Chapter 1 examines three distinct organic farming movements that arose in Germany in the 1920s as pioneering examples of environmental ideals in practice. Though disparate in their origins and political commitments, all three organic tendencies found considerable common ground with Nazism, in some cases well before the Nazis came to power. Tracing their divergent fates under Hitler’s regime after 1933, the chapter offers a dense historical reconstruction of early environmental ambitions that were sometimes thwarted and sometimes fulfilled through active cooperation with Nazi agencies. A core aspect of the analysis centers on the implicit and explicit influence of racial ideologies within the emerging organic milieu and the opportunities and challenges this opened up under the conditions of Nazi rule. The chapter is built around a comprehensive range of archival sources, many of which have never been examined before, and provides the fullest portrait yet in German or English of the inception of organic farming currents in the context of proto-environmental politics.

This chapter traces the historical junctures that have shaped the political-economic trajectories in those countries. It explains the structural contexts through which environmental movements have emerged as responses to political and economic transformation. The chapter demonstrates how the political-economic structure of the country where they operate has shaped the diverse characteristics of environmental movements in terms of their organisational structures, strategies, and modalities.

This chapter is an overview of the life and work of Oodgeroo Noonuccal (formerly Kath Walker), whose poetry collection We Are Going (1964) was not only the first ever book of poetry by an Aboriginal person but also one of the fastest-selling books in Australian history. It traces her early involvement in civil rights in Queensland, her ongoing activism in Aboriginal struggles, and the power of her poetry to articulate the feelings and lived experiences of the Aboriginal people. It discusses Oodgeroo’s friendship with Judith Wright and her founding of Moongalba, an Aboriginal cultural and education centre on Noonuccal country. The chapter outlines her role in various national Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts organisations and her international connections with Indigenous writers. Lastly, it emphasises Oodgeroo’s lifelong work in foregrounding Aboriginal cultural and political perspectives.

This chapter documents the conflicts among Đông Triều Coal Company (also known as SCDT), the city of Hải Phòng, and the French colonial government in Tonkin over the protection of potable water at a time when uncontrolled mining expansion in the Đông Triều highland, where SCDT was based, threatened to pollute the Hương River – Hải Phòng city’s source of potable water. This chapter argues that the French colonial state’s environment-centered attempts to safeguard the Hương River and public health, such as the creation of a massive water protection zone, were primarily driven by French concerns about the lack of hygiene and infectious diseases circulating within the indigenous communities located close to the Hương River rather than the industrial pollution caused by SCDT. The chapter also underlines issues pertaining to environmental laws, such as the logistical challenges of surveying and protecting water sources, and the lack of compliance with environmental regulations by big coal companies such as SCDT. More importantly, the chapter underscores the complex impact of mining expansion and environmental regulations on local ethnicities, such as the Dao communities.

Michael Field’s notion of ecology includes as fundamental components of their sense of being not only the external elements with which humans interact but also the gestures of curiosity, invitation, and emotional outreach themselves. In conceptualising the act of writing as part of this interspecies mutual realisation, they grappled with the conundrum of existing within their environment while seemingly being forced to render it from an external vantage point. This chapter proposes that they address the issue not simply through formal and other writerly innovations that depict their eco-relationality but also by encouraging a sense of their writing as an actual part of this network of emotional linkages and potentialities. Focusing primarily on their play, William Rufus, and a section of their diaries, this chapter explores that this is an undertaking less invested in reifying an eco-queer identity than in breaching the knowledge structure that scaffolds the concept of identity itself.

This chapter traces and contingently periodizes the development of Latinx science fiction from the early 1990s to the present, and charts its historical, political, and cultural contexts. While noting the complex genealogies of the genre, the chapter begins with a survey of Latinx dystopian and post/apocalyptic works responding to the nightmarish aftermath of the passing of NAFTA. The chapter then shifts to examine how Latinx science fiction following 9/11 foregrounds how Latinxs have never been safe in our own ostensible homeland. The remainder of the chapter maps how the genre proliferates in an unprecedented manner following the turn of the millennium, diversifying in terms of ethno-racial identity, subgenres, tropes, and subject matter that demand hemispheric approaches. The diverse narratives comprising Latinx science fiction reengage the post/apocalyptic, cyberpunk, and dystopian/utopian to excavate and linger in the past so as to radically restructure both the present and future. This chapter explores how Latinx science fiction narratives – differential, dissensual, and generative – collectively envision brown temporalities and futures of being-in-common.

