This document provides acknowledgements for the book "Ecological Revolution: The Political Origins of Environmental Degradation and the Environmental Origins of Axial Religions; China, Japan, Europe" by Mark D. Whitaker. It thanks various intellectual influences, including family members, professors, and scholars. It acknowledges their formative impact on the development of the author's ideas about linking environmental degradation, state formation and collapse, and religious change through a comparative historical analysis. The acknowledgements are organized in temporal order and save the scholar providing the most significant feedback, Joseph W. Elder, for last.

2. Ecological Revolution:
The Political Origins of Environmental Degradation
and the Environmental Origins of Axial Religions;
China, Japan, Europe
Mark D. Whitaker i

3. Acknowledgements
Intellectual acknowledgements, debts, and encouragements are best
explained in temporal order with the most important person saved for last in
my case. Beginning in Chattanooga, Tennessee, I thank both my well-
educated and well-travelled parents. I particularly thank my father Dr. Colbert
W. Whitaker, retired though long-serving Dean of the Education Department
at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga. His life-long, insatiable love of
historical reading tied with his multicultural interests in politics, food, music,
and friends were very formative. It was a unique environment to be raised a
secular, multicultural Southerner in the Baptist Bible Belt. My father through
career and personal inclination maintained close Palestinian Islamic and Black
American family friends while our immediate neighbors and childhood
playmates were Jewish. I thank all of them for providing something quintes-
sentially American and old-fashioned optimistic about this melange because it
felt so tacitly natural and neutral. With studies and travels around the U.S. and
other parts of the world, I learned otherwise. I thank my mother for her
analytic and athletic ability. I believe I got her physical stamina to tackle huge
emotionally-draining tasks impassively with discipline, encouraged by my
father’s wide-ranging intellectual interests.
I note a trend in my life of how I adopt a theme of research while
rejecting the methods through which it was approached. My typical disagree-
ments with methodological approaches to certain topics were that they were
unfairly limiting. This was particularly the case with analyzing the causes and
blame of environmental degradation. What I have learned from others in
methodological disagreements was more formative for me than the original
topic inspiration. Like many books on big topics, the ideas of environmental
degradation linked to unrepresentative states and the ideas of environmental
Mark D. Whitaker v

4. amelioration linked to said states’ collapse and religious movements (and
redefining what we mean by religious movements) started in my mind over
fifteen years ago. I was getting a second undergraduate degree in world his-
tory at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville after having graduated with a
degree from its well-known comparative religious studies program.
Key to the later linking of ideological and material issues in world
history with state formation/dissolution was my increasing concern about
environmental issues. I felt global environmental degradation was a materially
tangible research method for world history that was some security against sub-
jective historiography. Besides, environmental degradation seemed a very
important topic in which little cross-comparative research had been done in
history or sociology. In the days before the Internet, a fortuitous find in a used
bookstore introduced me to Clive Ponting’s A Green History of the World:
The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations (1991). Ponting
showed me that comparative historical research could be undertaken on these
issues of environmental degradation though his methods of populationism and
urbanization as a model of direct environmental degradation came up short.
I thank a world history professor, Dr. Van Aalst, for introducing me
to Karl Jaspers’s conceptions of an Axial Age of religious change. Jaspers
introduced me to a common theme in comparative historical contexts of reli-
gious change around the world. This book’s analytical comparisons revolve
around the same data as Jaspers though jettisons his claims of it being an age
of only the past or ushering in an age of current stability. I began thinking
about historical explanations for these ideological changes concerning the
political economic and material issues involved.
In hindsight it seems simple to merge certain strategies of states as
innately degradative and self-destructive and to merge environmental move-
ments and religious movements in opposition to this throughout human-
environmental history, though it is only possible to say that with hindsight.
These topics of state formation, societal and state collapse, environmentalism,
vi E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n

5. and religious change had been studied with methods and untested assumptions
that were worlds apart. Each were unfamiliar with each other’s literatures even
if they studied the same cases. It took a while to develop a sociological
vocabulary and the historical precision to talk about their empirical overlaps as
a wide-ranging topic in multiple areas of the world.
I thank historian Dr. Wayne Farris for his teaching and detailed
empirical writings on ancient Japanese texts and archaeology. It was in
geopolitically-isolated Japanese history that I understood first how it was pos-
sible to model a ‘natural experiment’ in macrosociological processes in
environmental degradation. This was useful for testing such conceptions else-
where. Studying Chinese and Japanese socioeconomic history was a method to
recognize and to challenge many European cultural, historical, and categorical
assumptions about the rest of the world and itself as a region.
At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I thank Dr. William
Freudenburg (now elsewhere) for his exhausting though thorough environ-
mental sociological knowledge. Though not explicitly an environmental
sociologist, I thank Dr. Pamela Oliver for opening a world unknown to me of
methods of empirical research for social movements. I appreciate the late Dr.
Stephen Bunker (died in 2005) for demonstrating in research and teaching
how the biophysical characteristics of material flows can be a sociological
phenomenon. This was a useful method for a micro-macro link and a human-
environmental link that placed environmental sociology at the center of the
discipline of Sociology. We parted intellectual company as my interests were
in sociopolitical motivations of who and why certain material choices were
institutionalized over other choices, while he remained interested in the more
stable and ‘post-choice’ organization of extraction economies.
Though not explicitly an environmental sociologist, I thank Dr. Philip
Gorski (now at Yale University) for his teaching and research about intersec-
tions of religious movements and state formation. I came simultaneously to
accept, critique, invert, and disaggregate his ideas. Though I think he may
Mark D. Whitaker vii

6. have misspecified and aggregated issues that should have been separated
analytically regarding Europe’s Protestant Reformation and ‘associated’ state
formations, without his pioneering comparative historical research in ideologi-
cal movements connected with state formation I would hardly be in a position
to comment upon it or argue the opposite was far more common, i.e., religious
(environmental) movements and state dissolution.
Though I never met him, I acknowledge Columbia University’s late
professor Dr. Charles Tilly and his wide ranging historical sociological writ-
ings organized around the topic of urbanization. It was an early inspiring com-
parative historical method even though I began to disagree that urbanization
was formative by itself (instead of urban-and-state interactions given to the
play of ongoing sociopolitical changes).
As the Internet has expanded, my time spent reading, writing, and
sharing in a philosophy of history listserve subscription and sharing in a world
systems theory listserve subscription with other macro-sociological scholars
like Christopher Chase-Dunn, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Andre Gunder
Frank was quite formative as well.
I acknowledge the aid of the late Dr. Frederick Buttel (died in 2005).
As the International Sociological Association’s Environment and Society
Research Committee President for several years, Dr. Buttel’s openness to big
questions of sociological origins of environmental degradation over thousands
of years and his appreciation of comparative historical methods for environ-
mental sociology was encouraging to me. I thank Dr. Daniel Kleinman for his
sympathetic and incisive ability to see the argument while providing advice on
improving the verbiage. I thank Dr. Charles Halaby for general advice on
methodological organization of causal claims.
Saving the best for last, I thank the advice and aid of Dr. Joseph W.
Elder. He is a comparative historical scholar specializing in the religions and
cultures of Asia, particularly India. His fine-grained commentary, shared
enthusiasm for comparative historical topics about big questions, and editorial
viii E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n

7. advice was helpful. While everyone else was preparatory I think there is only
one person for whom I will be forever grateful. Thank you, Joe.
Mark D. Whitaker
March 28, 2009
Seoul, Korea
Mark D. Whitaker ix

8. Table of Contents
I. Chapter One: A Green Theory of History 1
A. Introduction 1
B. Methods of the Book 8
C. Two Interacting Aspects: Slow and Fast Ecological
Revolutions 11
D. Propositions Challenged by This Book 13
E. Data Sources 20
F. A Changing Mechanism: Relational Consumptive
Infrastructures as Cause of Environmental
Degradation/Environmental Amelioration 23
II. Chapter Two: China’s Confucianism, the Odd Axial Religion
A. Introduction 30
B. Toward Confucianism, a “Lower-Elite” Ecological
Revolution 33
1. Map One: Satellite Map of China 35
2. Map Two: Ecoregion Map of China 35
3. Map Three: Riverine Map of China 36
C. After Larger Territorial State Formation, Larger Scale in
Pastoral Specialization 37
D. After Larger Territorial State Formation, Larger Scale in
Agricultural Specialization 41
E. After Larger Territorial State Formation, Larger Scale in
Urban Issues 44
F. More Consumptive Convergence: Evidence from
Different Statelet Burial Caches 49
G. More Consumptive Convergence: Evidence from Agri-
cultural Specialization and Jurisdictional Consoli-
dation Across Different Areas in Commodities 50
Mark D. Whitaker xi

9. 1. Map Four: Increasingly Jurisdictionally Autono-
mous, Territorialized Statelets, Instead of
Typical Zhou Urban-Statelets (“Spring and
Autumn”) 58
H. Geographic Inequality Issues of Consumptive Expansion
of Scale: Jin Frontier Expansion Compared to Zhou
Statelets Frontier Expansion in General, Versus
Curtailed Core Areas 59
I. Why Jin and Chu? Frontiers, Metal Ores, Breaking Relig-
ious Taboos, and Geography 62
J. Toward the Fast Ecological Revolutionary Era, Starting
with “Elite-Only” Confucianism 66
K. Confucianism as the First Fast Ecological Revolutionary
Context, Though Still a Pro-Hierarchal One 77
L. Kong Fuzi’s Confucianism: Meritocratic, Evangelical,
Anti-Systemic, Revolutionary “Neo Zongfa” 95
M. Confucian ‘De’ and ‘Li’ 100
N. Ecological Revolution: Origins of Humanity’s Shift
Toward Abstract Humanocentrism; Ecologically
Disembedded Identities Increasing with Degradation
and State-Elite Demotion of Local Economies 105
O. Conclusion of Confucian Section 106
III. Chapter Three: China’s Ongoing Anti-Systemic
Ecological Revolutionary Movements; Mohism
and Others Soon Against Confucianism 112
A. More Peasant-Based Fast Ecological Revolutions as
Penetration and Externalities Mounted (Circa 500s-
200s BCE); Difficult Attempts to Re-Clientelize a
Revolutionary Peasantry (221 BCE-220 CE) 112
B. Further Mass-Based Fast Ecological Revolution 121
xii E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n

