In the context of art and literature, the term "weird" refers to a sense of anxiety or terror regarding an ecological force seemingly acting on indeterminate motivations with little or no concern for people. A diversity of factors contributed to the 1890s flourish of the weird, including the growing economic investment in environmental policy, the rise of popular occulture, and the strong general interest in the biological, geological, meteorological, and astronomical sciences that were inspiring new notions of, among other subjects, the possibility of nonhuman consciousness. While not part of an overt environmentalist initiative, the weird nevertheless brings forward perspectives on animal, vegetal, and atmospheric ontology in which natural elements are subjects worthy of recognition and respect. The fin-de-siècle weird was driven not by the question of what protections or rights should be extended to nonhuman elements of the ecologies in which we participate, but rather, more disconcertingly for many, by considerations regarding what agency these other forces – many mysterious or yet unrecognized – enact and perhaps even assume for themselves.

The twenty-four accessible and thought-provoking essays in this volume present innovative new scholarship on Japan’s modern history, including its imperial past and transregional entanglements. Drawing on the latest Japanese and English-language scholarship, it highlights Japan’s distinctiveness as an extraordinarily fast-changing place. Indeed, Japan provides a ringside seat to all the big trends of modern history. Japan was the first non-Western society to become a modern nation and empire, to industrialize, to wage modern war on a vast scale, and to deliver a high standard of living to virtually all its citizens. Because the Japanese so determinedly acted to reshape global hierarchies, their modern history was incredibly destabilizing for the world. This intense dynamism has powered a variety of debates and conflicts, both at home and with people and places beyond Japan’s shores. Put simply, Japan has packed a lot of history into less than two centuries.

This chapter uses the lens of political ecology and environmental history to interrogate the use of pesticides in tobacco farming in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) from 1945 to 1980, and their effects on the human body, the body politic and the natural environment. It traces the growth of pesticide use from the end of the Second World War, which saw a turning point in the global pesticides’ regime as crop chemicals such as DDT became widespread. It explores the problems that arose with the use of these pesticides and connects this narrative with the various global debates on ‘environmentalism’ that arose in the 1960s, and how this impacted on the evolution of legislation and policies to curtail pesticide use in tobacco production in Southern Rhodesia. The chapter constructs a contextual reading of Silent Spring in Southern Rhodesia and Africa.

Jane Costlow explores Chekhov’s prescient conservationism against the environmentalist discourse of his time, characterizing Chekhov’s ecological intervention as a meditation on the problem of attention, whether in his fascination with the human inclination to look away from such realities as mass pollution, soil erosion, and deforestation; or in his attempts to inhabit the minds of animals, to imagine the world as not inherently bent towards human ends.

Tolstoy’s day-to-day engagement with nature shaped who he was and how he conceived of himself; it is reflected, abundantly, in what he wrote. But while the natural world remained an essential touchstone for Tolstoy for the whole of his life – a reservoir and measure of what was authentic and good – as he grew older this regard was tinged with ambivalence. He came to believe that not everything that was natural (war, violence, predation, sex) was necessarily good, and he appears to have doubted whether humans could live in a way that was at once fully natural and fully moral. This essay explores this central paradox of Tolstoy’s thinking, and focuses particular attention on the following aspects of his relationship with the natural world: the "green" creation myth that Tolstoy self-consciously fashioned about himself; the close link between nature and Tolstoy’s sense of the divine; Tolstoy’s presciently ecological conception of life in nature as a realm of both ceaseless "struggle" (war) and overarching harmony (peace); Tolstoy’s environmentalism.

Chapter 7 explores ways in which people’s perceptions of the actual risks posed by climate change can be elevated adequately to motivate them to engage in individual and collective action to counteract it.

This chapter examines the role that the Indian judiciary has played in advancing climate action and environmental governance. This chapter traces the judiciary’s contributions through a few landmark judgements and its relationship to varieties of environmentalism in India. India’s environmental movement, and the lawyering that supports it, oscillates between environmentalism of the poor and exclusionary conservation, where the human rights of forest-dwelling and other local communities are often violated. Moreover, though the judiciary in India has been a site of progressive environmental jurisprudence, it has nonetheless produced jurisprudence that violates the human rights of vulnerable communities. The judiciary is very often left to choose between the two competing strains of environmentalism and responding to the needs of development. These pressures, I argue, will shape the decisions the judiciary is likely to make in the context of climate change. Yet, this chapter ultimately argues that courts can play an important role in climate change governance if they adopt a more sensitive approach to questions of climate justice.

