppes; American forestry in the Great Plains before the Shelterbelt Project; and the transfer of relevant Russian experience, and Russian trees, to the United States.

This second chapter on Shelterbelt Project explains that it was launched in the summer of 1934 to address the Dust Bowl, but also because the Forest Service was seeking to get access to New Deal relief funds to make up for the cuts in its research budget. Raphael Zon in St. Paul, Minnesota and Edward Munns in Washington, DC, drew on Russian and Soviet studies to convince the president to approve their plan. Zon and his colleagues also drew on Russian studies in preparing a technical manual for the project. Zon fell out with the project’s administrative director, Paul Roberts in 1935. Thereafter, American experience played a larger role in the project, until it was brought to an end in 1942.

This chapter assesses the potential impact of SDG 8 on forests and forest-dependent people. The conceptual framework puts decent work and economic growth in the context of predominant development theories and paradigms (modernisation, growth, basic needs, sustainable development) shaping the agendas of governments, the private sector, civil society and investors. These stakeholders pursue different goals and interests, with uneven prioritisation of SDG 8 targets and mixed impacts on forests and livelihoods. At the country level, significant trade-offs are expected where growth policies and strategies focus on sectors competing with forestry for space and resources, such as agriculture, energy and mining. In these cases, decoupling economic growth from environmental degradation will be a major challenge. Combined, such policies and strategies lead to global trade-offs by exacerbating climate change. Synergies between SDG 8 and forests exist where growth is explicitly sought in the forest sector, focusing on tree plantations, timber and NTFPs from natural forests, eco-tourism and environmental services. Enhanced enabling environments help minimise trade-offs and maximise synergies by reconciling government policies and private sustainability standards, formalising community stewardship of tropical forests, addressing informality in forest product value chains and providing incentives for youth to become involved in forest-based economic activities.