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.
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From the course by University of Zurich
Asian Environmental Humanities: Landscapes in Transition
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From the lesson
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.
Meet the Instructors
Andrea RiemenschnitterProf.
Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies
We are reaching the conclusion of our online course
Asian Environmental Humanities: Landscapes in Transition.
Our survey of issues,
theories, debates, aesthetic representations,
and case studies was meant to introduce you to an emerging field of
interdisciplinary study that responds to
the far-reaching transformation of landscapes and ecologies across the globe.
Humanity and the more-than-human world today witness an accelerating retreat of
self-regenerating nature in phenomena, such as desertification and species extinction.
Our course proposes to reflect upon these changes, and ways to cope with
them, by taking into account the various modes of eco-aesthetic perception,
environmental values, and affective affordance of landscapes across
Asian cultures in a broad, interdisciplinary conceptual framework.
In particular, we focus on the power of stories and storytelling,
claiming that what helps to raise and mobilize environmental awareness are stories.
Stories moreover deepen our knowledge about the relationship between
a world view and the material consequences of its implementation,
including the implications of changing from one world view to another.
We further attempted to demonstrate that
enlightening stories are not necessarily human-authored,
be it by writers, media reporters, artists, or scientists.
Many things – rivers, trees, rocks, ruins, landslides,
a nuclear power plant, rice field,
a soup can or a plastic bottle
and the like – can become storytellers, too.
Stories teach us to situate ourselves differently in relation to each other,
the rest of nature, and the cosmos in order to
re-imagine or re-story our endangered worlds.
If there is a common denominator,
our approaches resonate with what Gayatri Spivak has called planetarity –
that is, viewing environments as
material extensions of their animate inhabitants upon whose wellbeing,
ecological balance, and prosperity
all life on earth depends.
She first presented this term in a lecture she gave in Zurich in 1997,
and two years later published her reflections by the title
of “Imperatives to Re-Imagine the Planet”.
Reaching out beyond the search for technical solutions meant
to break up the environmental crisis into remediable fragments,
Spivak insists on the necessity to change the hegemonic world view.
According to her, the scientific cartographer’s division of the planet has
restricted our perception to isolated groups and their interests.
This method facilitated the combination of colonization, globalization,
and consumerism that in the past
created political boundaries and divided humankind.
On the contrary, her concept of planetarity envisages a way of life nourished by both,
modern knowledge and those pre-capitalist cultural memories,
where no sharp line of distinction was drawn between nature and culture.
This new outlook of planetarity would allow us
to embrace differences rather than exhaust them,
and in this way, to overcome the aporia of developmentalism.
So, why should we study Environmental Humanities?
The connectivities and interdependencies of living beings
and their environment acknowledged and studied as subjects of knowledge as
much as of the imagination in the field of Environmental Humanities.
Prasenjit Duara argues that questions of identity,
representation, religion, ethics, contending knowledge systems,
and more are central concerns of the humanities,
and that they are deeply embedded in imagining how to
respond to the environmental challenges we are facing today.
In his book “The Crisis of Global Modernity”,
he argues that environmental activism today creatively
combines local and transnational forms of storytelling.
For instance, it finds as much inspiration in natural sciences as in anthropology,
philosophy, history, art, literature, and religious thought.
In other words, environmentalism fosters environmental awareness to performative action
and underscores its concerns with the help of ancient cosmologies,
rituals, and landscape aesthetics.
Popular cultural forms pursuing similar goals, such as the Hollywood blockbuster movie
“Avatar” by director James Cameron,
may draw from the same sources.
These two forces can also converge.
These photos show protesters who call themselves Cambodia’s Avatars
demonstrating to appeal to the government to save Prey Lang forest.
Hence, Cambodia’s Avatars make use of
the movie’s enormous impact on the imagination of a global audience,
and the movie itself draws from ancient cosmological thought and landscape aesthetics,
even though not necessarily Asian.
Transposing them into a science fiction context of galactic resource exploitation,
the movie fuses ethico-philosophical questions
related to environmental justice with allure of the visual,
achieved with images of sublime landscapes and astounding special effects,
and the post-secular imaginary of matter-based transcendence.
You may remember that the connecting heart of the Pandoran tribe is a magic forest,
where bodies are re-absorbed into the planet’s luminescent metabolism upon their death.