10. C. State Consumptive Consolidation Involved in Expanding
Peasant Risk 125
D. Urban Areas Expand in Population as Consumptive
Consolidation Continues: Deskilling, Pattern-Block
Methods of Manufacturing, Create Mass-Marketed
Industrial Items, Massive Wealth and Massive
Poverty 126
E. The Mass Manufacture Of Individual Identity 133
F. State Penetration: Military Consolidation Via Internal
Consumptive Alliance Arrangement First 143
G. State Penetration: Demoting Qin’s Pro-Aristocratic
Purpose of State Toward Central Political Eco-
nomic Interfering Models 144
H. Aristocratic Ecological Revolution to Peasant Ecological
Revolution: Externalities Keep Mounting with
Wider State Penetrations 176
I. State Formation after Mozi: Mencius Reclientelizing the
Peasantry with Military Welfare, Second
Generation “Legalist Confucianism” 189
J. Another “Confucian Mozi”: Xunzi 197
K. Hermitage, Hedonism, and Hermeticism: Individualized
Fast Ecological Revolution as “Personal Turns”
of Confucianism and Mozi for Those Inert to
State Appeals 200
IV. Chapter Four: Ecological Revolution in the Former and
Later Han Dynasty (208 BCE Through 220 CE),
and Beyond 219
A. Han Empire Consumptive Consolidation and Its Social,
Economic, and Environmental Effects 220
B. Ecological Revolutionary Implications of Increasing
Externalities on the Peasant Level 241
Mark D. Whitaker xiii

11. 1. Map Five: Increasingly Militarized Jurisdictional
Autonomy in China, Circa 200 CE; Three
Major Peasant Ecological Revolutionary
Statelets 283
C. Coda: Fast Ecological Revolutionary Pressures Seen in
Chinese Christianity in the 1800s 291
V. Chapter Five: Two Ecological Revolutionary Movements
Through Japanese Buddhism, Circa 700-850; and
Circa 1185-1600 297
A. Introduction: Two Cases Analyzed 297
1. Map Six: Satellite Map of Japan 300
2. Map Seven: Ecoregions of Japan 300
B. Slow Ecological Revolution in Japan: State Formation and
State Shinto Moving from Unrelated, Local Kami and
Rice Spirits, to Related, National Kami and Rice
Spirits 303
C. Toward Fast Ecological Revolution: Environmental Exter-
nalities of Japanese Territorial State Formation 313
D. Fast Ecological Revolution Already Starting in Late
Yamato Expanding in Opposition Via Larger Social
Penetration of the Early Ritsuryo State 318
E. Soga Buddhist Power in Late Yamato then Mass Peasant
Buddhism in the Early Ritsuryo State: Budding Fast
Ecological Revolution’s Anti-Systemic Material-
Ideological Orientation Using Buddhism 324
F. State-Consumption Section: Facilitation of a More Oppo-
sitional Fast Ecological Revolutionary Process
by Denying Buddhist Equality and by High State
Penetration 346
xiv E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n

12. G. Great Smallpox Epidemic of 737: A Change of Elite
Decisions and How “Stateness” in Japanese
Society Struggled to Survive; Co-opting Fast Eco-
logical Revolution into State-Supported Slow Eco-
logical Revolution 370
H. Case Two: Fast Ecological Revolutionary Context of Pure
Land Buddhism, Approximately 1200-1600, and
Somewhat in Christianity in the 1600s 389
I. Fast Ecological Revolutionary Response Effects Through
Buddhism Once More: Buddhist “Village-Leagues”
Nearly End the Elite-Run State 398
J. Elite Response: Bakufu Attempts to Demote Pure Land
Buddhism 409
VI. Chapter Six: Two Fast Ecological Revolutions: the Last
Centuries of the Roman Empire; and Contexts
Leading to Protestant Reformation, 1200-1600 419
A. Introduction: The Singular Continuing Slow and Fast
Ecological Revolutionary Context after the Roman
Empire 419
1. Map Eight: Satellite Map of Europe 428
2. Map Nine: Ecoregional Map of Europe 428
B. Before Rome: Intersocietal Consumptive Expansion and
Trade; Mutual Militarization 435
C. Enter Roman Elite Territorial State Formation:
Republic-Based Elite Integration Instead of
Wholesale Conquest 441
D. Attempts to Stave Off Fast Ecological Revolution and
Ongoing Immiseration of Planter-Soldiers, with Elite
Decisions for Consumptive Ambivalence 444
E. The Marian Reforms of Consul Gaius Marius 447
Mark D. Whitaker xv

13. F. Consumptive Consolidation Wider than Ever Before
in the Mediterranean, Toward Massive Fast Eco-
logical Revolution 454
1. Map Ten: Consumptive and Jurisdictional Expan-
sion of the Roman Republic into Princeps
of the Roman Army, in the Senate (The
Principate) 457
2. Map Eleven: Provinces of the Roman Principate/
Empire, Circa 117 CE 458
G. The ‘Crisis of the Third Century’: Anti-Systemic Fast
Ecological Revolution Followed by Constantine’s
Slow Ecological Revolution Consolidation in State
Christianity 461
H. Consumptive Consolidation Effects of the Combined
Roman Catholic Church/Holy Roman Empire into a
Europe of Locally Autonomous Statelets and
Denominations: Fast Ecological Revolutionary
Opposition 476
1. Map Twelve: Core Holy Roman Empire/Roman
Catholic Church’s Papal States in Con-
sumptive Expansion, Soon Facing Eco-
logical Revolution Against Consolidation
and Externalities 479
2. Map Thirteen: Later Zhou Consumptive Expansion
(ca. 600-300 BCE) and Its Periphery of
More Consolidated Territorial Statelets 480
I. The Slow Globalization of the Later Roman Empire’s
Consumptive Expansion: Further Fast Ecological
Revolutionary Context As a Result, 1200-1600 481
xvi E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n

14. J. Beginnings of Fast Ecological Revolution: Religious
Critiques of the Material Consolidation of the
Roman Catholic Church 484
K. Fast Ecological Revolution Within Europe: Different
Localist Interpretations of Christianity Against
the Holy Roman Empire and the Roman Catholic
Church’s Consumptive Consolidation as
Illegitimate, 1200-1600 487
L. Waldensians 490
M. Mendicant Orders 493
N. Lollardy 497
O. Popularization of Anti-Systemic Millenarian Tracts and
Piers Plowman: How to Live the Ideal Christian
Life As Radically Opposed to Then-Current Roman
Catholic Practice 504
P. The “Proto-Protestant Reformation” of Jan Hus: Fast
Ecological Revolutionary Opposition Expands
into Local Aristocratic Sponsorship Against the
Church: the Czech/Prague “Protesting Catholic”
Origins of Anti-Systemic Nationalism, 1400s 508
Q. Other Fast Ecological Revolutionary Movements in
Plurality: Individual Withdraw Movements As
Another Tactic Against Material and Psychic
Stresses and Social Disembeddedness 520
VII. Chapter Seven: Conclusion: The Religio-Material Aspects
of the German Green Party and the Green
Movement Internationally; Plus Ça Change? 530
A. Summary of the Ecological Revolutionary Process 530
B. Places Without Fast Ecological Revolution:
Three Conditions; Two Globalized Fast Ecological
Revolutions in World History 547
Mark D. Whitaker xvii

15. C. The Global Green Movement as a Religious, Fast Eco-
logical Revolutionary Movement: Plus Ça Change? 556
D. Toward a Bioregional State 580
References 591
xviii E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n

16. I. CHAPTER ONE: A GREEN THEORY OF HISTORY
a. Introduction
It is widely assumed that environmentalism is an ideal example of a
‘new social movement’ unheralded in human history, and it is assumed that
environmental degradation is a similar novelty—something to be laid at the
door of the past 500 years of European expansion. However, in testing these
hypotheses by taking a more comparative historical view, the politics of state-
sponsored and protected environmental degradation along with the contentious
political pressures for environmental amelioration against it are seen through-
out the human historical record. Instead of being a phenomenon of only the
past 50 or 500 years, an environmentalist politics as a template of human
political relations through the way states have facilitated environmental
degradation, externalities, and economic-consumptive consolidation has been
with us since the contentious beginning of state formation and urbanization to
the present day of global political pressures against state-backed transnational
corporations.
In this book I argue that as environmental degradation ensues, social
movements by peasant/citizens often oppose the loss of their human health
security, ecological security, economic security while losing their identifica-
tions with (or at least their ambivalence toward) their once legitimate govern-
ment. These movements have often been perceived as involving primarily
ideological or religious change, failing to recognize how many religious
changes have been forms of anti-systemic health, ecological, and economic
autonomy movements away from a degradation-based state political economy.
Therefore instead of arguing that environmental movements are a
novel feature of world politics, I argue that they are a durable feature of a
degradation political economy. Past or present, environmental politics became
expressed in major religious change movements as material oppositions to
state environmental degradation using discourses available.
Mark D. Whitaker 1

17. An historical pattern is identified in which two powerful intercompet-
ing groups, in their efforts to obtain support of each other or to derive benefit
from the weaker group, engage in activities that degrade their common
environment. One of the two groups includes the delocalized networks of ter-
ritorial 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 degrada-
tion. This leads to their more autonomy-inclined ideological and material sup-
port frameworks against degradation-encouraging state-based elites. The
mediating variables to responses would be case-specific hinterland/frontier
context, particularities of geography itself, depth of state penetration of the
wider society, historical event outcomes, availability or ingenuity of alterna-
tive discourses and conceptions of revolt, and ongoing state-movement inter-
actions.
Peasant/citizens mobilizations that can be termed religious or
ecological revolutions have several common features often overlooked.
Analyzing global religious movements often has been carried out in isolation
from political-economic issues, overlooking environmental degradation and
material political economic stresses that contributed to the movement. Analyz-
ing global religious movements previously assumed major religious ‘Axial
Age’ changes in world history (using Karl Jaspers’s phrase) have only been an
identity issue, some form of non-material irrationality in action (both conser-
vative pre-1970s views and 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 book argues many major religious
movements combined health movements, peasant/citizen ecological (or local
jurisdictional) protection movements, and local economic institutional move-
2 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n

