Winifred Bird: Your article about the Hachinohe Wild Boar Famine describes an episode in far-northern Honshu in the mid-1700s, where farmers started growing soybeans as a cash crop to send to Edo (now Tokyo), and to do that they used slash and burn agriculture. Winifred Bird spoke with him by telephone at his office in Bozeman. Walker is Regents’ Professor and department chair of history and philosophy at Montanta State University, Bozeman. Often, he traces the roots of environmental destruction much further into the past than we commonly assume they reach. Always, the stories he tells are unflinching, impressively researched, and eloquently written. Since then he has documented how trade and conquest transformed Hokkaido’s landscape (The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion, 1590-1800, 2001) how modernization drove wolves to extinction (The Lost Wolves of Japan, 2005) and how workers, farmers, mothers, and babies have paid in pain for the industrial development of Japan (Toxic Archipelago, 2010). While there he befriended some scholars who encouraged him to study its history more seriously he did so, gaining his Ph.D from the University of Oregon in Japanese history in 1997. After graduating he traveled to Hokkaido, teaching at a juku and falling in love with the country. Walker says he “stumbled on Japan” as an undergraduate history student in Idaho. Yet it is industrial civilization as a whole, rather than a uniquely Japanese interpretation of it, that his books condemn. As he acknowledges-without apology-in the prologue to his most recent book, Toxic Archipelago: A History of Industrial Disease in Japan, the patterns he finds are often dark ones: “I am a historian and I am calling it as I see it, and I see environmental decline and deterioration everywhere,” he writes. He treats economics, folklore, ecology, family history, and politics not as independent disciplines but as threads that wrap together into episodes, which in turn accumulate into the patterns that give history meaning. History as Walker writes it is as seamlessly complex as life outside of books. This powerful, probing book demonstrates how the Japanese archipelago has become industrialized over the last two hundred years - and how people and the environment have suffered as a consequence.Any student of Japan who is tempted to idealize, or simplify, the way people in this country have historically interacted with nature would do well to search out the writing of environmental historian Brett Walker. Brett Walker examines startling case studies of industrial toxins that know no boundaries: deaths from insecticide contaminations poisonings from copper, zinc, and lead mining congenital deformities from methylmercury factory effluents and lung diseases from sulfur dioxide and asbestos. Toxic Archipelago explores how toxic pollution works its way into porous human bodies and brings unimaginable pain to some of them. Toxins moved freely from mines, factory sites, and rice paddies into human bodies. Nowhere is this truer than on the Japanese archipelago.ĭuring the nineteenth century, Japan saw the rise of Homo sapiens industrialis, a new breed of human transformed by an engineered, industrialized, and poisonous environment. Our lives depend on these relationships - and are imperiled by them as well. Every person on the planet is entangled in a web of ecological relationships that link farms and factories with human consumers.
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