Ecological revolution: The political origins of environmental degradation and environmental amelioration; patterns, processes, outcomes; a comparative study of Japan, China, and Europe.

摘要

Most argue environmental movements are a novel feature of world politics. I argue that they are a durable feature of a degradative political economy. Past or present, environmental politics became expressed in major religious change movements as material oppositions to state environmental degradation using discourses available.;An historical pattern is identified in which two powerful intercompeting groups, in efforts to obtain support of each other or to derive benefit from the weaker group, engage in activities that degrade their common environment. One group includes delocalized networks of territorial state-based elites and mechanisms they utilize to consolidate power. They consolidate economic, material, and ideological relations in a territory over time. This leads toward mounting externalities effecting desires to escape in the other group.;The other group includes the multiple areas of more geographically embedded peasants/citizens. This group responds in a variety of ecological revolutionary ways to its suffering from state-based environmental degradation. This leads to their more autonomy-inclined ideological and material support frameworks against degradation-encouraging state based elites.;Peasant/citizens' mobilizations termed religious or ecological revolutions have several common features often overlooked because analyzing global religious movements often has been carried out in isolation from political economic issues. Analyzing global religious movements previously assumed major religious 'Axial Age' changes in world history (using Karl Jaspers' phrase) have only been an identity issue, some form of nonmaterial irrationality in action (left-wing neo-Marxist views of religious social movements), or some interesting 'epoch' according to Jaspers that happened once and never happened after that. This dissertation argues many major religious movements combined health movements, peasant/citizen ecological (or local jurisdictional) protection movements, and local economic institutional movements toward peasant/citizen autonomy, rolled into one. Additionally, I argue these ecological revolutions are endemic to degradation-based political economies. Instead of happening only once, ecological revolutions continue. It is not argued that all identity changes tie to environmental degradation. It is argued that an overlooked point about major religious change has been its connection to mobilizing material politics of degraded political economies.