Despite the restrictions that had been imposed on domestic travel since the early seventeenth century – which included checkpoints and the need for travel permits – in early modern Japan people traveled, merchandise moved, and ideas circulated. Commercial publishers played a key role in promoting the flows of people and things, not only with guidebooks and travel itineraries, as one would expect, but also in unusual places, such as board games and parodies of sumo rankings. Their output illuminates the democratization of knowledge and the creation of an interconnected archipelago in early modern Japan. More broadly, it reflects the global expansion of the information industry and the rise of tourism in the nineteenth century, linking Tokugawa Japan to dynamics at play the world over.

Chapter 11 deals with future trajectories. How will environmental infrastructures in north-western Namibia develop in future? There are very different visions on what will and what should happen. Climate change projections suggest that by the end of the twenty-first century, herding and agriculture may be difficult in the region due to continuous desiccation. Conservationists allege that only conservation-based economic acitivities will be viable and opt for a strengthening of community conservation and advertise the Kaokoveld's nature (which in many visions entails wildlife, landscape, and humans alike) to the global tourism market. Yet others highlight the opportunities mining brings about. The region is extremely rich in different ores and foreign comapnies line up to lay claim to future minining options.