The skills of environmental activists in combining
social mobilization, artistic performativity,
an eclectic range of aesthetic principles stemming from
diverse cultural traditions, political negotiation,
and ethical claims turn them into
important change agents – no matter whether
they are members of first nations, creative workers,
academic professionals, NIMBY – or not in my backyard – protesters,
or just ordinary people worried about the future that is lying ahead of us.
So, why “Landscapes in Transition”?
We drew less attention on these agents, but focused
more on the landscapes that are subject to their struggles to protect,
conserve, or reclaim nature,
as well as on a broad selection of landscape stories and visual representations –
in other words, when we address
the disciplinary field of Environmental Humanities in terms of landscapes in transition,
we do not mean to belittle their efforts and achievements.
On the contrary, it is our aim to demonstrate how human activities are situated
within a commonwealth of air and matter since
the beginning of life on earth, or even long before,
shaped and transformed the natural environment until
planet earth became the beautiful blue marble that we can see from space.
But only in the cosmic blink of an eye of the last 1000 to 2000 years,
human interference with these processes
has become a tangible problem,
hence, the heated debates on the causes of climate change and
the emergence of an era of Anthropocene in academia and the media.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary offers this definition:
The Anthropocene is “the period of time during which human activities have had
an environmental impact on the Earth regarded as constituting a distinct geological age.”
Some experts locate that phenomenon in
a short interval of 60 to 400 years, which by implication
would further condense the span of
possible redemption for the newly inflicted damage – until
a collapse of the current ecosystem further
endangers or maybe even wipes out life on earth.
Why do we study Asia?
Our answers to the question of why it is important for
Environmental Humanities to turn to Asia were manifold.
On the one hand, the environmental problems are most acute and life-threatening in
the densely populated, vulnerable ecologies
of the Global South, comprising Asia and Africa.
On the other hand, post-capitalist reworlding projects such as Auroville in India,
or Yu Kongjian’s landscape reconstruction scheme in China,
transnationally environmental protest movements,
as well as local activists can reactivate
Asia’s ancient cosmologies and aesthetic landscape concepts from within.
Thus, reorienting production and consumption patterns,
and social life in general, towards sustainable futures.
Hence, the answers we found to our initial questions are manifold:
the stories told by landscapes in transition
comprise representations of real, ideal, dystopian,
and imaginary landscapes, which can be as small as a potted plant or miniature garden,
or as spacious as an ocean or the Mongolian grassland.
Some of them nourish hope,
others evoke despair, anxiety, and sorrow.
Past teaches us to try to overcome what Renato Rosaldo
defined as imperialist nostalgia in his critique of the colonial mindset
and Harvard professor of comparative literature
Karen Thornber re-issued as eco-ambiguity.
In her words, East Asian literatures are famous for celebrating the beauties of
nature and depicting people as intimately connected with the natural world.
But in fact, much fiction and poetry in the Chinese, Japanese,
and Korean languages portrays people as damaging
everything from small woodlands to the entire planet.
These texts seldom talk about environmental crises straightforwardly.
Instead, like much creative writing on degraded ecosystems,
they highlight environmental ambiguities.
For our purpose, we concur on the fact that there is a range of
ethical as well as aesthetic incentives to respect nature in Asian civilizations,
and that Asian traditions
with the potential for post-secular, aesthetic forms of re-enchantment and
transcendence are particularly alluring
for contemporary environmental protection projects.
However, their ingrained values easily clash with
the needs and desires of living bodies, which is why sustainable
ecologies demand protection, but also a readiness
for complicated negotiations among conflicting stakeholders.
When it comes to visions for the future,
we have encountered a broad range of experiments and
productive entanglements from educational garden projects, such as
the 18th century influx of Chinese ideas into English gardens to
the Shaxi reconstruction initiative in the early 21st century.
While it has become increasingly difficult to ignore the limits of
natural resource-based economic growth and the effects of industrial pollution,
there is, so far, no global strategy to halt and mitigate the damage.
Together with the diversity of local solutions,
a global policy framework would certainly help to spur,
coordinate, and empower individual sustainability initiatives.
However, inspired by the many creative approaches
towards Asia’s landscapes in transition,
we contend that everyone can and should become a change agent.
Landscape appreciation is the common denominator of
the great variety of environmental initiatives presented in this course.
We hope to have shown that this is a privileged gateway to education,
volunteer commitment, and the formation of sustainable values.
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