Employing the term “green nationalism” in the broad sense of nationalist ideologies that concern themselves with the natural environment, we trace a genealogy of green nationalist thought in Japan back to the start of the long 19 th century. The changing contours of this discourse are mapped through five representative writers: Moto'ori Norinaga (1730–1801), Shigetaka Shiga (1863–1927). Testurō Watsuji (1889–1960), Takeshi Umehara (1925–2019) and Yoshinori Yasuda (b. 1946). Despite significant transformations in how Nature has been understood over the previous two and a half centuries, we identify five common trends in the discourse: (1) Japan as a “natural community;” (2) Japan as a harmonious nation where conflict comes from the outside; (3) a nativist concern with Japanese cultural and racial exceptionalism in opposition to China and the West; (4) a concern with protecting the natural resources of the nation for the exclusive benefit of the Japanese people; and (5) the view that an “authentic” Ur -identity can be found in archaic or traditional Japan. These ideas have been influential in Japanese society; however, their impact in fostering pro-environmentalist behaviour requires further analysis. Some of the complexities involved are illustrated by a brief examination of the role of green nationalism on school textbooks. We conclude that the radical, utopian elements of Japanese green nationalism have often been at odds with national educational policy. While the discursive constructs of Japanese green nationalism have been mobilised in some state policies, their capacity to encourage environmental action remains questionable.

One of the most mysterious stories in Estonian energy history revolves around the planning of a nuclear power plant (NPP) at Lake Võrtsjärv between 1967–1972. Despite the absence of planning documents in the energy archives and the impracticality of an NPP given Estonia’s abundant oil-shale energy production, the story, though sounding fishy, is well established in media and oral sources.

In a regime where open confrontation with the central government was risky, alternative resources in the envirotechnical system of the NPP, such as water, fish and land, were mobilised to protect the lake. By utilising envirotechnical systems as a method to locate alternative sources, we have traced the negotiations within the central planning processes of inland fisheries and water resources. As ecosystemic nature protection strengthened, scientists managed to defer the NPP and reorganise the entire fisheries industry at Lake Võrtsjärv, recovering the populations of valuable fish.

This chapter uses the specific case of Antarctica to think more broadly about how the treatment of animals can reveal colonial attitudes and logics, but also whether, in the absence of an Indigenous human population, animals have been (or can be) mobilised as subjects of human domination in a manner with parallels to colonialism. After a discussion of the relationships among imperialism, colonialism and capitalism, the chapter asks what wider structures facilitated the exploitation of animals by visitors to Antarctica, and contrasts the view of animals as objects for exploitation with the occasional invocation of penguins as Antarctic ‘citizens’. The chapter considers Greenpeace’s use of penguins in its 1980s campaigns for an Antarctic World Park as an example of how animals could be mobilised as representatives of the Antarctic environment, which proved an effective tactic even if it raised questions about who spoke for Antarctica and its animals. The chapter concludes that while it is problematic to cast Antarctic animals as colonial subjects, the underlying logics and attitudes of colonialism can be regarded as having potentially shaped actions in Antarctica towards animals.

This paper seeks to further heritage theory and practice by considering decay as a transformative process contributing to heritage formation and value. Informed by our expertise in a variety of fields bordering heritage studies, we highlight the interplay of generative and degenerative aspects in different modes of decay and suggest that partnering with decay epistemologically, artistically, academically, practically, and democratically would allow heritage to be understood not as a rearguard action against loss but rather as a creative and generative process. To explore these ideas, we draw on several cases in geographical locations with unique socio-political and socio-environmental conditions, namely South Africa, Japan, Brazil, and Antarctica. We investigate different domains including archives and museums, heritage practices, landscapes, indigenous knowledge, environmental history, and nature conservation. We argue that decay is tightly linked to the concept of authenticity and acts as a code that holds a key to both past, present and future values of heritage, depending on the positionality and institutionalisation of the interpreter.

Although many scholars date the onset of the Anthropocene to the Industrial Revolution or the post-1945 ‘Great Acceleration’, there is growing interest in understanding earlier human impacts on the earth system. Research on the ‘Palaeoanthropocene’ has investigated the role of fire, agriculture, trade, urbanisation and other anthropogenic impacts. While there is increasing consensus that such impacts were more important than previously realised, geographical variation during the Palaeoanthropocene remains poorly understood. Here, we present a preliminary comparative analysis of claims that pre-industrial anthropogenic impacts in Japan were significantly reduced by four factors: the late arrival of agriculture, an emphasis on wet-rice farming limited to alluvial plains, a reliance on seafood rather than domesticated animals as a primary source of dietary protein, and cultural ideologies of environmental stewardship. We find that none of these claims of Japanese exceptionalism can be supported by the archaeological and historical records. We make some suggestions for further research but conclude that the Japanese sequence appears consistent with global trends towards increased anthropogenic impacts over the course of the Palaeoanthropocene.