Climate change, mass extinction, deforestation, desertification and increasing pollution and toxicity of the air, water and land: Uncontainable by national borders, these are quintessentially global concerns for which peoples and states have turned to international law for solutions. This edited collection asks how international lawyers have understood the environment: What exactly is it and how do international lawyers purport to govern it? These seemingly straightforward questions have the potential to unmake our discipline through destabilizing formative assumptions about the separation between subjects and objects of governance, between the social and the natural, and between the human and non-human. We explain in this introductory chapter that reexamining international law assumptions about the natural world is not mere theoretical speculation. It is an urgent and necessary step for addressing pressing environmental challenges.

In the mid-1860s, as Britain enjoyed global power thanks to coal-fueled industrial capitalism and as American industrialization was poised to take off, George Perkins Marsh of Vermont in America and William Stanley Jevons from Liverpool in Britain published books that warned unsustainable use of natural resources threatened to impoverish future generations. Their Reformed Protestantism upbringing, descended from forebears’ Puritanism, had instilled in both Marsh and Jevons perspectives and values that informed their analyses and solutions. Since their publication, their books’ reputation has risen with concern for the environment and about limits to growth. They remain valuable and relevant today.

In the wake of the ‘golden age’ of economic growth in the early 1970s, public provision of urban infrastructure came under the close scrutiny of governments seeking to reduce the size of their bureaucracies in the face of expanding budgets, rising prices, and increasing unemployment. Australian governments and water utilities followed the UK and USA by introducing price mechanisms to attain more efficient water use. This coincided with severe droughts that affected urban water supplies and led state governments to impose residential water restrictions, save for Brisbane, where catastrophic floods in 1974 reminded residents of their vulnerability to the elements. Growing concern for the environment, as well as the implications of environmental degradation for human health, meant that the sights, smells, and sounds of the Australian suburbs were on the eve of change. The use of suburban waterways as drains for industrial and domestic waste would no longer be tolerated, as local residents campaigned to protect built and natural environments from pollution and development projects. Such health and ecological concerns collided with the neoliberal reform agenda of the 1990s, when newly restructured water utilities faced a series of crises in their provision of water and disposal of wastes.

British nature writing is a conflict-ridden mode that speaks to contradictions in the modern condition, and a crisis-ridden mode that addresses the modern crises of the environment, of representation and of the alienated self. It returns repeatedly to problems of mimesis and the non-transparency of language, and to the slippages between ecological facts and the cultural imagination. ‘Nature writing’ is a problematic category, and classifications of earlier literature as such must be qualified, recognising the historical overlapping of environmental literature with natural history and other genres. Although British nature writing grew in dialogue with its American equivalent, it has always been less concerned than the latter with the wilderness, addressing more cultivated environments in which wildlife intermingles with human social and economic activity. The genre has long sought spiritual renewal and significance in wildlife and engaged in conservation movements, although its environmentalist ethics have not been consistent. British nature writing has also been deeply shaped by the pastoral and georgic traditions, causing it to waver between the foci of leisurely contemplation and laborious activity.

As discussed in Chapter 8, while the exiled section of the Iranian Kurdish movement experienced massive decline in its activity and was forced to passivity (kampnshini), the Kurdish civil society has in the 1990s and more recent decades innovated and experienced a new trend, known as the era of flourishing NGOs and civil society associations. Though emergence of this trend has been argued to be a development that emerged as result of the reform era under Mohammad Khatami’s presidency (1997-2005), the evolution, politicisation and discourse of Kurdish civil society has been unique to this region and has cherished Kurdish nationalism, culture and language. However, as this chapter highlights, another aspect of this development is that through the latest two decades Kurdistan has entered into a new phase of securitisation, expressed through mass arrests, persecutions and executions of Kurdish journalists, civil society and human rights activists, etc. Securitisation of the Kurdish region has been a development intensified through Mahmud Ahmadinejad’s (2005-13) and Hasan Rouhani’s presidencies (2013-).