18. ments toward peasant/citizen autonomy, rolled into one. Additionally, I argue
these ecological revolutions are an endemic part of a degradation-based politi-
cal economy. Instead of happening only once, ecological revolutions continue
into the present. It is not argued that all forms of such identity change are tied
to environmental degradation. It is only argued that an overlooked point about
major religious change in world history has been its connection to mobilizing
material politics of degraded political economies. This book will try to show
how religio-ecological social movements get paired against state-led environ-
mental degradation processes in a predictable fashion. In an effort to
encourage a less Eurocentric sociology and world history, cases of environ-
mental interaction between state-facilitated political economic change and
reverberative religious changes derive from China, Japan, and Europe over the
past 2,500 years into the present looking at commonalities and differences.
Analyzing environmental degradation comparatively historically can
provide insight into many issues central to the sociological enterprise and can
provide insight for the project of sustainability. Common human-
environmental problems in past and present1
over long historical periods are
the rubric of analysis in three areas of the world: China, Japan, and Europe. In
these long-term comparative historical analyses, three situations are focused
upon: [1] how larger political economies are created, [2] how they maintain
their expansion, and [3] how they are challenged systemically during periods
of mounting environmental degradation. These are windows into common
sociological factors concerning domination, environmental degradation, and
political economic opposition regardless of area or epoch in world history.
This book will concentrate mostly upon the third factor by comparing and
Mark D. Whitaker 3
-------------------------------------
1
Redman, Charles L. 1999. Human Impact on Ancient Environments. Tuscon, Arizona: University
of Arizona Press; Chew, Sing C. 2001. World Ecological Degradation: Accumulation, Urbaniza-
tion, and Deforestation, 3000 B.C.-A.D. 2000. Walnut Creek, California: AltaMira Press;
Diamond, Jared. 2005. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York City, New
York: Viking.

19. contrasting how ‘ecological revolutions’ of massive political economic oppo-
sition to environmental degradation in the past (and the present) are important
processes in our common, globally-shared, human-environmental historical
heritage. ‘Ecological revolution’ conceptualizes how an interactive human-
and-environmentally conditioned period of multiple social movements of
political economic opposition and identity change opposes and dismantles
state-based, state-protected, and state-legitimated penetrations of degradative
forms of state formation in different areas of the world. This book analyzes
different ecological revolutions in world history from a theoretical standpoint
of common global factors as well as explores why different cases have out-
come variations.
First, on issues central to the sociological enterprise, this research
helps us adapt our theoretical ideas in light of comparative historical research.
This research on comparative environmental degradation contributes a
sociological viewpoint to a topic mostly left to anthropologists2
and evolution-
ary biologists.3
Additionally, this topic shows how environmental sociology
can provide ways to unify many other subdisciplines in the sociological pro-
ject researched in reductionistic isolation, by studying their common environ-
mental intersections. We can compare some of the novel ideas in this book
with the theories of past sociologists on how larger political economies are
created and maintained politically and ideationally. Ralf Dahrendorf, in his
1959 Class and Class Conflicts in Industrial Society and his 1968 Essays in
the Theory of Society, drew on both Karl Marx and Max Weber to develop his
theory of social conflict.4
From Weber he borrowed the definitions of power
and authority and adapted Weber’s concept of imperatively-coordinated asso-
4 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
2
Redman, Human Impact on Ancient Environments.
3
Diamond, Jared, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.
4
Dahrendorf, Ralf. 1959. Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society. Stanford, California: Stan-
ford University Press; Dahrendorf, Ralf. 1968. Essays in the Theory of Society. Stanford, Califor-
nia: Stanford University Press.

20. ciations (Herrschaftsverbaende) in which legitimate authority resided in social
positions. In an integrated imperatively-coordinated association the dominated
accepted the dominators’ right to issue legitimate orders for them to follow.
However, imperatively-coordinated associations were not always integrated.
Marx, for example, identified conflictive social classes whose antagonism
emerged from structural conflicts over property and production. Dahrendorf
argued that domination ipso facto, rather than property and production, gener-
ated conflicts. The same idea of state penetration paired against social move-
ment opposition is the ‘polity model’ of social movements scholars from
Charles Tilly to Sidney Tarrow as well.5
When the dominated no longer
accepted the orders of the dominators as legitimate, the imperatively coor-
dinated association faced serious internal challenges. As a last resort, the dom-
inators could try to substitute power for authority to command obedience from
the dominated. This, however, could generate its own problems. It could drive
the dominated to withdraw even more of their contingent obedience to the
commands of the dominators. It could even entirely de-legitimize the founda-
tion of the imperatively coordinated association. In this book, domination is
an unrepresentative state arrangement argued to be connected to environmen-
tal degradation. Opposition to this arrangement contributes to religio-
ecological revolutions.
Over many years, I have had the privilege of studying the histories of
China, Japan, and Europe. In the process of comparing and contrasting various
Mark D. Whitaker 5
-------------------------------------
5
Tilly, Charles. 1987. “Social Movements and National Politics.” Pp. 297–317 in Statemaking and
Social Movements: Essays in History and Theory, Charles Bright and Susan Harding, eds. Ann
Arbor, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press; Tarrow, Sidney. 1987. “Review: Big Struc-
tures and Contentious Events: Two of Charles Tilly’s Recent Writings.” Sociological Forum 2(1),
Winter:191–204; Tarrow, Sidney. 1996. “The People’s Two Rhythms: Charles Tilly and the Study
of Contentious Politics. A Review Article.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 38(3),
July:586–600; Tarrow, Sidney. 1998. Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious
Politics. Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics. Cambridge, U.K: Cambridge University
Press.

21. areas of the world, I began to notice what looked like a consistent pattern of
domination and resistance to domination. These major issues of domination
and resistance to domination made two factors seem quite contentious and
immanently researchable with comparative historical methods: what con-
tentious [1] ideological and [2] material mechanisms elites chose to achieve
power, and what were the implications of keeping or altering these as they
were challenged during long-term political economic expansion and environ-
mental degradation. Subsequent multiple ‘hydra-headed’ ideological and
material strategies appeared as anti-systemic social movements, anti-systemic
self-identity transformation movements, and/or a combination of both. These
can become so anti-systemic and so durable culturally that they can make the
entire ‘believability’ of a cultural tradition of required ‘stateness’ be shunned
in social relations6
--delegitimated to inconsequentiality in social relations for
centuries after an ecological revolution. Ecological revolutions represent huge
changes in mass ideational and organizational frameworks that have durable
cultural implications hampering the ideational and organizational ability of
future state formation by elites attempting to re-erect themselves in its wake.
These contexts are comparable worldwide. In short, domination capacities are
related to a larger changing ecological context, changing material consumptive
distribution, and changing ideological ‘stateness’ as required (or rejected) in
people’s lives. In ecological revolutionary situations all three factors become
eroded. These are problematic grounds for future state formation. When state
formation is readapted in its wake, typically at a larger scale, another ecologi-
cal revolutionary context is primed for a potentially even larger anti-systemic
opposition in the future.
To elaborate this model, in an effort to extend its domination over
additional resources and groups of people, a state would expand its territories,
using physical force and material distribution often “legitimated” by the
6 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
6
Nettl, J. P. 1968. “The State as a Conceptual Variable.” World Politics 20(4), July:559–92.

22. chosen state religion. Subsequently, the state elites would encourage the
change of formal institutions and formal policy biased toward exhausting nat-
ural resources of its territories, toward consumptive consolidation, and toward
demoting state distribution--demoting the means of ‘domination-distribution’
that assured consumptive ambivalence in the ruled. Changes in these factors
increasingly alienated and caused more material risk for those dominated
groups of peasants and citizens who depended on those resources for their
livelihood.
The dominated groups would increasingly resist their dominators--
not necessarily directly (although that sometimes happened, often with dis-
astrous consequences) but indirectly through migrating away or through an
“ecological revolution” involving resistance with novel institutions and belief
patterns that demoted the imposed risk in their lives by dominating state elites.
In the process, new religious frameworks often developed, frameworks that
denounced the violence and ecological damage of the arrangements of domi-
nation and called for humanocentric values (often pacifist), local-only collec-
tive ownership or oversight of property against state elites, a simple lifestyle,
stewardship of environmental resources, and extensive health care. Within
these religious movements, economic issues were not seen as separate from
ecological concerns. Ways of making local economic security more
sustainable, locally representative and autonomous were important--as
opposed to dependencies upon state elite extraction, distribution, and pro-
tection.
A major result of these new religious frameworks was a denial of the
legitimacy of the dominant group, its state religion or state ideology, and its
state institutions’ extractions and impositions in their lives. Although most of
these new religious frameworks were absorbed, were repressed or disappeared
some of them became “axial” religions,7
gaining a widespread public support
Mark D. Whitaker 7
-------------------------------------
7
Jaspers, Karl. 1953. The Origin and Goal of History. Translated by Michael Bullock. London,

23. by being adaptable (or twisted) enough to become state religions that were
used, in turn, by dominant groups to justify their territorial expansion once
more though the movement origins were entirely anti-systemic.
b. Methods of the Book
The late comparative historical sociologist Charles Tilly argued that
in historical sociology there were three types of methods: epochal syntheses,
retrospective ethnography, and critical comparison. My book incorporates a
bit of all three. It attempts to make epochal synthesis more empirically com-
parative and rigorous. It is designed to look at long-term comparative histori-
cal mechanisms of environmental degradation and their ‘civil society’ out-
comes. Tilly wrote:
...I predict a revival of epochal syntheses in sociology as biology’s
evolutionary models and findings become increasingly dominant in
public discourse; why should sociologists let the world’s
[biologically-trained scientists like]...Jared Diamond...monopolize the
discussion [of models of environmental degradation]? In any case,
retrospective ethnography and critical comparison continue to strug-
gle for the souls of historically oriented sociologists.8
In short, I will try to show this historical pattern in which two inter-
competing groups, in efforts to obtain support of each other or to derive bene-
fit from the weaker group, engage in activities that degrade their environment.
This can lead to various outcomes involving ecological revolution. There are
8 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
U.K.: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
8
Tilly, Charles. 2006. “History of and in Sociology: Introduction to the Didactic Seminar on Meth-
odologies of the History of Sociology.” 12 August 2006. American Sociological Association
Annual Meeting. Montreal, Canada.

