In a document prepared for the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE) in 1972, the activist-engineer Ui Jun declared that Japan probably had “the worst environmental pollution problems of any country in the world.”² Rejecting triumphalist rhetoric about Japan’s economic “miracle,” Ui described instead an archipelago disfigured by “pollution department stores” with all measure of ground, water, and atmospheric contaminants.³ Richard Curtis and Dave Fisher of theNew York Times could only agree. In a 1971 article for the newspaper, the journalists included smogchoked Tokyo in their list of the “seven pollution wonders of the world,” and they...

Japan had experienced its share of industrial pollution before the postwar era, but nothing of the scale and intensity of that which unfolded from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s. Particularly striking was the enormity of human destruction wrought by postwar pollution on livelihoods, living environments, human dignity, and human bodies. In most cases industry was to blame, but in large urban centers like Tokyo and Osaka ordinary citizens also contributed to environmental degradation through voracious consumption and ever-intensifying demands for convenience, construction, and mechanization. The results of this simultaneous surge in consumerism and unyielding industrial expansion were horrific for...

Transnationalism can have vastly different connotations, ranging from the relatively informal diffusion of ideas or practices across borders to highly coordinated mobilizations among activists from different countries. I am receptive to the many shades of transnationalism along this definitional spectrum but want to give priority to material or physical connections, because it is the face-to-face meetings between people from different countries that very often stimulate meaningful changes in the ways those involved think, how they act, and the kinds of changes they produce when they return home. Particularly important here is Sidney Tarrow’s idea of transnational activists as “connective tissue”;...

In a famous speech to the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations in Switzerland in 1965, US ambassador to the UN Adlai Stevenson articulated an embryonic vision of globalism characterized by a “heightened sensitivity to the fragility of the life-support system of the planet” and a “sense of human solidarity in a world of increasing interdependence.”¹ Invoking the imagery of a spacecraft, Stevenson observed how “we travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by...

The UN conference in Stockholm was an eye-opening experience for the Japanese pollution victims and their supporters, thanks in part to the remarkable media and public attention they received, but also for what the group learned about Japanese corporate pollution worldwide. Activists, journalists, and delegates from other countries—especially East Asia—confronted the Japanese with troubling reports about the environmentally destructive activities of Japanese industry: pollutive mining operations in the Philippines, logging in Malaysia and Indonesia, and industrial plants in Singapore.¹ As Ui Jun frankly admitted, until Stockholm he and others had not really thought about the Japanese “economic invasion”...

“A house with no toilet” is one of the less flattering ways critics have described commercial nuclear power in Japan since its beginnings in the 1960s.³ Indeed, not only in Japan but worldwide, the disposal of radioactive waste from nuclear power plants has been the Achilles heel of this industry, and as much as proponents speak of a nuclear fuel “cycle,” the reality is a nuclear dead end of radioactive waste material that continues to accumulate and, in some cases, will remain toxic to human beings essentially forever. As early as 1951, the eminent chemist and Harvard University president James...

In June 1988, Dr. James Hansen, an atmospheric physicist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told a US congressional committee on energy and natural resources that he was 99 percent confident the temperature increases of the 1980s were not caused by natural variation. Hansen’s analysis of weather data in the United States for the previous hundred years revealed that the highest four temperatures had occurred in the 1980s and that current average temperatures were the highest in recorded history. Significantly, Hansen attributed the warming to anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon...

In a fascinating reflection on the emergence of global environmental consciousness, science and technology studies expert Sheila Jasanoff poses a number of critical questions about the motivations for transnational activism.² “What,” Jasanoff asks, “makes people from different societies and cultures believe that they should act to further common goals, even if these goals require them to sacrifice or postpone perceived economic and social interests?” How do activists “form commitments to collective action on a global scale, and from where do they derive notions of an international common good that are strong enough to override the intense but parochial pull of...