Green Asia

Ecocultures, Sustainable Lifestyles, and Ethical Consumption

Tania Lewis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138854086
• eBook ISBN: 9781317524731
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Economic development in Asia is associated with expanding urbanism, overconsumption, and a steep growth in living standards. At the same time, rapid urbanisation, changing class consciousness, and a new rural–urban divide in the region have led to fundamental shifts in the way ecological concerns are articulated politically and culturally. Moreover, these changes are often viewed through a Western moralistic lens, which at the same time applauds Asia's economic growth as the welcome reviver of a floundering world economy and simultaneously condemns this growth as encouraging hyperconsumerism and a rupture with more natural ways of living. This book presents an analysis of a range of practices and activities from across Asia that demonstrate that people in Asia are alert to ecological concerns, that they are taking action to implement new styles of green living, and that Asia offers interesting alternatives to narrow Anglo-American models of sustainable living. Subjects explored include eco-tourism in the Philippines, green co-operatives in Korea, the importance of "tradition" within Asian discourses of sustainability, and much more.

1	Sustainability, lifestyle, and consumption in Asia
	Tania Lewis

A climate of contradictions

This edited collection is concerned with the lifestyle and consumption practices of ordinary people and their implications for environmentalism. Discussions of environmental issues in South and East Asia tend to be primarily framed as large-scale problems of state and global governance, often in turn linked to market mechanisms. In contrast, this book’s concerns lie with more everyday experiences of and engagement with sustainability, including a focus on forms of everyday activism and “experiments” in sustainable living. These alternative practices and discourses are of course invariably shaped by larger state and civic structures (although in some cases grassroots interventions may have a “trickle up” impact on such structures), but they also can represent a significant critical counterpoint to state logics of environmental governance.

There are a number of reasons why everyday environmentalisms are important to examine in Asia, not least of which being the question of global environmental justice given that historically the burden of environmental impacts created by the Global North has fallen on ordinary people in so-called “developing” nations (Shiva 2008). First, while localized environmental practices in the Global North have been widely documented and debated across a range of academic scholarship, there has been much less work done in this space in South and East Asia in Asian or English-language contexts, though there has been growing media coverage across the region of the sustainability practices of ordinary people, from rooftop productive gardening in Hong Kong to China’s “back-to-the-land” movement and the rise of permaculture in Malaysia (Choong 2014; Live Curiously Magazine2014; Thompson 2014).

Second, while local practices may have sustainability outcomes, they may not necessarily be defined primarily in terms of environmentalism. It is important then to examine the ways in which issues of sustainability are performed and negotiated on the ground, particularly in the context of countries where civil society-state relations are only just starting to emerge. What social actors are participating in grassroots initiatives that engage with sustainability and in what ways? How do questions of class, gender, urban versus rural location, and so on frame such engagements?

Third, while many South East Asian nations have embraced elements of late industrializing capitalism, for many ordinary people their lives continue to be shaped by regimes of living that are often quite distinct from consumer-citizens of the Global North. As the chapters in this collection suggest, there is much to be learned about the potential for alternative and sustainable collective life practices from examining other pathways or modes of “modernity”.

Another key reason behind this edited collection was the desire to expand the conversation on South East Asia and environmentalism beyond what are often one-dimensional depictions of the region. The political and cultural agenda of “development” in parts of Asia is often evaluated through a Western-centric moralistic critique of hyper-consumerism and imagined as a rupture with naturalistic ways of living. At the same time, key Asian cities such as Shanghai are increasingly depicted as the engine room (and future) of a floundering global economy but against the backdrop of anxieties in the Global North concerning the precarious state of the world’s ecological resources. In debates around climate change, in particular, reports on Asia increasingly frame it as a space of aggressive development, rapidly growing urbanization, and dwindling natural resources. Thus, where once South East Asia was discussed in terms of a trajectory of necessary growth and development, the region is increasingly the projected site of intensifying anxieties within the Global North about population growth, over-consumption, and the increasingly visible externalized costs of capitalism. From nongovernmental organization (NGO) reports to press coverage, we are told that 60 per cent of the world’s population now lives in Asia and are moving toward the urbanized, carbon-intense lifestyles that characterize the high per capita polluters of the world, such as the United States and Australia. China in particular is a source of major apprehension here, given that 800 million of its population still live in low-impact rural lifestyles. Reports suggest that if rural Chinese adopt the high consumption practices of urban dwellers, the global consequences will be catastrophic, with flooding likely to impact major cities from Shanghai to Miami and New York by 2050 (May 2011).

While these troubling predictions are underpinned by very real concerns about our global future on this planet, they gloss over the complex and uneven nature of Asian development on the ground, generalizing across a region that is extremely diverse. Furthermore, while this kind of discourse is often framed in terms of a shared collective experience or “cosmopolitan perspective” as Beck (2015) has framed it—an interconnectedness between all nation-states and peoples—there is a tendency here to project Northern anxieties regarding global environmental impacts onto the Global South. As Brand and Wissen argue, it is these same nations who have historically had the role of carrying the global environmental burden for Western consumers, as providers of resources and labor for Northern industrialism and the ecosystems able to absorb the emissions produced by Northern lifestyles (2013, p. 700).