24. two possible avenues whereby I might develop a truly comparative approach
to this book’s major empirical claim, i.e., that environmental degradation by
elites can tend to lead to ecological revolution. One avenue is to identify and
to explain differences between instances in which ecological degradation by
elites generated ecological revolution and instances in which it did not.
Another avenue is to identify and to explain differences between instances. I
have chosen to develop the second avenue. I shall try to explain the dif-
ferences between instances in which ecological degradation by elites in China,
Japan, and Europe generated state-directed ecological revolution (see section
‘c’ below) and instances in which ecological degradation by those same elites
generated a response in the population of anti-state ecological revolution. I
shall look at variations in both elites’ and peasants’/citizens’ ideological and
material strategies. I will try to show that important explanatory variables
shaping the changes were [1] the ‘depth’ or ‘shallowness’ of the state elites’
jurisdictional penetration of the rest of society, [2] the peasants’/citizens’
resource capacities to respond to those elites’ jurisdictional penetration, [3]
state/movement interactions, and [4] geographical and biophysical particu-
larities of the case. I shall also try to identify instances in which ecological
degradation by elites did not generate ecological revolution. I shall do this
with reference to different cases’ ‘lag’ in response or their lack of response.
By examining other areas of the world, I shall also try to identify instances in
which ecological revolution occurred in the absence of ecological degradation
by statist elites (like environmental degradation by non-statist tribal peoples9
),
though it has been argued for several decades that scaled environmental
degradation mostly is associated with the social hierarchies of domination that
come from the first territorial states or the expansion of territorial states.10
Mark D. Whitaker 9
-------------------------------------
9
Krech, Shepard. 1999. The Ecological Indian: Myth and History. New York City, New York:
W.W. Norton & Company.
10
Carneiro, Robert L. 1970. “A Theory of the Origin of the State.” Science 169(3947), August
21:733–38; Dickson, D. Bruce. 1987. “Circumscription by Anthropogenic Environmental Destruc-

25. Instead of being a ‘natural’ product of the human species, environmental
degradation is a product of a certain type of organizational dynamics of expan-
sion and penetration of unrepresentative states that deny locally-enfranchised
influences to moderate it.11
To summarize, this book will take a close look at citizen/peasant
ecological revolutions in three different parts of the world--China, Japan, and
Europe--looking for patterns of similarities and explaining differences. As
mentioned earlier, this historical pattern involves two powerful intercompeting
groups in their efforts to obtain support of each other or to derive benefit from
the weaker group and how they engage in institutionally chosen activities that
degrade their common environment and protect a process of ongoing degrada-
tion. One of the two groups includes the delocalized networks of territorial
state-based elites with institutional, material distributional, and ideological
mechanisms utilized to consolidate power across larger territories. This
strategy of state formation, however, leads over time to consolidation of eco-
nomic relations in the territory, resulting in mounting problems of health,
ecological soundness, and economic durability. These material problems have
an ideological consequence, in that they slowly delegitimate state elites, lead-
ing other groups such as peasant/citizens to break away from their state elites
both materially and ideologically in the name of their own self-protection. In
many instances, their self-protection includes pro-environmental sentiments.
10 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
tion: An Expansion of Carneiro’s (1970) Theory of the Origin of the State.” American Antiq-
uity 52(4), October:709–16; Bodley, John H. ed. 1988. Tribal Peoples and Development Issues: A
Global Overview. Mountain View, California: Mayfield Publishing Company; Earle, Timothy.
1989. “The Evolution of Chiefdoms.” Current Anthropology 30(1), February:84–88; Browder,
John, and Brian Godfrey. 1997. Rainforest Cities: Urbanization, Development, and Globalization
of the Brazilian Amazon. New York City, New York: Columbia University Press.
11
Bodley, Tribal Peoples and Development Issues: A Global Overview; Whitaker, Mark D. 2005.
Toward A Bioregional State: A Series of Letters on Political Theory and Formal Institutional
Design in the Era of Sustainability. Lincoln, Nebraska: Iuniverse.

26. These peasant/citizens respond to state-generated environmental degradation
in a variety of ‘ecological revolutionary’ ways. Typically, these ‘ideological’
movements share three common factors against state elites: anti-state-elite
health practices, local protection movements against state/elite ecological
jurisdiction and extraction, and efforts to initiate more ecologically rational
economic institutions than the current state-imposed institutions of property
and jurisdiction. Contingent, mediating variables to these peasant/citizen
responses could include [1] local biophysical variations in geographies and the
availability of hinterland/frontiers influencing possible exit and voice,12
[2]
outcomes of earlier historical events including depth of previous penetration
of society by the state, [3] availability of resources, alternative discourses and
conceptions of revolt, and [4] on-going state-to-movement interactions.
c. Two Interacting Aspects: Slow and Fast Ecological Revolution
Two aspects of the overall ‘ecological revolution’ are noted. State-
based elites typically draw upon pre-existing religious movements in estab-
lishing themselves in larger territories. The term ‘slow ecological revolution’
relates to these ideological and material processes in state formation whereby
peasants/citizens who once had many different, unrelated, exclusive, and
counter-oppositional micro-level identifications with multiple local ecologies,
when faced with elite territorial expansion, have their identities and ecologies
shifted into cross-group humanocentric hierarchies with more ‘denatured’
political and material legitimacies. It is ecologically revolutionary because the
significations of attachment are moved away from local ecologies to more
humanocentric networks of power and domination even if sometimes the same
symbolism is maintained with reference to different centralized elite-preferred
Mark D. Whitaker 11
-------------------------------------
12
Hirschman, Albert O. 1970. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organiza-
tions, and States. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

27. signified aspects. In this way, future environmental degradation and state eco-
nomic consolidation processes come to delegitimate once deeply-held eco-
identifications and to disembed populations organizationally from local
ecological connections economically as well. Examples of slow ecological
revolution would be state workers cutting down a particular sacred tree or
grove once of special significance to some local religious identity and requir-
ing tithes to a central state source instead of their local religious hierarchy. A
European example would be the Roman Catholic Church erecting churches on
multiple different numinous sites after razing entirely locally-based, self-
referential, and non-Christian religious arrangements.13
A Japanese example
of slow ecological revolution would be the development of humanocentric and
hierarchical Shinto in parallel with the Yamato territorial state formation
expanding into local autarkic areas once identified with only separate,
unconnected kami spirits and equally unconnected local elite-run economies.
As they expanded into self-sufficient areas that had separate, unconnected
kami spirits, elites to continue to do this state formation were required to find
ways to interpret the legitimacy of their consolidating actions in the available
language. This led to their shifting of the peasant/citizens’ referents from the
locality to the state elites while hardly changing the legitimating signs of the
pre-existing religious discourses. The aim was to incorporate local elites with
the distant state elites and to normalize this in a common language.
On the other hand, the term ‘fast ecological revolution’ incorporates
the social movement opposition as a latter effect of this type of state forma-
tion: the environmental degradation component that influenced the origins of
many peasant/citizen revolutions. Many major (meaning, long-term durable)
religious changes in world history have resulted from the aforementioned
12 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
13
Jones, Prudence, and Nigel Pennick. 1995. A History of Pagan Europe. New York City, New
York: Routledge; Fletcher, Richard. 1997. The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Chris-
tianity. New York City, New York: Henry Holt and Company; Walter, Philippe. 2006. Chris-
tianity: The Origins of a Pagan Religion. Inner Traditions; 1st U.S. Edition.

28. ‘slow’ ecological revolutions of degradation state formation yielding later
‘fast’ ecological revolutions. The term ‘fast ecological revolution’ helps ident-
ify anti-systemic social movements that combine strategies to address human
health, environmental degradation, and economic oppression throughout
human history.
In my book I will see to what extent evidence supports or fails to sup-
port my thesis that state formation, typically with its accompanying environ-
mental degradation, is a form of slow ecological revolution that tends to yield
a plurality of fast-ecological revolutions against it with religious implications.
d. Propositions Challenged by This Book
I have several challenges to deliver about the historiographical aims
of this book. My book is designed to challenge common historiographic treat-
ment about environmentalism and to challenge assumptions of historical
periodization--the assumption of ‘different temporal epochs’ in world history
characterized by different types of political economy or different ‘stages of
history.’ In addition to these challenges I aim to provide an alternative solution
based on comparative historical analysis of a common social process and its
variation: the institutionalization of elite-led environmental degradation and its
opposition in ecological revolution, in ongoing interaction at larger scales of
the same process.
The first historiographic challenge is on how to treat ‘environ-
mentalism’ in world history. It is still widely assumed that environmentalism
is an example of a ‘new social movement’ or ‘new social problem’ unheralded
in human history (however, see others14
), and it is often assumed that environ-
Mark D. Whitaker 13
-------------------------------------
14
Buechler, Steven M. 1995. “New Social Movement Theories.” The Sociological Quarterly 36(3),
Summer:441–64; Pichardo, Nelson A. 1997. “New Social Movements: A Critical Review.”
Annual Review of Sociology 23:411–30; Redman, Human Impact on Ancient Environments; Chew,
World Ecological Degradation: Accumulation, Urbanization, and Deforestation, 3000 B.C.-A.D.

