In this course, featuring many researchers from the University of Zurich and international institutions, we will introduce you to some of the most vibrant cultural trends addressing landscape appreciation, degradation, protection, and rehabilitation that currently circulate in the Asian hemisphere. You will learn about concepts of landscape in Asian religions, philosophy, social sciences, history and the arts and their reverberation in selected environmental projects in China, India and Japan. Furthermore, we will discuss how they are critically reflected upon in the context of the environmental humanities, and observe how an interdisciplinary approach towards regional ecosystems past and present reaches out beyond pragmatic technological solutions to mitigate environmental damage. Following us on our different paths and trajectories through the five modules of the course, you will encounter many of the reasons why environmental humanities study projects which strive to change people’s prevalent attitudes, values and behavioural patterns in order to redeem the rapidly globalizing crisis, and how they go about it. Having acquainted yourself with the stories Asia’s landscapes – and landscape representations – tell about actual and possible human-nature relationships, you can compare and evaluate their potential to bring about the desired change and define your own range of actions as an informed stakeholder for creating a sustainable future. What is arguably no less intriguing: you will learn how to appreciate a broad range of eco-aesthetic forms that re-enchant our lives by creatively interacting with the more-than-human world. You can follow the five modules of the course consecutively or just study the modules that interest you the most. If you want to earn a certificate, you need to complete all of the modules including the quizzes at the end of each module. THESE ARE THE TOPICS OF THE 5 MODULES OF THIS COURSE: Module 1: Concepts of landscape past and present and their cosmological underpinnings. Module 2: Entangled landscapes comprising cultural flows of concepts and forms, contemporary gardens on the move, nostalgic elegies of demolished sites and rural reconstruction projects. Module 3: Discussion of two religious communities in India (the Parsi-Zoroastrians and the Auroville community) and their relationship with the environment. Module 4: Environmental debates tackling religious concepts and social practices and the problem of waste disposal in India. Module 5: Environmental movements and the impact of Fukushima on attitudes towards nuclear energy in Japan, creative activism including arts projects and documentaries to protest against pollution and landscape degradation and raise environmental awareness in the Sinosphere, and emergent concepts for sustainable community life on the planet.
China's Environmental History
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Do curso por University of Zurich
Asian Environmental Humanities: Landscapes in Transition
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Na lição
East Asian Environmentalism
In the last module of this course, we will look at how, in the age of the Anthropocene, the role of humans came to be conceptualized in opposition to nature, and assert the validity of certain traditional Asian ideas suggesting that we are not at the centre, nor in control of the environment. Furthermore, we will examine some of the ways in which the natural world has been “remade” within the planetary scope both discursively and materially - for instance, by way of a largely materialistic concept of historical progress encouraging industrialized resource extraction, colonial patterns of wealth accumulation, and unsustainable models of economic growth - which led to the transformation of entire ecosystems. We will moreover explore how political and economic stakeholders, activists and intellectuals in Asia get productively involved with these processes.
Conheça os instrutores
Andrea RiemenschnitterProf.
Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies
Welcome to the second lesson of the module on East Asian environmentalism,
which is about environmental awareness.
In the first video,
we will have a brief look at China’s environmental history
and in the second video,
we will tackle the government’s change of focus towards environmental modernization.
China’s traditional Confucian, Taoist,
and Buddhist philosophies postulate a harmonious relationship
of human communities and individuals within non-human environment.
A key notion is the “unity of the universe and the human”,
in Chinese, “tian ren heyi”.
Originating in early antiquity,
the concept was revived in the context of contemporary environmentalism.
Confucian classics, such as “The Book of Rites”,
explain how an ideal cosmic order is to be achieved.
For a community to prosper,
ritual sacrifices to heaven and earth,
virtuous leadership, respect, and emotional bonds are essential.
Here is what is said about the ideal relationship between heaven,
earth, and humanity: “[T]he earth is treated as numinous.
Earth supports the 10,000 things, and heaven arrays its signs.
[The ancient sages] took their resources from the earth,
and they took their standards from heaven.
Hence, they revered heaven and had affectionate intimacy for the earth.
That taught the people how to recompense them splendidly.”
In ancient China, political critique could be hidden in landscape poetry,
essays, or paintings that were submitted to the emperor by court officials.
Beginning from the Song dynasty,
the visual representation of landscapes was
almost always merged with poetry and calligraphy.
Allusions to earlier works were popular and contained hidden meanings, as
here in a painting on the Confucian “Book of
Odes” by an artist from the Southern Song dynasty
– that is, after the disastrous defeat in the Jin-Song wars
that forced the court to move the capital to the south in 1127.
In times of political upheaval or bad rulership,
a comparatively popular choice for virtuous men was
quitting bureaucratic service in order to become a hermit,
preferably in the mountains.
On this image, we see Ma Yuan’s album leave “Walking on a Mountain Path in Spring”,
in Chinese, “Shan jing chun xing”.
The hermit is accompanied by a servant carrying his qin zither,
and the inscription in the upper right corner stems from the Ningzong Emperor Zhao Kuo.
The inspiration from China’s spectacular mountains and
a strong ritual and philosophical focus on the power of nature
created one of the world’s most ancient and sophisticated traditions
of cultural landscape representation.
Yet, the environmental history of China shows that
neither the religious and philosophical ideas nor the elite’s elaborate shanshui aesthetics
could protect China’s forests from being overexploited and cut down in the past.
Nor were wild animals, such as elephants, tigers, monkeys,
and wolves sufficiently respected to avoid
being exiled to the country’s ever more remote peripheries.
Gradually, the human impact on landscape ecologies led to species extinction.
