From: "Frank Conlon" <conlon@U.WASHINGTON.EDU>
To: <H-ASIA@H-NET.MSU.EDU>
Sent: Tuesday, January 25, 2011 9:44 PM
Subject: H-ASIA: REVIEW H-Net Review Publication: 'The Place of
Environmental Movements in the United States and Japan'
> H-ASIA
> January 25, 2011
>
> Book Review (orig pub. H-Environment) by Colin Tyner on Pradyumna P.
> Karan, Unryu Suganuma, eds. Local Environmental Movements: A Comparative
> Study of the United States and Japan.
>
> (x-post H-Review)
> ************************************************************************
> From: H-Net Staff <revhelp@mail.h-net.msu.edu>
>
> Pradyumna P. Karan, Unryu Suganuma, eds. Local Environmental
> Movements: A Comparative Study of the United States and Japan.
> Lexington University Press of Kentucky, 2008. xii + 303 pp. $55.00
> (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8131-2488-9.
>
> Reviewed by Colin Tyner (University of California, Santa Cruz)
> Published on H-Environment (January, 2011)
> Commissioned by Dolly J??rgensen
>
> The Place of Environmental Movements in the United States and Japan
>
> In her history of contemporary environmental protest in Japan from
> 1981, _Environmental Protest and Citizen Politics in Japan_, Margaret
> A. McKean drew attention to the role that environmental campaigns
> have played in creating a new political dynamic at the local level in
> Japan. Coming out of a conference held at the University of Kentucky
> in 2003, which examined the dynamics of environmental groups'
> influence over policymaking in Japan and the United States, Pradyumna
> P. Karan and Unryu Suganuma's _Local Environmental Movements in the
> United States and Japan _suggests that an examination of
> environmental movements, which often work outside governmental and
> nongovernmental organizations, while converging on the same
> discursive and material space, provides social scientists with the
> opportunity to analyze "politics in the raw" (p. 5). Because "there
> is no one, single environmental movement and ... the differences
> between the many environmental movements far outweigh their
> similarities" (p. 4), Karan and Suganuma argue further that an
> examination of these political performances, which implicate multiple
> stakeholders within any given locality, requires a flexible
> methodological tool kit and attention to complex assemblages of the
> actors, goals, values, and the mode of action in each of the case
> studies presented in the book.
>
> This is, indeed, a very complex book, covering seventeen case studies
> of local environmental movements active, or once active, in the
> United States and Japan from the 1960s to 2008. The chapters are
> assembled loosely in five thematic sections. The first section
> includes an introductory chapter and comparative histories of
> environmental movements in the United States and Japan. In their
> essay, Richard Forrest, Miranda Schreurs, and Rachel Penrod attempt
> to situate the particularity of local movements into a national
> framework by nationalizing local ecologies and movements under a
> tidal wave of historical context. As a cautionary tale, they
> highlight the importance of reflecting on the complexity of
> situations rather than pushing for cross-national similarities or
> relying on facile generalizations. The final two chapters of this
> section examine the ways in which certain movements have attempted to
> work their political goals in conversation with the language of
> international environmentalism. Stanely D. Brunn explores the role
> that _National Geographic_ has played in bringing environmental
> problems into popular consciousness through its textual, broadcast,
> and online media. Kim Reimann offers a methodologically savvy essay
> exploring how environmental groups in Japan have begun to use what
> she calls "postmaterialist protest frames," such as the language of
> "biodiversity" or cultural artifacts, to protect threatened wetlands
> near the city of Nagoya (p. 45). Instead of focusing on human costs
> of polluting the environment, which characterized the environmental
> movement in Japan in the 1960s and 1970s, Reimann argues that
> environmental groups have used these discursive frames to engage
> conversations with national and international nongovernmental
> organizations with similar conservationist and preservationist goals.
>
>
> The second section covers frictions produced in communities that host
> the facilities of national nuclear and chemical weapons programs. The
> first two chapters (chapters 5 and 6) examine how communities hosting
> nuclear facilities in both countries came to terms with the effects
> of nuclear radiation. David Zurick's essay investigates the political
> movement opposed to the proposed construction of a biological weapons
> incinerator at the Blue Grass Army Depot in central Kentucky. John
> Metz's well-researched and well-written chapter examines the
> community relations of the U.S. Department of Energy through nine
> "site-specific advisory boards" (p. 77). If there is a common thread
> that runs through all of the chapters in this section, it is that the
> community-based movements that developed in opposition to these
> national facilities were made possible because of the community
> members' unwillingness to put up with the environmental and financial
> costs of hosting them.