29. mental degradation is a similar novelty--something exclusively to be laid at the
door of the past 500 years of European expansion.15
However, as said above,
in testing these hypotheses by taking a more comparative historical view, the
politics of state-sponsored and protected environmental degradation along
with the contentious political pressures for environmental amelioration against
it are seen throughout the human historical record globally. They are hardly
limited to ‘the modern’ present or connected to European expansion alone.
The second historiographic challenge is questioning Eurocentric,
hierarchical, evolutionary ideas of development noted in the terms ‘ancient,
feudal, and modern.’ Instead, if we analyze a common historical process as a
‘test’ of these categories by analyzing cases that fall within each assumed
separate category of ‘ancient’, ‘feudal’, or ‘modern,’ it is argued that there are
more commonalities in historical processes of expansion regardless of
assumed ‘epoch’ past or the present. Therefore it belies utilizing these static
categories in world history because they lack differentiation from each other
when historical processes are analyzed. They are teleologically cross-
referential terms instead of case referential. These hierarchical, ideological
categories about evolutionary development are a residual Eurocentrist view of
world history that should be rejected in social scientific explanations.16 17
A
14 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
2000.
15
Whitaker, Mark D. 2009 (Pending). “Our Common Civilizing Problem with Environmental
Degradation: A Short Look at the Evidence and Perhaps What To Do About It.”. In Global Forum
on Civilization & Peace, Paper Presentations at the Fifth International Conference. Conference
Proceedings of May 27–29, 2008. Seoul, Korea: The Academy of Korean Studies.
16
Blaut, James M. 1993. The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and
Eurocentric History. New York City, New York: The Guilford Press; Lewis, Martin W., and
Kären E. Wigen. 1997. The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography. Berkeley, Califor-
nia: University of California Press; Blaut, James M. 2000. Eight Eurocentric Historians. New
York City, New York: The Guilford Press.
17
The rejection of Eurocentric modernistic assumptions in world systems theory--or at least the
open contention over the issue--is one step forward. (See: Chase-Dunn, Christopher, and Alice
Willard. 1993. “Systems of Cities and World-Systems: Settlement Size Hierarchies and Cycles of

30. Eurocentric metaphysics and value judgment keeps many from doing more
comparative, empirical, and analytic descriptions of common processes.18
Such static periodization terms are politically mobilized to justify or to criti-
que policy direction,19
or to narrate claims of European exceptionalism. As
such, these terms are useless as descriptions of sociological processes. By
definition they deny and preclude the potential of commonalities in
socioeconomic change if different cases are pre-placed in different
‘uncomparable eras’ of temporal classification.
This book argues for a common, cross-case comparative process that
only gets geographically larger as history moves on instead of moving from
one static epoch to another.20
This book presents a series of isolate cases as
Mark D. Whitaker 15
Political Centralization, 2000 BC-1988 AD.”. In IROWS Working Paper # 5. Presented at the
International Studies Association meeting, March 24–27, 1993, Acapulco.
Http://www.irows.ucr.edu/papers/irows5/irows5.htm; Chase-Dunn, Christopher, and Thomas D.
Hall. 1993. “Comparing World-Systems: Concepts and Working Hypotheses.” Social
Forces 71[4], June:851–86; Chase-Dunn, Christopher, and Peter Grimes. 1995. “World-Systems
Analysis.” Annual Review of Sociology 21, [1995]:387–417; Chase-Dunn, Christopher, and Susan
Manning. 2002. “City Systems and World-Systems: Four Millennia of City Growth and Decline.”
Cross-Cultural Research 36[4], November:379–98; Chase-Dunn, Christopher. 2005. “Upward
Sweeps in the Historical Evolution of World-Systems.”. In IROWS Working Paper #20.
Http://irows.ucr.edu/papers/irows20/irows20.htm.)
18
Stevenson, Leslie, and David L. Haberman. 1998. “Chapter One: Rival Theories--and Critical
Assessment of Them.” Pp. 3–21 in Ten Theories of Human Nature, Third Edition. New York City,
New York: Oxford University Press.
19
So, Alvin Y. 1990. “Chapter One: Introduction: The Power of Development Theories,’ [Pp. 11–
14], The Modernization Perspective [Pp. 17–59], and The New Modernization Studies [Pp. 60–
87].”. In Social Change and Development: Modernization, Dependency, and World-Systems
Theories. Sage Publications, Inc; Watts, Sheldon. 1999. Epidemics and History: Disease, Power,
and Imperialism. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press.
20
Reynolds, Susan. 1984. Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900–1300. Oxford,
U.K.: Clarendon Press; Reynolds, Susan. 1994. Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence
Reinterpreted. New York City, New York: Oxford University Press; Fischer, David Hackett. 1996.
The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History. New York City, New York:
Oxford University Press; McNeill, John Robert, and William H. McNeill. 2003. The Human Web:

31. removed as possible from situations of interacting territorial state geographies.
In single case studies, this allows a discussion of the singular phenomenon
under analysis, and in comparison, the cases in plural allow a demonstration of
the parallel processes involved in the phenomena under analysis as well as
allowing a description of the same process as it moves into larger geographic
scale.
Additionally, this book argues that peasant/citizen mobilizations that
can be termed religious or ‘ecological revolutions’ have often been overlooked
in their local economic and environmentalist features because of specializa-
tions in the Western academy. In this institutional realm, analyzing global reli-
gious movements and ideological changes has often been carried out in isola-
tion from political, economic, and environmental/material issues. The ‘gaze’
of particular academic disciplines (whether religious studies, political sociol-
ogy, or economic history) has often been unable to describe the mixed
phenomena of ecological revolutions without appealing to ideological or
material reductionism. Across world history, anti-systemic religious move-
ments have been seen to arise in opposition to territorial state-based societies.
Many of these were simultaneously pro-environmental amelioration move-
ments against the state because of how the state was degrading their local
environment.
This book challenges ideas of Karl Jaspers. Karl Jaspers21
argued for
a classification of a static ‘Axial Age’ or ‘Axial Religious Age’ that saw
dramatic new religious ideas emerge in different parts of the world between
800 BCE and 200 CE. Contemporary figures included Buddha (Siddhartha
Gautama), Confucius, Zoroaster, and the Hebrew prophets. From Jaspers
onward, scholars of global religious movements often assumed that major reli-
gious ‘axial age’ changes in world history happened at one static ‘axial pivot-
16 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
A Bird’s-Eye View of World History. New York City, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.
21
Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History.

32. point’ epoch in world history and ended after that. Jaspers posed that after this
‘pivotal epoch’ of religious change, all major traditional world religious motifs
settled into their current accepted ‘stable’ state-sponsored forms to the present.
I shall try to present evidence that challenges Jaspers’ thesis that major reli-
gious change was completed several thousands of years ago. I shall try to pres-
ent evidence that parallel dynamics of religious change have occurred
repeatedly throughout history and continue to this day. This book argues that
many major religious movements past or present combined health movements,
peasant/citizen ecological (or local jurisdictional) protection movements, and
local economic institutional movements toward peasant/citizen autonomy,
rolled into one. This book also argues that these ecological revolutions are an
endemic part of a degradation-based political economy.
This book also argues, in contrast to neoMarxist views of religion
that see religious movements as some form of non-materialist irrationality, that
many major religious movements combined very materialist concerns in their
institutional creations, their doctrinal focus on where to intervene, and in their
political critique. One might think of some of the popularity of Marxism as
just another case of moralistic, anti-systemic, ecological revolutionary critique
from a social movement opposing state elites in the degraded social and urban
conditions of the early 1800s in Europe and then later worldwide in opposition
to Amer-European imperial corporate penetration.
For several centuries many Eurocentric and/or neoMarxist historians
have expected to take the European case as a unidirectional standard: a form
of ever-expanding, universalistic, secular dynamism or a capstone culture at
the ‘end of history’ in evolutionary historiography. They have viewed other
parts of the world to be either without their own historical change until
touched by European societies or exclusively mired in religious movements.
This has been widely critiqued.22
In this book I do not see Europe as passing
Mark D. Whitaker 17
-------------------------------------
22
Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric His-

33. through “ancient,” “feudal,” and “capitalist” stages. Instead, I see Europe to
include the same issues of territorial state formation with its environmental
degradations and ecological revolutionary reactions as anywhere else. Similar
cases will be identified in China, Japan, China, and Europe over the past 2,500
years and continuing into the present.
I do not argue that all peasant/citizen revolutions are tied to environ-
mental degradation. I argue only that frequently overlooked dimensions of
ideological movements have been their material concerns reflected in their
health, ecology, and economic policies against degrading political economies.
In short, I will try to show how in different times and places religious social
movements have predictably emerged in opposition to state-facilitated
environmental degradation. Typically, as elite-led states expand and con-
solidate their new territories, they engage in environmental degradation and
consumptive (and ideological) consolation. In doing so, they contribute to
their own demise by generating grievances toward fast ecological revolution-
ary activities. The process continues into later attempts to re-erect state forma-
tion over larger areas where ecological revolutionary contexts had contributed
to breaking down the ideological and material legitimacy of the previous terri-
torial state. I do not argue that this ecological revolutionary process is the sole
cause of territorial state breakdown.
This book provides a fresh institutional explanation or mechanism for
why there is a widening geographic scale of territorial states in world history,
and why this history is punctuated by episodes of state delegitimation and
18 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
tory; Wallerstein, Immanuel, et al. 1996. Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian
Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. Stanford, California: Stanford University
Press; Blaut, Eight Eurocentric Historians; Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2001. Unthinking Social
Science: The Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms; Second Edition, with a New Preface. Stan-
ford, California: Stanford University Press; Hobson, John M. 2004. The Eastern Origins of West-
ern Civilisation. New York, New York: Cambridge University Press.

34. state dissolution23
before an even larger territorial state/empire. The mechan-
ism identified to explain this phenomenon is the interaction between state-
initiated environmental degradation with its consumptive consolidation and
fast ecological revolution. This process has both ideological and state-
delegitimation effects and economically and environmentally destructive
effects. The subsequent re-erection of the state (at a larger geographic scale
typically afterwards) utilizing a selective co-option of these discourses replays
a recurrent mechanism. As such, it is a window through which to view the
continuing history of human-environmental identity change.
I do not argue that this ecological revolutionary process is ‘required’
to occur, because I am not basing the argument on a functional, unalterable,
instrumentalist, or Aristotelian view of the state as ‘having to,’ by theoretical
definition, facilitate environmental degradation processes like many eco-
Marxists can argue.24
Instead, state institutional adaptations and technological
adaptations can and have occurred to protect the environment instead of the
state politics being required to destroy common property issues as such.25
Mark D. Whitaker 19
-------------------------------------
23
Chase-Dunn, Christopher, E. Susan Manning, and Thomas D. Hall. 2000. “Rise and Fall: East-
West Synchronicity and Indic Exceptionalism ReexaminedRise and Fall: East-West Synchronicity
and Indic Exceptionalism Reexamined.” Social Science History 24 (Winter):727–54; Chase-Dunn,
and Manning, “City Systems and World-Systems: Four Millennia of City Growth and Decline”;
Chase-Dunn, “Upward Sweeps in the Historical Evolution of World-Systems.”
24
O’Connor, James. 1971. The Fiscal Crisis of the State. New York City, New York: St. Martin’s
Press; Schnaiberg, Allan. 1980. The Environment: From Surplus to Scarcity. New York City, New
York: Oxford University Press; O’Connor, James. 1991. “Theoretical Notes: On the Two
Contradictions of Capitalism.” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 2(3):107–09; Foster, John Bellamy.
1992. “Symposium: The Second Contradiction of Capitalism.” Capitalism, Nature,
Socialism 3(3):77–82; O’Connor, James. 1994. “Is Sustainable Capitalism Possible?”. In Is Capi-
talism Sustainable?: Political Economy and the Politics of Ecology, ed. Martin O’Connor. New
York City, New York: Guilford Press; Foster, John Bellamy. 1999. “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic
Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology.” The American Journal of Sociol-
ogy 105(2).
25
Ostrom, Elinor. 1986. “How Inexorable Is the Tragedy of the Commons? Institutional Arrange-
ments for Changing the Structure of Social Dilemmas.” Distinguished Faculty Research Lecture,