This chapter posits that water’s repudiation of containment transforms this element into a space, place, and being that can usher in new directions for Latinx studies. Specifically, the chapter contends that when water overflows it “undoes” the work of borders, a move signaled by the Spanish word for this action, desbordar. Underscoring how water can generate theoretical frameworks that reach across geographic divides, the chapter provides a succinct analysis of this element in Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier, Myriam J. A. Chancy’s What Storm, What Thunder, and Daniel José Older’s Shadowshaper. The chapter also stresses the connections between environmentalism and spirituality by emphasizing readings of water informed by Afro-diasporic religions such as Haitian Vodou and Santería/Regla de Ocha. By highlighting water’s capacity to sustain conversations regarding such topics as violence, memory, and repair, the chapter offers water as an entryway into critical conversations in Latinx literature that do not disregard cultural and/or national specificity but remain provocatively untethered to these allegiances.

Following Expo 70, the Japanese state continued to use international exhibitions and other big events to remodel the archipelago, with Okinawa in 1975 and Tsukuba in 1985 the beneficiaries of the bureaucratic determination to develop the regions. They were vastly outnumbered, however, by a torrent of local initiatives in the 1980s, as cities and regions turned again to exhibitions, as they had in the 1930s, to resituate themselves on the national map, trying to navigate the shift of the economy away from heavy industry. This chapter explores both, thereby tracing the relationship between national plans and regional development. Big cities used expos to rebrand themselves for the information age, regional centres to advertise their distinction. Many expos continued to rely on corporate exhibits to attract the crowds; but some branched out, acknowledging environmental limits, and incorporating the local community, not just as consumers but also as participants. More important than the exhibits, however, was the demand unleashed by the expo and the impact on the local economy.

The wheels came off the Japanese economy in the early 1990s, throwing into question the expos that had emerged from and contributed to the previous two decades of growth. The first casualty was the Tokyo World City Expo, planned in the late 1980s and cancelled in 1995. By the end of the decade, there was a wave of nostalgia for Expo 70, as middle-aged creatives mourned the betrayal of its promises, or bemoaned its continuing hold on the present. But expos continued to have their uses. Alongside the laments, this chapter explores how the national bureaucracy and local authorities continued to use a new system and new kinds of expos to coordinate and foster development in the regions. It argues that the complicated genesis and unexpected success of Expo 2005 in Aichi, which evolved from a spur for regional development to the first eco-expo recognized by the United Nations, shows how expos remain a tool in the armory of development, even if observers in the West and intellectuals in Japan think their time has passed.

Chapter 6 completes the theme of the European Mythology of the Indies (III) and analyzes the impact of Enlightenment thought (French and British) on interpretations of Native Americans and Pacific Islanders. The chapter explores myths of primitivism and progress, showing how appeals to scientific authority grew at the expense of reference to biblical texts. It then examines the impact of the scientific voyages of Bougainville and Cook. On the one hand, the manner and customs of some of the South Seas peoples evoked the same kind of comparisons with classical antiquity as had been made in the Americas, especially the Golden Age of Antiquity, and appeared to offer confirmation of the myth of humankind in its infancy. So it was not just the Polynesians who interpreted the first Europeans in terms of their own myths; the same was true vice versa. On the other hand, the “enlightened” scientific expedition produced new data on non-European peoples which laid the foundations for rethinking theories of development of humankind, whether through progress or degeneration. Increasingly towards the end of the eighteenth century, notions of race became more salient in how non-European peoples were understood.

Increasing educational standards in the workforce have increased the use of experts throughout the economy, leading to processes that more closely resemble bureaucracies and stakeholder policymaking, with an increasing emphasis on culturally liberal values such as diversity, representation, and social responsibility. The guiding industries and workforces of the scientific and technology sectors have enabled a technocratic ethos in government and industry. But public opposition to technocracy and skepticism of meritocracy is growing among voters, allowing conservatism to brand itself as an opposition movement to the extension of government reach and the associated prevalence of “politically correct” messages and practices across educational institutions and in the workplace. The polarized American brand of politics pervades internal debates across organizational sectors, enlarging the scope of activist politics beyond campaigns and government, especially where educational and cultural divides are strongest. The distinct styles of the culture war’s two conflicting sides have become more dissimilar at the national, state, and local levels, even in ostensibly apolitical arenas.

Chapter 6 expands on African legal cosmologies by demonstrating what it is that the world has missed out on by not incorporating customary law, ethics, and Indigenous norms from the Global South much earlier into the jurisprudence on sustainable development. The different senses of the legal dimensions of the concept of sustainable development as embedded in non-positivist legal traditions and thinking about law differently have tremendous potential to ensure that the sustainable development becomes effectively local, a concern that must engage the attention of international law scholars. This is where eco-legal philosophies and ecological integrity interact to found ecological law which involves reorganising the law–ecology nexus by retrenching the overbearing dominance of Eurocentric law on the planetary community and its disproportionate dominance in the humanity–nature nexus. In this respect, the renewed normativity of sustainable development as ecological integrity recalibrates law as a subset of a universal whole where law is appropriately located within, and not external to, nature. This remedial task is made possible by forging a beneficial interconnection between customary law, ethics, and Indigenous norms guided by the awareness that sustainable development reflects legal pluriversality and a significant feature of alternative legal ontologies.