Organizer and Chair: J. Peter Brosius, University of Georgia
Discussant: Charles Zerner, Rainforest Alliance
From Timber Grower to Forest Steward? Foresters and the Transvaluation of
Woodland in Japan
John Knight, Oxford University
In recent years Japanese upland municipalities with large forest areas have banded together to form a League and petition the government to pay them an annual "forest grant" (shinrin kofuzei) based on each municipality's forest area. The rationale for seeking remuneration is that the stewardship upland communities exercise over local forests contributes to the quality of the larger national environment.
The decline of Japanese domestic forestry in recent decades, related to the growth of wood imports and the flattening of timber prices, has meant that maturing timber stands-often of fifty, seventy, even one hundred years old, and into which three or four generations of family care has been put-cannot be sold for a fair price. What the forest grant idea does is offer the chance to foresters to redeem the value of such family forests by redefining them from timber to be felled to standing trees contributing to the national environment (soil stabilization, water catchment, carbon sinks). Instead of growing timber for buildings, foresters are set to become managers of ideally permanent forests.
While the forest grant would be a welcome extra source of local revenue, it would require radical change in the self-definition of Japanese forests. Local data from Wakayama Prefecture are presented on forester perceptions of, and attitudes to, the decline of timber-growing and the prospect of "forest growing" (morizukuri).
Facing the "World": Japan and the Anti-Whaling Campaign
Arne Kalland, University of Oslo
During the last two decades we have witnessed the emergence of a strong international movement against whaling, pushing the International Whaling Commission (IWC) to vote for a total moratorium on commercial whaling in 1982. This put an end to most of Japan's whaling activities: only "scientific whaling" (allowed by the Whaling Convention) and some limited coastal whaling, not under the jurisdiction of the IWC, have continued on a small scale. Nevertheless, Japan has continued to be targeted in anti-whaling campaigns staged by Western environmental and animal rights organizations. This paper will first analyze how the Japanese are responding to the anti-whaling rhetoric directed against them, with particular emphasis on their attempts to understand and give meaning to the campaigns, and how their defense of whaling makes use of the rhetoric of their adversaries. Second, the paper will examine how the anti-whaling discourse is appropriated in order to create a feeling of identity. At the local level this takes place within the context of the Japanese village revitalization movement (muraokoshi undo).Festivals and other "traditions" are reinvented and communities are sold to tourists as "whale towns" or "dolphin towns." At the national level the focus is on the allegedly unique man-whale relationship in Japanese culture-which, it is argued, entitles Japanese whaling to be classified as "aboriginal subsistence whaling" not covered by the moratorium-and Japan's place in what is perceived as a hostile world.
Evolution and Conflict of Environmental Discourse in Taiwan
H. H. Michael Hsiao, Academia Sinica
Juju C. S. Wang and Chun-Chieh Chi, National Tsing-Hua University, Taipei
This paper aims to provide an account of the evolution of, and conflict over, environmental discourses in Taiwan since the 1980s. We first trace the history of the discovery of "the environment" in post-war Taiwan's development experience. It is our contention that "the environment" was first discovered in the late 1970s when the environment problem was felt by the public. Intellectuals and environmental scientists were the first agents to appropriate this concept in their initial advocacy for environmental concerns. Beginning in the 1980s, environmental discourses evolved into a social protest arena, where local environmental pollution victims organized themselves to stage widespread protests throughout Taiwan. Concerned intellectuals advanced the concept of "nature conservation" as another discursive element. We will delineate how various agents (local victims, protest organizations, intellectuals, journalists) interpreted the cause and effect of various environmental issues confronting Taiwan, and how environmental discourses were transformed from a focus on pollution, health, and quality of life, to a focus on sustainable development, social justice, and indigenous resource rights.
Finally, we analyze the responses of the growth-driven state to the rise of public concern and organized protests for "the environment," a process marked by the distortion and manipulation of the discursive elements deployed by citizens in an effort to shift the focus from the environment to development.
Chinese Fengshui as Environmental Discourse
Ole Bruun, Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Copenhagen
Environmental discourse is slowly making its way into the public debate in China, while traditional techniques and systems of thought such as Chinese geomancy (fengshui) are being reconsidered for their environmental potential. Decades ago, however, fengshui was discovered by Western environmentalists and interpreted as a moral code for human interaction with nature.
I have recently been examining the use fengshui at two levels in contemporary China. First, at the level of rural society, fengshui-related beliefs and practices have had a tremendous revival since the launching of economic reforms around 1980. This revival is not linked to a growing concern for the environment, however. Second, at the level of intellectual production, old systems of thought are being revitalized and infused with new meaning in an intense nativization of culture-in some cases pushed by the Chinese state, in other cases driven by groups of young intellectuals both inspired by, and seeing their country in competition with, the West.
Using fengshui as an example, this paper examines the appropriation of traditional Asian ideologies by Western environmentalists, as well as the recently begun transference of Western ideas to an emerging environmentalism in China. I examine the production of novel meanings as fengshui has begun to return in an environmental guise, a process which represents a contradiction between fengshui as rural ideology and fengshui as intellectual enterprise.