35. e. Data Sources
To test these ideas I wanted my data to be as geographically and
temporally separated as possible and sufficiently detailed to refer to environ-
mental degradation and peasant/citizen revolutions if they occurred. Most of
my raw data came from accepted orthodox scholars of the regions in question.
A major source for Chinese data were the multi-volume sets of the Cambridge
Histories of China and the recently-completed Cambridge History of Ancient
China.26
In many cases, these volumes run over one thousand pages in length.
The recently completed volumes of the Cambridge History of Japan (last
volume completed in 1999) made a vast amount of historical data readily
accessible for the first time in English. These multi-authored volumes by top
scholars in their fields stress historical detail and multifaceted complexity over
‘selling’ a particular theoretical perspective. This was ideal from my point of
view because I wanted to analyze particular instances of territorial state forma-
tion, environmental degradation and peasant/citizen revolutions against those
state formations framed in religious and environmental terms. Additionally, I
20 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
April 3, 1986. Bloomington, Indiana: Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Indiana
University; Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Col-
lective Action (Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions). Cambridge, United Kingdom:
Cambridge University Press; Boland, Joseph. 1994. “Ecological Modernization.” Capitalism,
Nature, Socialism 5(3):135–41; Mol, A.P.J. 1995. The Refinement of Production. Ecological Mod-
ernisation Theory and the Chemical Industry. Utrecht: Jan van Arkel/International Books;
Acheson, James M., and Jack Knight. 2000. “Distribution Fights, Coordination Games, and Lob-
ster Management.” Society for Comparative Study of Society and History:209–38; Dryzek, John,
David Downs, Hans-Kristian Hernes, and David Schlosberg. 2003. Green States and Social Move-
ments: Environmentalism in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Norway. Oxford,
United Kingdom: Oxford University Press; Whitaker, Toward A Bioregional State: A Series of
Letters on Political Theory and Formal Institutional Design in the Era of Sustainability.
26
Loewe, Michael, and Edward L. Schaughnessy, eds. 1999. “The Cambridge History of Ancient
China.”. In The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 B.C.
Cambridge History of China. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

36. wanted to get around a view limited by academic specialization (e.g., analyz-
ing cultural and religious change in isolation from state political and state eco-
nomic change), and I wanted to check against any singular authorial voice in
historiographical reconstruction. Moreover, I wanted to understand these fine-
grained histories comparatively. These are hardly the only sources I have util-
ized. I am particularly indebted to Farris’s fine-grained details on ‘ancient
Japan’s’ available original historiographical texts, knowledge of court-and-
society politics, and archaeological records.27
I feel indebted as well to others’
pioneering work on Japanese environmental degradation historically.28
For historical Europe I drew on books stressing the wider “Greek-
Mediterranean-Babylonian Levant” civilization rather than just a thin Greco-
Roman civilization.29
This was combined with my long-term historical knowl-
edge of the Roman Republic state formation and its change into the Roman
Empire. For the ‘European’ case, the Roman State’s slow and fast ecological
revolutionary processes and their aftermaths are analyzed in the Mediterranean
area. I also referred to specialized histories like works on European heresies,
European Crusades, European histories of technology, and European histories
of disease.
Mark D. Whitaker 21
-------------------------------------
27
Farris, William Wayne. 1985. Population, Disease, and Land in Early Japan: 645–900.
Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series. Cambridge, Massaschusetts: Council on East
Asian Studies, Harvard University, and the Harvard Yenching Institute; Distributed by the Har-
vard University Press; Farris, William Wayne. 1992. Heavenly Warriors: The Evolution of
Japan’s Military, 500–1300. Harvard East Asian Monographs. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Coun-
cil on East Asian Studies, Harvard University; Distributed by the Harvard University Press; Farris,
William Wayne. 1998. Sacred Texts and Buried Treasures: Issues in the Historical Archaeology
of Ancient Japan. Honolulu, Hawai’i: University of Hawai’i Press.
28
Totman, Conrad D. 1989. The Green Archipelago: Forestry in Preindustrial Japan. Berkeley,
California: University of California Press; Chew, World Ecological Degradation: Accumulation,
Urbanization, and Deforestation, 3000 B.C.-A.D. 2000.
29
Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation; Burkert, Walter. 2007. Babylon, Memphis,
Persepolis: Eastern Contexts of Greek Culture. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University
Press.

37. For information about European Green movements as possible exam-
ples of contemporary ecological revolutionary movements in the offing, I
relied on first-hand information gathered in West German interviews about its
Green movement’s leadership, doctrines, demographics of support, and
institutional concerns as they appeared in the early 1980s.30
This movement
has expanded to many states globally by the early 21st century.31
I have thought about these interactive political, economic, and
religious-movement issues for many years. My two separate Bachelors of Arts
degrees (in comparative religious studies and in world history (with an interest
in East Asia)) and the professors who contributed to my comparative historical
doctoral work in environmental sociology were formative.32
All the above
22 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
30
Spretnak, Charlene, and Fritjof Capra. 1986. Green Politics. Sante Fe, New Mexico: Bear &
Company.
31
Lee, Yok-shiu F., and Alvin Y. So, eds. 1999. Asia’s Environmental Movements: Comparative
Perspectives. Asia and the Pacific, Series Ed., Mark Selden. Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe;
Broadbent, Jeffrey. 1999. Environmental Politics in Japan: Networks of Power and Protest. Cam-
bridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press; Sutton, Philip W. 2000. Explaining Environmentalism:
In Search of a New Social Movement. Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Company;
McNeill, John Robert. 2001. Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the
Twentieth-Century World. Global Century Series. Foreword by Paul Kennedy. New York: W. W.
Norton & Company; Dryzek, Downs, Hernes, and Schlosberg, Green States and Social Move-
ments: Environmentalism in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Norway; Rootes,
Christopher. 2004. “Environmental Movements.” Pp. 608–40 in The Blackwell Companion to
Social Movements, David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule, and Hanspeter Kriesi, eds. Malden, Massa-
chusetts: Blackwell Publishing, Ltd.
32
Tilly, Charles. 1985. “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime.” Pp. 169–87 in Bring-
ing the State Back In, Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds. Cambridge,
U.K.: Cambridge University Press; Tilly, Charles. 1990. Coercion, Capital, and European States,
AD 990–1990. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Basil Blackwell Publishers; Gorski, Philip S. 1993.
“The Protestant Ethic Revisited: Disciplinary Revolution and State Formation in Holland and
Prussia.” The American Journal of Sociology 99(2), 1993, September:265–316; Fischer, The Great
Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History; Tilly, Charles. 1999. Extending Citizenship,
Reconfiguring States. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers; Whitaker, Mark D.
2000. Raw Materials and the Division of Labor, or, Cotton and Wool: Differences in Raw

38. have provided me with many years of thought about issues of “epochal
syntheses, retrospective ethnography, and critical comparison.”33
f. A Changing Mechanism: Relational Consumptive Infrastructures As
Cause of Environmental Degradation or Environmental Amelioration
To view Europe or other areas of the world as a single unit of
environmental degradation (and of fast ecological revolution in response), I
drew from Wallerstein’s encouragement to demote tacit boundary assumptions
of most Eurocentric academy divisions.34
I drew as well on the movement in
environmental sociology to analyze consumption as a form of politicized
infrastructure. This particularly holds true here, though it is applied in the
analysis of state formation, religious movements, and patterns of material con-
sumption in terms of how they altered or influenced these politicized infra-
structures of consumption.
Mark D. Whitaker 23
Material Substrate Effects and Urban Industrialization Outcomes - Interrelating Urban Sociology,
Organizational Sociology, Environmental Sociology, and Social Stratification. Master’s Thesis.
University of Wisconsin; Whitaker, Mark D. 2002. “The State as a Biased Sponsor of Consump-
tion: Theorizing the Politics and Policies of Consumptive Bias in the Consumer Infrastructure,
Through a Positionalist Sociology.” Sociological Abstracts; Buttel, Frederick H. 2004. “The
Treadmill of Production: An Appreciation, Assessment, and Agenda for Research.” Organization
and Environment 17(3), September:323–36; Bunker, Stephen G., and Paul S. Ciccantell. 2005.
Globalization and the Race for Resources. Themes in Global Social Change. Baltimore, Maryland:
The Johns Hopkins University Press; Tilly, Charles. 2005. “Regimes and Contention.” Pp. 423–40
in The Handbook of Political Sociology: States, Civil Societies, and Globalization, Thomas
Janoski, Robert Alford, Alexander Hicks, and Mildred A Schwartz, eds. New York City, New
York: Cambridge University Press; Whitaker, Mark D. 2008. “Environmental Degradation.”. In
The Encyclopedia of Social Problems. Sage.
33
Tilly, “History of and in Sociology: Introduction to the Didactic Seminar on Methodologies of
the History of Sociology.”
34
Wallerstein, Immanuel, et al., Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission
on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences; Wallerstein, Immanuel, Unthinking Social Science:
The Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms; Second Edition, with a New Preface.