Anxieties about a rapidly developing Asia then are underpinned by a highly uneven ecological geo-politics (Barry 2012). While notions of a global eco-consciousness or concepts such as the anthropocene position us all as belonging to a collective (carbon-emitting) species, in real terms some members of that species are much less powerfully placed than others. Such inequities are highlighted in the very calculative discourse of climate mitigation itself (May 2011). What we might see as the “biopolitics” of the anthropocene for instance positions Northerners as consumer-citizens with individualized carbon footprints. By contrast, China’s 800 million rural people are depicted by that same politics of regulation and “calculative value” as eco-masses, as the imagined other of climate cosmopolitanism (May 2011).

This book then is a conscious and deliberate challenge to abstracted discourses of biopolitics and quantified personhood. The chapters in this collection offer instead a range of embedded socio-cultural perspectives on practices and discourses that engage with sustainable modes of living, from farming in the city to embracing cultural heritages of sustainable cooling practices. As such, this collection also represents a challenge to the notion that the future of the region is necessarily one of consumptive modernity, that is, that “developing” nations are all on the same teleological path to capitalist modes of modernization through industrialisation, post-industrialisation, and the like (Barry 2012; Shiva 2013). This book aims in a modest way to offer a counterpoint to broad brush stroke generalizations about environmentalism and Asia through offering grounded, localized examples and case studies and highlighting the way in which notions of and practices of sustainability are articulated to a variety of cultural, social, political-economic structures at a range of scales—local, regional, national, global. These are offered up not in order to deny the huge pressures and challenges the region faces but to highlight the role of ordinary citizens and communities in engaging with those challenges and attempting to develop alternative socially and ecological sustainable futures.

This introductory chapter is structured as follows.

In the first section, I offer a brief overview of environmental governance, movements, and civil society in South and East Asia, focusing on a few key examples including China. The next section moves on to a discussion of lifestyle, arguing that developmental models of Asia are often underpinned by normative conceptions of carbon-intensive lifestyles and consumption. Discussing the gap between discourses of Asian growth and the realities of Asian “middle-class” lifestyles, I question the assumption that South East Asia is necessarily marching along a path toward a Western modernity marked by globalized, middle-class modes of living and consuming. The third section introduces the concept of “multiple modernities” as a way of thinking through alternative pathways of modernization. Discussing two Chinese exemplars of “ecological urbanization,” however, I discuss the limitations of technology and market-driven “innovations” that simply replicate the environmental and social costs of capitalism as usual. Finally, I suggest that case studies of transformations in lifestyle regimes might offer a more fruitful point of access into enacting and modeling the necessarily major changes in sustainability practices required on a shared, collective level and provide a summary of the chapters in this collection.

Shifting environments: From governance to civility

While this book is primarily focused on questions of lifestyle and the practices of ordinary people across a range of South and East Asian sites, clearly such activities need to be understood within the contexts of governmental politics and policies in relation to climate change recognition and mitigation, the presence (or absence) of environmental movements, and the level of civil society engagement across the region. Space prohibits mapping the specific genealogy of each and every country, but suffice it to say the region is shaped by considerable diversity in terms of political, governmental, and civic responses to environmentalism. For instance, while Japan is often assumed to be a leader in environmentalism (particularly in the post-Fukushima context), historically it has been marked by a relatively weak political response to environmental concerns such as the anti-pollution movements of the 1960s and 1970s, with much of the action in the contemporary sustainability space occurring at the level of local grassroots organizations (Ku 2011, p. 223) and lifestyle movements (Vinken 2010) such as the Sloth club, Japan’s equivalent of the slow movement.

In Korea, on the other hand, the rise of the environmental movement has been closely tied to democratization and national-political structures and processes (Ku 2011). While the movement, following a period rapid industrialization, was initially driven by the victims of pollution in the 1980s, in the 1990s and 2000s it expanded its political focus and legitimacy through various environmental and civil society groups, setting its sights on larger political reform. In 2008, on South Korea’s sixtieth anniversary, the president declared that the country’s development over the next 60 years would be oriented toward “Low Carbon Green Growth” while the Korean Ministry of Environment (MOE) introduced a GreenCard initiative in July 2011 that rewards card holders with points and benefits for various environmentally friendly practices, including purchase of eco-certified products and conservation of household energy. The MOE announced on April 15 that the number of cardholders surpassed 2 million people on April 13 (Jungyun 2012).

In Taiwan, while the KMT (or Chinese Nationalist Party) had previously largely repressed the environmental movement, as in Korea, the 1980s was marked by a growing environmental consciousness and the emergence of environmental protests in relation to incidences of pollution (Weller 1999). After the lifting of martial law in 1987, the environmental movement developed rapidly. Though green politics have not become mainstream to anywhere near the extent they have in Korea, the country has one of the few Green parties in the region, with interest in the party boosted by anti-nuclear protests in the wake of Fukushima (although it receives a very small percentage of the national vote; Ku 2011).