>
> The third section deals with both successful and unsuccessful
> environmental movements to protect fragile terrestrial and littoral
> landscapes. The chapters help to illustrate how movements to preserve
> built environments are often produced by the coming together of a
> number of social worlds, many of which would not come into contact
> otherwise. Don Carey and Karan's case study shows how groups of
> conservative and progressive actors in the Bluegrass region of
> Kentucky worked together to hold back the colonization of the rolling
> landscape by developers. Kenji Yamazaki and Tomoko Yamazaki show that
> the activist successes preserving what is left of the Sanbaze
> tidelands in Tokyo Bay depended on them framing their preservationist
> arguments in a way that "can be understood by the general public,"
> thereby achieving some kind of "consensus among interested parties"
> (p. 203). All of the case studies in this section illustrate how
> environmental movements often have trouble functioning within overly
> complex institutional structures of local, regional, and national
> governments. Masao Tao, for example, describes how the fractured
> policymaking process in municipal politics in Kyoto has worked to
> undermine efforts of preservationists to preserve much of the urban
> environment.
>
> The fourth and largest section of the book examines the ways in which
> environmental movements evolved in the context of mega-projects, such
> as the building of hydroelectric dams, airports, and reclamation
> projects. Two standout chapters are Akiko Ikeguchi and Kohei
> Okamoto's discussion of the movement to preserve the tidal flats near
> the port of Nagoya , and Suganuma's investigation of the local and
> international movement to protect the Shiraho Sea from the proposed
> construction of an airport on Ishigaki Island. Ikeguchi and Okamoto
> bring up the salient point that one of the reasons that political
> movements to preserve ecological spaces like the Fujimae Tidal Flats
> developed is because they are valued not only by activists for
> cultural or biological reasons but also by industrialists who view
> the tidal flats as easily reclaimable land. Both chapters demonstrate
> well that much of the success of environmental movements in Japan and
> elsewhere relies on the ability of the members of the movement to
> enlist members from multiple and dynamic interests of the social
> worlds directly engaged or implicated in the preservation, or
> destruction, of the local environment.
>
> The final section, which is ostensibly on movements that developed in
> militarized island environments, examines human conflict with human
> and nonhuman invasive species that have established themselves on the
> islands of Okinawa and Hawai'i. Jonathan Taylor reviews how Okinawan
> movements to protect the environment and remove the bases from the
> prefecture are intertwined, while Christopher Jasparro's chapter on
> alien-species control in Hawai'i shows how civilian and military
> personnel have worked together to protect biodiversity within the
> Nu'upi Wildlife Management Area, which is partially on U.S. military
> land. The essays are housed under the section heading "Protesting the
> Effect of Military Activity," although, really, Talyor's chapter on
> Okinawa is the only one that deals explicitly with protest against
> military activity. In contrast, Jasparro's chapter deals less with
> protest against the military than it does with how the military
> partially enabled the removal of invasive species from the Nu'upi
> Wildlife Management Area, providing significant amounts of scientific
> expertise (including Jasparro's), volunteers, and funding.
>
> The lack of continuity in this collection of case studies might
> dissuade some reviewers from assigning _Local Environmental Movements
> in the United States and Japan_ to undergraduates. However, the
> chapters read alone demonstrate what can be gained from examining the
> history of environmental movements locally. Most contributors ask
> critical questions that are attentive to the historical contingencies
> through which the social movements have developed in complex
> socio-natural ecologies that are particular to each case study. The
> different ways in which these movements have unfolded cannot be
> simply attributed to variations in preexisting cultural ideas about
> nature. Rather, the chapters show that ideas about nature and
> grassroots politics are shaped as much by relationships between
> actors as they are by grand historical narratives, culturalist
> premonitions, or crude stereotypes. For this reason alone, this
> collection of essays is well worth the read.
>
> Citation: Colin Tyner. Review of Karan, Pradyumna P.; Suganuma,
> Unryu, eds., _Local Environmental Movements: A Comparative Study of
> the United States and Japan_. H-Environment, H-Net Reviews. January,
> 2011.
> URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31284
>
> This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
> Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
> License.
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