39. State-based environmental degradation as an institutional process has
drawn much from views in environmental sociology on ‘consumptive flows’
and/or consumption as a form of politicized infrastructure that encapsulates
micro, meso, and macro-level information simultaneously.35
This is uncannily
like an environmental sociological version of Charles Tilly’s and others’
recommendations of doing the same with ‘mechanism based research’ in his-
torical sociology that seeks equally the micro-to-macro linkages. I argue that
contentious and historically-changing politics around organizing particular
commodity choices and their distributions provide an ‘environmental
indeterminist’ and interscientific micro-macro link for comparative historical
environmental sociology.36
This allows for viewing state formation elites’
24 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
35
Whitaker, “The State as a Biased Sponsor of Consumption: Theorizing the Politics and Policies
of Consumptive Bias in the Consumer Infrastructure, Through a Positionalist Sociology”;
Whitaker, Raw Materials and the Division of Labor, or, Cotton and Wool: Differences in Raw
Material Substrate Effects and Urban Industrialization Outcomes - Interrelating Urban Sociology,
Organizational Sociology, Environmental Sociology, and Social Stratification; Shove, Elizabeth,
and Alan Wade. 2002. “Inconspicuous Consumption: The Sociology of Consumption, Lifestyles,
and the Environment.” Pp. 230–55 in Sociological Theory and the Environment: Classical Foun-
dations, Contemporary Insights, Editors Riley E. Dunlap, Frederick H. Buttel, Peter Dickens, and
August Gijswijt. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc; Mol, Arthur P. J.,
and Gert Spaargaren. 2005. “From Additions and Withdrawals to Environmental Flows: Refram-
ing Debates in the Environmental Social Sciences.” Organization & Environment 18(1):91–107;
Spaargaren, Gert, Arthur P. J. Mol, and Frederick H. Buttel, eds. 2006. Governing Environmental
Flows: Global Challenges to Social Theory. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press; Whitaker,
“Environmental Degradation.”
36
Whitaker, Raw Materials and the Division of Labor, or, Cotton and Wool: Differences in Raw
Material Substrate Effects and Urban Industrialization Outcomes - Interrelating Urban Sociology,
Organizational Sociology, Environmental Sociology, and Social Stratification; Whitaker, Mark D.
2002. “The State as a Biased Sponsor of Consumption: Theorizing the Politics and Policies of
Consumptive Bias in the Consumer Infrastructure, Through a Positionalist Sociology.” Sociologi-
cal Abstracts. International Sociological Association, World Congress of Sociology XV. Brisbane,
Australia; Whitaker, Mark D. 2003. “Jousting at Treadmills of Production? Turning the Treadmill
of Production Into a State-Centric Approach to a Biased Form of Consumption: Implications of the
State Being Part of the Idea of the Treadmill and Integrally Part of the Way We Consume.” Octo-

40. imposition and sponsorship of particular material frameworks as their biased,
politically-strategic tools--along with other potentially-different multiple
peasant groups working against the process for their own versions of
optimality in different materials and organizations in their different localities.
A consumptive infrastructure is relational between social, biological, and
physical issues in a single merged infrastructural topic. As such it is argued
that a biased consumptive infrastructure is to blame in environmental degrada-
tion, and this biased infrastructure is what fast ecological revolutionary move-
ments find themselves in opposition to, both ideologically and materially. I
argue that Ulrich Beck’s ‘risk politics’37
is mistakenly assumed to be only a
novel issue of industrial economies.38
Instead, the issue of risk politics can
help establish a truly comparative historical exploration in environmental
sociology, the environmental origins of state formation, and the environmental
degradation origins of mass opposition to state legitimacy in a culture.
Non-relational, single-variable explanations of environmental
degradation and environmental amelioration make poor models. Many of these
single-variable models have been proposed in the past including the biological
reductionism of Tudge,39
the populationist reductionism of Malthus and its
Mark D. Whitaker 25
ber 31. Symposium on Environment and the Treadmill of Production, Co-sponsored by the Depart-
ments of Rural Sociology and Sociology, and by the ISA Environment and Society Research Com-
mittee (RC 24). Madison, Wisconsin, USA.
37
Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Newbury Park, California: Sage
Publications; Beck, Ulrich. 1995. Ecological Enlightenment: Essays on the Politics of the Risk
Society. Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press; Beck, Ulrich. 1995. “Introduction.”. In
Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press; Bronner, Stephen Eric. 1995.
“Ecology, Politics, and Risk: The Social Theory of Ulrich Beck.” Capitalism, Nature,
Socialism 6(1):67–86.
38
Mythen, Gabe. 2007. “Reappraising the Risk Society Thesis: Telescopic Sight or Myopic
Vision?” Current Sociology 55(6), November:793–813.
39
Tudge, Colin. 1996. The Time Before History: Five Million Years of Human Impact. London,
U.K.: Scribner.

41. update by Garrett Hardin (see Harvey for a critique40
), the technological
reductionism of Lovins or Ausubel,41
and the sociologically reductionist and
even functionalist eco-Marxist arguments about environmental degradation.42
A difficulty in modelling consumption without reductionism is that
most sociologists have ignored the sociology of consumption43
or have ana-
lyzed consumption as only a micro-level behavior (though see Schnaiberg44
).
Mostly, sociologists have wholly missed ways in which consumption is infra-
structural and thus “inconspicuous”.45
Arguably much micro-level behavior is
dependent upon highly politicized sociotechnical systems that guide into exis-
tence certain aggregate micro-level behaviors over others.46
At times, power-
26 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
40
Harvey, David. 1974. “Population, Resources, and the Ideology of Science.” Economic Geog-
raphy 50(3), July:256–77.
41
Ausubel, Kenny. 1994. Seeds of Change: The Living Treasure, the Passionate Story of the
Growing Movement to Restore Biodiversity and Revolutionize the Way We Think About Food. San
Francisco, California: Harper; Ausubel, Kenny. 1997. Restoring the Earth: Visionary Solutions
from the Bioneers. H.J. Kramer.
42
O’Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State; Schnaiberg, The Environment: From Surplus to Scar-
city; Schnaiberg, Allan., and Kenneth Alan. Gould. 1994. Environment and Society: The Enduring
Conflict. New York: St. Martin’s Press; Foster, “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foun-
dations for Environmental Sociology”; Bunker, Stephen G. 2005. “How Ecologically Uneven
Developments Put the Spin on the Treadmill of Production.” Organization Environment 18(38).
Http://oae.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/18/1/38.
43
Zukin, Sharon, and Jennifer Smith Maguire. 2004. “Consumers and Consumption.” Annual
Review of Sociology 30:173–97.
44
Schnaiberg, The Environment: From Surplus to Scarcity.
45
Shove, and Wade, “Inconspicuous Consumption: The Sociology of Consumption, Lifestyles, and
the Environment.”
46
Bijker, Wiebe, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, eds. 1989. The Social Construction of
Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology. Cambridge,
Massachusetts: The MIT Press; Bijker, Wiebe, and John Law, eds. 1994. Shaping Technology /
Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change. Inside Technology. Cambridge, Massachu-
setts: The MIT Press; Bijker, Wiebe. 1997. Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of
Sociotechnical Change. Inside Technology. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press; Whitaker,
“Jousting at Treadmills of Production? Turning the Treadmill of Production Into a State-Centric

42. ful private or state elites have created sociotechnical systems that have biased
the aggregate level of micro-level consumers to serve themselves clientelisti-
cally with little public or ‘cultural’ input.47
Others have approached this infra-
structural view of consumption by analyzing global regional spaces, proposing
a ‘sociology of flows,’ a network model,48
or a ‘global commodity chains’
model.49
This allows for viewing the state formation elites’ imposition or
sponsorship of particular material frameworks as political strategic tools along
with the differing optimalities of other local peasant/citizen groups against the
process.
In conclusion, a consumptive infrastructure is relational between
social, biological, and physical issues in a single merged infrastructural topic.
As such it is argued that a biased consumptive infrastructure is to blame in
environmental degradation, and it is this which local ecological revolutionary
movements seek to oppose both ideologically and materially. Thus, human-
Mark D. Whitaker 27
Approach to a Biased Form of Consumption: Implications of the State Being Part of the Idea of
the Treadmill and Integrally Part of the Way We Consume.”
47
Eisen, Jonathan Eisen. 2001. Suppressed Inventions. New York City, New York: Berkeley Pub-
lishing Group; Freudenburg, William R. 2005. “Privileged Access, Privileged Accounts: Toward a
Socially Structured Theory of Resources and Discourses.” Social Forces 84(1):89–114; Black,
Edwin. 2006. Internal Combustion: How Corporations and Governments Addicted the World to
Oil and Derailed the Alternatives. New York: St. Martin’s Press; Wine, Byron. 2007. “Suppressed
Gas Efficient Engines.”. In Energy Information. Http://www.byronwine.com.
48
Castells, Manuel. 1996. The Rise of the Network Society (Volume 1 of the Information Age.
Economy, Society, and Culture). Blackwell Publishers; Urry, John. 2000. Sociology Beyond
Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty First Century. International Library of Sociology. London,
United Kingdom: Routledge; Mol, and Spaargaren, “From Additions and Withdrawals to Environ-
mental Flows: Reframing Debates in the Environmental Social Sciences”; Spaargaren, Mol, and
Buttel, Governing Environmental Flows: Global Challenges to Social Theory.
49
Innis, Harold Adams. 1956. Essays in Canadian Economic History. Toronto, Canada: University
of Toronto Press; Bunker, Stephen G. 1985. Underdeveloping the Amazon: Extraction, Unequal
Exchange, and the Failure of the Modern State. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press;
Bunker, “How Ecologically Uneven Developments Put the Spin on the Treadmill of Production”;
Bunker, and Ciccantell, Globalization and the Race for Resources.