Finally I spend some time discussing China, which offers one of the more complex evolving pictures of environmental politics, governance, and emerging civil and grassroots movements in the region. On the one hand, with its continued massive reliance on coal, China is one of the world’s major polluters and can now lay claim to being the largest carbon emitter in the world.¹ At the same time, the Chinese government has developed a series of major policy and economic initiatives in an attempt to move toward “ecological modernization” (Dent 2014, p. 57) and has sought increasingly to brand itself as a major player in the green global economy. As Zhang puts it, “China is aggressively tying its dominance in future global politics to ambitious climate initiatives, and tactically allying its climate actions with international partners from different sectors” (2015, p. 330). However, while in 2008, when the central government boosted its environmental protection agency into a dabui or “super-ministry” (Li and Lang 2010), attempts to implement ecological modernization through a green gross domestic product (which includes the real cost of environmental damage and pollution) saw major pushback from many local governments fearful of the economic impact (Li and Lang 2010).

At the level of civil society, China offers a complex picture of, on the one hand, an emerging “green public sphere” (Yang and Calhoun 2007), with Geall arguing that investigative journalism and micro-blogging have brought some degree of accountability into China’s environmental decision making (2013). On the other hand, Zhang and Barr note China’s tendency toward “authoritarian environmentalism” (2013, p. 853). They argue, however, that a top-down conception of China’s green governance doesn’t quite capture the complex dynamics of Chinese social activism, where “a system of ‘symbiosis’ is emerging as unlicensed civil actors are tolerated so long as they refrain from calling for wholesale political reform whilst addressing social needs that help relieve pressure on the government” (Zhang and Barr 2013, p. 853). This does not mean, however, that green activists are in any way duped by government; rather, as Zhang argues in relation to the air pollution movement (discussed in Chapter 8 of this book), many of these figures can be seen as “climate sceptics” who work reflexively and strategically with government:

These sceptics [sic] do not challenge the validity of climate science per se, nor do they dismiss the necessity for collective undertaking. Rather, this discourse is highly suspicious of the social cost of climate agendas set by Western as well as Chinese state sponsored hegemonies

(Zhang 2015, p. 333)

In terms of lifestyle and consumption, given China’s large and growing urban middle class, there has also been increasing interest in “green” and “ethical” consumer markets in China. A survey of consumers conducted in 2007–2008 found that 31 per cent of Chinese consumers identify the environment as a higher priority than the economy, significantly higher than consumers in the United States (17 per cent), while the survey also found that Chinese consumers’ opinions about environmentalism were tied to broader concerns about corporations and their practices rather than personally engaging in “lifestyle” practices such as recycling (China Daily2008).

While such broad-brush-stroke, quantitative surveys have major limitations, these kinds of findings point to the way in which “environmental consciousness” in China, and in other parts of Asia, has a distinct flavor, situated as it is within the context of specific cultural, political, economic, and governmental trajectories. Across the region, civil society and consumer movements are emerging that are oriented toward questions of environmentalism and sustainability but are also invariably co-articulated to a range of other political, economic, and cultural concerns. As noted, this book is primarily concerned with questions of sustainability at the level of everyday living, habits, and lifestyles and, in this next section, I discuss the question of whether South East Asia might offer useful insights into alternative modes of living than those that have become normalized and naturalized in the Global North. In invoking the term lifestyle, however, I am by no means merely concerned with questions of individualized behaviors and motivations. Rather, as I discuss in the next section, lifestyle practices are tied to, enabled by, and in turn themselves shape socio-technical regimes and the larger political and governmental contexts in which they are situated. In South East Asian countries undergoing major transformations, the question of “lifestyle politics” becomes even more pressing given that questions of how to live are often shifting and contested in such settings, opening the way for potential challenges to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Sustainability, lifestyle, and consumption in Asia
• 2 From sustainable architecture to sustaining comfort practices: air conditioning and its alternatives in Asia
• 3 Green marketing and green consciousness in India
• 4 “Relying on Heaven”: natural farming and “Eco-tea” in Taiwan
• 5 The Urban Wilds: ecoculture, consumption, and affect in Singapore
• 6 Domestic “Eco” tourism and the production of a wondrous nature in the Philippines
• 7 The greying of greenspeak? Environmental issues, media discourses, and consumer practices in China
• 8 Building a green community: grassroots air quality monitoring in urban China
• 9 Keitai mizu: a mobile game reflection in a post-3/11 Tokyo, Japan
• 10 Living co-ops in Korea: sustainable living, communal labor, and social economy
• 11 Urban farming in Tokyo: toward an urban-rural hybrid city
• 12 Farming against real estate dominance: the Ma Shi Po Community Farm in Hong Kong
• Index