Description:
A timely collection examining a diverse region's environmental shifts
East Asia hosts a fifth of the world's population and consumes over half the world's coal, a quarter of its petroleum products, and a tenth of its natural gas. It also produces a third of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, making it a major contributor to climate change. The region--whose countries share ecological, sociocultural, and political characteristics while varying in size, resource wealth, history, and political systems--offers excellent insights into the complex dynamics influencing environmental politics, advocacy, and policy. With essays addressing Japan after Fukushima, coal plants and wind turbines in China, environmental activism in Taiwan, and sustainable rural development in South Korea, Greening East Asia explores a region's shift from development to "eco-development" in acknowledgment that environmental sustainability is a critical component of economic growth.
Brief description: Ashley Esarey is associate professor of political science and East Asian studies at the University of Alberta. He is the coauthor, with Hsiu-lien Lu, of My Fight for a New Taiwan: One Woman's Journey from Prison to Power (UWP, 2014); and coeditor of Taiwan in Dynamic Transition: Nation Building and Democratization (UWP, 2020) and Greening East Asia: The Rise of the Eco-Developmental State (UWP, 2020).
Review Quotes:
"[A] timely effort to integrate our understanding of environmental action in four major countries of East Asia. This book steps beyond the democracy/autocracy binary to point out the many ways that they have followed a similar development pathway, just at different times. This volume offers three commonalities"
-- "China Quarterly"