For example, the fear of tigers, together with the demand for
steady increases in agricultural production and extensive flood control,
brought about early waves of large-scale deforestation,
land erosion, and river siltation.
This caused the disappearance of many wild animals besides the tiger.
Why is there such a gap between the East Asian regions’ widely shared
moral and ethical principles regarding nature, and the way nature was actually treated?
To answer this question,
we first need to consider China’s topography.
The most fertile land, suitable for agriculture,
is situated in the plains and lowlands of
the central part, covering less than one third of the country’s territory.
It stretches out from the middle eastern coast toward the mountains, plateaus,
and deserts in the north and west,
where both climate and soil are much less favorable to human settlement.
But even within the fertile zone,
heavy rainfall periodically causes floods between
central China’s two largest rivers, the Huanghe and the Yangzijiang,
if no precautionary measures are taken.
The high population density in the fertile regions explains
China’s early efforts in taming nature and creating man-made, life-sustaining landscapes.
Successful over centuries, these same
measures that were used for the improvement of the people’s livelihood
ushered in a “pattern of exhausting the earth through deforestation, erosion, siltation,
desertification, land reclamations, habitat loss,
and human-caused extinctions,” observes Judith Shapiro.
Human-induced climate change has become a hot topic today,
but it began very early in China.
Environmental historians identify several phases
of climate change on the territory of today’s China.
Colder periods were witnessed during the Western Zhou dynasty,
3000 before the common era,
the first centuries of the first millennium, and the 12th century of the common era.
By now we know that the two latter periods were
influenced by large-scale deforestation in the region.
As a consequence of human interference,
the natural precondition for droughts and floods was aggravated.
Locust plagues and epidemics frequently followed on the heels of these natural disasters.
They can furthermore be linked to extreme poverty, insurrections,
war frequency and major dynastic crises in the human world.
For instance, towards the end of
the Tang Dynasty at the end of the ninth and the beginning of the 10th century,
or when the short-lived Qin dynasty was overthrown and
replaced by the Han in 206 before the common era.
The famous Terracotta Army of Emperor Qin Shihuang offers a clue to
how strong the fear of hungry or revengeful enemies from the empire’s hinterlands,
and even the underworld, had grown shortly before the first millennium of the common era.
Here is a picture of the Terracotta Warriors
which were discovered by farmers in Shaanxi province, in 1974.
By the end of the 18th century,
pressure on the environment had become considerably higher in China than in Europe.
Yet, sustainability was preserved in many places,
especially in the more remote and isolated minority communities.
As rural poverty had grown
into a serious systemic problem towards the end of imperial China,
early Chinese modernists were particularly attracted by
the utopian New Village movement
and projects launched by intellectuals in Russia and Japan.
These projects attempted to mitigate the peasants’
economic disadvantages through integrated education and welfare programs.
Scientific progress was part of the trajectory,
but the positive social and environmental impact of
these small-scale experiments was low, when compared to
the devastation wrought upon the countryside during
the civil and imperialist wars in the first half of the 20th century.
When Mao’s China finally became sufficiently
pacified to return to some kind of economic stability,
the traditionally weak moral doctrines for a harmonious relationship between heaven,
earth, and humans, were altogether thrown to the winds.
Mao's ruinous revolutionary economy,
especially his mass campaigns to increase the land’s productivity,
impoverished not only the more prosperous villages in the centre,
but damaged the particularly vulnerable ecosystems of the peripheries.
Across the country, lakes were filled to grow grains, mountains flattened,
forests cut down, and polluting factories placed next to rivers and water reservoirs.
Mao called his economic boom crusade a “war against nature”.
It was a gigantic failure resulting in unprecedented suffering.
Yet, the regime’s ensuing capitalist turn under Deng Xiaoping,
despite its positive effects on rural poverty,
turned out to be even more disruptive in terms of
cultural heritage destruction and environmental degradation.
Uncontrolled production and resource overexploitation added exponentially to
the pressures, until the negative side effects began to crunch on the national GDP.
Today, the country’s ecological collapse has become a realistic threat.
Among the consequences of
the highly accelerated environmental crisis
under China’s modern and contemporary regimes
are: the disruption of the process of natural regeneration,
the wasteful consumption of non-renewable resources,
an incalculable extent of human suffering,
and irretrievably destroyed cultural heritage
including landscapes, in unprecedented scales.
The northern and western peripheries suffer from
particularly negative implications resulting from both utopian
Maoist projects and capitalist development schemes.
A belt of desertification runs along Inner Mongolia,
Xinjiang, Gansu, Qinghai, Tibet,
Shanxi and Hebei provinces,
and gigantic coal and rare earth mines have transformed grasslands into toxic wasteland.
In conclusion, we can say that in ancient China, cosmology, moral philosophy,
and landscape/shanshui art established a robust cultural tradition of venerating nature.
Small-scale farming was sustainable
and village buildings usually were beautifully in tune
with the different environmental conditions prevailing across the empire.
Like the humble functional buildings of the peasants,
upper class mansions, gardens, and scenic architecture
were designed in the spirit of the “unity of heaven and man”,
to be an organic part of the natural landscapes,
rather than spectacular signifiers of human superiority over nature.
However, this deeply ingrained worldview could not protect
pre-modern China’s landscapes from large-scale human interference, such as deforestation,
species extinction, flood control construction,
wars and, finally, industrial pollution.
Today, the government inherits Mao’s infatuation with spectacular grandeur,
but at the same time is committed to solving
the crisis by means of a strategic focus on environmental modernization.
This will be discussed in more detail in the next video.
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