During the quarter-century following their defeat, Germany and Japan gradually conquered world markets with goods they designed and manufactured. In the process, Germans and Japanese households became steadily more affluent, directing a considerable amount of their newfound wealth into savings, but also using it to purchase their way into mass consumer society. Together, these factors drove their economies forward in a virtuous circle, and Germany and Japan entered the highly select club of the richest nations. As a direct result of this success, however, Germany and Japan confronted new and different challenges. Harrowing experiences of heavy industrial pollution and consumer waste crises associated with extremely rapid industrialisation and growth of consumerism stimulated social and political change both in Germany and in Japan. More recently, they also prompted innovation as many German and Japanese companies embraced green technology for growth, especially in foreign markets. The other side of the coin, however, is that industrial pollution and waste continue to plague both countries, with the added realisation of the challenges of climate change coming to the fore since the 1990s. Environmental scandals and legacy, moreover, have formed a key dimension of the recurring need to deal with the unmastered past for both countries.

The gross injustice of environmental change, with those who have polluted the least suffering the biggest consequences, is becoming more apparent. Society is not responding at the scale and pace required to avoid catastrophic loss of life, but from courtrooms to the streets changes are emerging. In this context, public health is now practised. Public health skills, knowledge and attitudes are essential to creating a more sustainable and fairer world.

This chapter defines key terms, describes some of the most important environmental transitions, challenges and opportunities, and considers what our public health response to these can be. It seeks to equip the reader with some basic knowledge and all-important motivation for becoming a more effective agent for change at a time when planetary health must become everyone’s business.

This chapter explores Japan’s environmental history within the context of the Pacific world and its natural and human-fashioned features. Japan’s history is intertwined with the rhythms of its Pacific environment in physical and cultural ways. In this manner, the Pacific Ocean serves as a “connective force,” as one historian has described it, with far more tensile strength than the brittle cultural coherency of East Asian or Western civilization. The Pacific world provides coherency to Japanese history in ways that are often neglected but that relate to Japan’s modern industrial successes and its likely Anthropocene tragedies. By analyzing Pacific tectonics, Pacific highlands and lowlands, Pacific hydrography, Pacific climates, and Pacific politics and culture, this chapter demonstrates that the Pacific Ocean is not only a “connective force” of Japan’s history but also the energy source that powers much of it as well.

Chapter 7 narrates the development of public nuisance law in the context of environmental contamination litigation. At the outset, the description of environmental litigation notes that these cases represent the oldest and prototypical public nusiance litigation cases, because the cases are closest to an invasion of, or interference with, property rights that are the framework for historical public nuisance claims. The chapter canvasses a wide variety of environmental public nuisance claims relating to contamination of common water sources, noxious plumes emanting from factories and plants, chemical emissions contributing to climate change, oil spill contamination, waste dumps, ground water and soil contamination from various chemicals such as PCBs and MBTEs. The chapter discusses the Supreme Court decision in American Electric Power v. Connecticut (2011), holding that any asserted federal common law public nusiance claim against electric power companies was displaced by the federal Clean Air Act. The chapter contains an examination of federal displacement and preemption doctrine concerning the relationship between several federal and state laws regulating environmental concerns.

This chapter introduces approaches to materiality and biology within anthropological scholarship on sex and gender. It emphasizes how biological subfield of eco-evo-devo (which emerged in dialogue with feminist studies) can contribute to anthropological debates. The authors focus on hormones, signaling molecules that regulate many physiological processes in humans, animals, and plants. Hormones are a particularly productive site for considering how anthropologists interested in sex, gender, and bodies might benefit from additional attention to biological processes and biological knowledges, as they challenge prevailing concepts and categorical oppositions of self/world, nature/culture, and mind/matter. The authors first sketch out a history of the relationship between anthropology and biology and, within that history, how feminists have confronted biologism. They then introduce eco-evo-devo and explore how its insights about hormones and development can serve as a prompt to rethink the body within anthropology. Last, they review examples of social scientific engagement with hormones, arguing that a deeper engagement with the materiality of hormones rather than only with their popular representation can help anthropologists continue their ongoing efforts to reframe the social and apprehend gender and sexuality as entangled within complex ecologies of industrial capitalism.

This chapter examines 1890s women poets through the lens of ecology. By focusing on three main parameters (countryside, city, and empire), the chapter offers a new landscape of poets and poetries of the 1890s and argues that some of the most advanced ecological thinking of the period appeared in women’s poetry. Starting with Christina Rossetti, the chapter unveils how poets of the 1890s used genres such as the pastoral, realist, and symbolist poetry paradigmatically to produce powerful critiques of agrilogistics, globalization and eco-colonialism at the fin de siècle. Central to the chapter is its focus on polluted environments. Looking at Amy Levy and Alice Meynell, it shows how their poetics of soot and grime argued for green spaces to combat the damaged caused by the coal industry to modern city living. The chapter also analyzes the anticolonial poetics of Katharine Tynan and Sarojini Naidu and their use of autochthonous plants in their fight against the British empire.

Asthma is one of the leading respiratory complaints presenting to Emergency Departments and a prevalent cause of hospitalizations. Urban environments present special issues related to the pathophysiology, underlying causative conditions, management, and long-term outcomes. Environmental pollutants and traffic-related pollution are two important factors affecting urban asthmatics. There are also significant socioeconomic and numerous social determinants of health that impact urban environments in the management of asthma. These conditions affect prevalence, morbidity, and mortality, so a holistic approach to management and treatment is crucial for patient’s outcome. Understanding these differences can help identify opportunities for improved management on the individual and population basis.

Chapter 3 presents the Corporations and Human Rights Database by exploring patterns and trends with descriptive data to illustrate the variation in access to remedy. The CHRD includes over 1,300 allegations of corporate human rights abuse between 2000 and 2014. Chapter 3 explains how my students and I created the CHRD, which is the first systematic database on corporate human rights abuses and access to remedy. This chapter discusses the data collection process and includes descriptive statistics on the type of claim, corporate responses, and associated judicial and non-judicial remedy efforts included in the database. This chapter familiarizes the reader with the data, discusses verification processes, and provides a basic landscape of how the CHRD informs business and human rights in Latin America.

Chapter 2 takes a deeper dive into the literatures on pragmatism and agonism to illustrate how, when combined, they provide the intellectual framing and underpinnings of the varieties of remedy approach. While pragmatism highlights the need to analyze the dynamics between local actors, their advocates, and the firms involved in the abuse, agonism opens us to the notion that non-violent contestation and confrontation could have a potentially positive role. With this foundation, I develop the varieties of remedy approach, exploring how contestation (e.g. claim making) shapes governance outcomes (e.g. access to judicial or non-judicial remedy mechanisms). Three pathways are discussed in greater depth in Chapter 2 – Institutional Strength, Corporate Characteristics, and Elevating Voices – and tested empirically in subsequent chapters.