43. generated environmental degradation can be conceived of as the outcome of a
contentious, politicized organizational phenomena instead of humans being
functionally required to degrade the environment. This is similar to what
Nobel Prize Winner in Economics Amartya Sen and others talk of when they
describe major famines being caused by a lack of political infrastructural entit-
lement instead of by a lack of food.50
In the following chapters I shall try to demonstrate that at various
times and places state formations that engaged in territorial extensions
arranged certain aggregate styles of resource consumption and generated
environmental degradation that in turn led to citizen/peasant opposition and
fast ecological revolution. However, environmental degradation alone is
hardly enough to explain such oppositions. The development of anti-statist
opposition traditions--and the localist institutions and interests they
encourage--are also important. This political competition has been going on
throughout the human-environmental experience of territorial state formation.
Instead of history capable of categorization in static Eurocentric labeled
‘epochs,’ these similar patterns of elite-sponsored ecological degradation fol-
lowed by peasant/citizen ecological revolution can be seen in a variety of
cases worldwide, affected by different sociological factors and biophysical
factors like ‘hinterland closure’ eras in many cases.51
28 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
50
Sen, Amartya. 1983. Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. Oxford,
United Kingdom: Oxford University Press; Sen, Amartya. 1994. “Population: Delusion and
Reality.” The New York Review of Books 41(15), September 22.
Http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=2149,
http://www.marathon.uwc.edu/geography/malthus/sen_NYR.htm; Lappe, Frances Moore, Joseph
Collins, Peter Rosset, and California Institute for Food and Development Policy. 1998. World
Hunger: Twelve Myths, Second Edition. Grove Press.
51
What is so useful in analyzing Japan, China, and the Roman State is their geographical and
geopolitical isolation from other territorial states as they expanded. This yields more comparative
historical ‘natural experimental’ material. For Japan, Totman as well as Farris argues for the
closure of the Japanese hinterland by 900 at the latest. (See: Farris, Population, Disease, and Land
in Early Japan: 645–900; Totman, The Green Archipelago: Forestry in Preindustrial Japan;

44. Mark D. Whitaker 29
Farris, Heavenly Warriors: the Evolution of Japan’s Military, 500–1300.) Elvin argues the same
for China by around the 1300s. (See: Elvin, Mark. 1973. The Pattern of the Chinese Past. Stan-
ford, California: Stanford University Press.) For Europe, the feeling of ‘frontier closure’ only
occurred on an international maritime empire sense by the early 20th century to the mid 20th
century, as analyzed by others. (See: Colby, Gerard, and Charlotte Dennett. 1996. Thy Will Be
Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil. Harper-
Perennial; Isichei, Elizabeth Allo. 1997. A History of African Societies to 1870. Cambridge, U.K.:
Cambridge University Press; Browder, and Godfrey, Rainforest Cities: Urbanization, Develop-
ment, and Globalization of the Brazilian Amazon.)

45. motivated by novel Christian equality ideas, they sought to bring about the
Confucian “Great Peace” (t’ai p’ing, as in “Taiping Rebellion”). Hong Xiu-
quan and his followers seized Nanking, a major city, from the Ch’ing dynasty.
With Nanking as his literal “New Jerusalem,” Hong Xiuquan maintained a
Christian Chinese regime ruling over a great portion of Chinese territory dur-
ing a twenty-year Taiping (Confucian Great Peace) Rebellion. This was only
one movement of the period. It is estimated that, by combining the environ-
mental/infrastructural neglect disasters of the 1800s as well as Ch’ing govern-
mental repression, over twenty million people died to maintain the Ch’ing
dynasty.250
Soon afterwards in Korea, Christianity spawned another fast ecologi-
cal revolution of peasants against an illegitimate dynasty. This was seen in the
Tonghak rebellion in the 1880s-1894 against the Korean Chosun Dynasty and
in the enduring politio-religious movement of Chondogyo (“Eastern Learn-
ing”) in Korea from the 1890s continuing into the present. It was based on
another mystical experience reinterpreting “Western learning” (Christianity)
importing its radical human equality ideas in heavily repressive Confucian-
dynastic state that widely seen as illegitimate. The Tonghak Rebellion was
crushed in 1894. However, in the same year massive attempts to reclientelize
peasants with material succor were attempted in the Gabo Reforms. Korean
slavery and its caste/class system were abolished in that year. Further
exacerbating the long term cultural dynamic of anti-systemic religious oppo-
sition in Korea, Chondogyo continued as a mobilization against the Japanese
occupation during the early 20th century.251
Later, Catholic religious institu-
tions played a large part in mobilizing the Korean labor movement in the
1970s as well.
Mark D. Whitaker 295
-------------------------------------
250
Spence, Jonathan D. 1997. God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiu-
quan. New York City, New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc; Davis, Late Victorian
Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World.
251
Beaver, R. Pierce. 1962. “Chondogyo and Korea.” Journal of Bible and Religion 30(2):115–22.

46. In short, anti-systemic religion and poor material politics as its
motivation have mixed for a long time. It will continue predictably to mix in
the future as long as states encourage developmental processes that lead to
consumptive consolidation and expansions of environmental and health
degradations of the people at large.
296 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n

47. winter weather on the Pacific side is moderated by the Japan Current, making
winters sunny and moderate however dry they are. This facilitated agriculture
in this ecoregion.
In these Pacific Ocean-facing coastal plains and low hills of Japan,
rice and other crops have been grown for only 2,000 years. Agriculture is
much older in other places of the world. Presently, this ecoregion has been
almost entirely covered by urban areas or converted to agriculture.
There is evidence that people have been living in the Japanese
archipelago for over 10,000 years, so for most of Japanese history there was a
lack of agriculture. However, some of the first examples of pottery known to
world archaeology comes from Japan, and it is distinct from agricultural
storage purposes with which it is typically associated elsewhere. In densely
forested Japan, the larders (and waste pile middens) of the population for
thousands of years show durable hunting, gathering, and fishing as major
sources of sustenance instead of agriculture.
b. Slow Ecological Revolution in Japan: State Formation and State Shinto
Moving from Unrelated, Local Kami and Rice Spirits, to Related,
National Kami and Rice Spirits
Connecting to our previous story about China, this lack of Japanese
agriculture started to change during the military consolidation of China’s Qin
Empire in the late 200s BCE. Agriculture was ‘injected’ into Japan in the 200s
BCE, the same period in which Qin’s military consolidation was pressing
toward the Pacific Coast and then immediately thereafter into the Korean
Peninsula. The Qin Empire after it consolidated China in 221 BCE attempted
to conquer statelets on the Korean Peninsula. Failures there, followed by inter-
nal rebellions in China, led to the collapse of the Qin Empire in eleven years,
immediately after the death of the first emperor. So China’s Qin Empire had
almost no impact on Japan or its agricultural system except indirectly through
Mark D. Whitaker 303

48. refugees from continental areas. The refugees brought different skills and
techniques during the Japanese “Yayoi period,” that started the change toward
agriculture in Japan. However, it was without a different state-facilitated form
of agriculture just yet.
At the base of the [Japanese agricultural] system were agricultural
communities that had probably come into existence at the time of the
introduction and spread of wet-rice agriculture, when flat and well-
watered land was first developed for the cultivation of rice in paddy
fields. Archaeological studies indicate that such communities, sur-
rounded by ditches and walls, were usually located on ground too
high for the cultivation of rice but near paddy fields. From earliest
times, similar concerns and interests bound members of such farming
communities into tight social groups that, from their position at the
base of Japanese society, shaped and colored subsequent social
change. Farmers have always had to deal with the common task of
leveling land, building and maintaining dikes and canals, keeping the
fields flooded during the growing season, and coping with the
dangers of drought and storm as well as the possibility of attacks by
wild animals or aggressive neighbors. And it was in such farming
communities that linear control groups (called uji or clans) gradually
emerged [by taking on associations that they were direct descendants
of local, particularistic, religious kami] to become major units in the
[later hierarchal-kami-legitimated relations259
of the] Yamato
[(approximately 250-650 CE) elite state formation] control
structure.260
304 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
259
This process is the slow ecological revolutionary dynamic. It will be described in more detail
momentarily.
260
Hall, John Whitney, Marius B. Jansen, Madoka Kanai, and Denis Twitchett, eds. 1993. The
Cambridge History of Japan, Volume One: Ancient Japan. Edited by John Whitney Hall. Cam-

49. A novel ‘rice spirit’ (instead of a localized kami) came to be another source of
material propition for the peasant communities during this era as well. The
local uji (clan) leadership became associated with these rice spirits lineally.
[I]t seems the basic element of Yayoi religion included shamanism
that used oracle bone divination [same as Shang China and onward]
and other methods to guide the course of secular government, and the
worship of a ‘rice spirit’ that accompanied the introduction of wet-
rice cultivation....Harvest festivals described in [Chinese visitor]
literary sources and surviving rice cultivation customs resemble those
of southeast Asia and Indonesia, indicating that wet-rice agriculture
may have been introduced from southern regions.261
The important
element in these festivals is the veneration of the rice spirit, believed
to dwell at harvest time in specially reaped sheaves of rice. These
sheaves were enshrined in a grain storehouse. The ritual prayers
(norito) that hint at primitive agrarian beliefs identify the food kami
Toyouke as the spirit of rice. Another name for her is Ukanomitama,
a name that can be translated literally as ‘food spirit.’262
Showing the combination of the material and ideological in religious traditions
was the rice spirit itself:
Mark D. Whitaker 305
bridge, New York: Cambridge University Press.
261
Unrelated to this discussion are other Polynesian elements of Japanese settlement as well. (See:
Cavalli-Sforza, L. Luca, Paolo Menozzi, and Alberto Piazza. 1994. The History and Geography of
Human Genes. Abridged Paperback Edition, with a New Preface by the Author. Princeton, New
Jersey: Princeton University Press.)
262
Hall, Jansen, Kanai, and Twitchett, The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume One: Ancient
Japan, 331–2.

50. Veneration of the rice spirit was an important element in the develop-
ment of [more humanocentric and hierarchical State] Shinto [as local
eco-identifications were stretched into more humanocentric hierarchi-
cal networks across different local groups in the slow ecological rev-
olutionary aspects of state formation.] [State] Shinto’s indebtedness
to Yayoi period agrarian ritual is disclosed in the construction of
shrine buildings at such early shrines for the worship of the [Yamato
imperial cult’s] Sun Goddess and another for the [novel centralized]
worship of the [once only localized] food kami Toyouke. The main
hall of [these early Yamato state religious legitimacy shrines at] both
Ise sanctuaries is built with a raised floor, ornamental roof
crossbeams, and other architectural details that...typify grain
storehouse construction.263
Three state-formation attempts each expanding in scale were built
from expanding politicized agricultural frontier difficulties on the local agri-
cultural level, it seems, as much as the expanding nested hierarchal relations of
kami-sacral communities. In order, these three were: Yamatai (approximately
100s-250s), Yamato (200s-650s), and the ritsuryo civil-penal statutory law
state that was derived from imported techniques of Chinese inspiration (650s
to 1860s, with many modifications and historical drift in its institutions).
By the 650s, this state formation via slow ecological revolution had
increasingly turned a Shinto religion into a more distanciated form of political
network of elite service instead of simply it being about the kami themselves.
It was about a network of human relationships referencing the kami for human
sociopolitical and cultural legitimacy. This slow ecological revolution created
a nationwide, delocalized hierarchy of status relationship ‘among the kami.’
306 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
263
Hall, Jansen, Kanai, and Twitchett, The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume One: Ancient
Japan, 332.

51. To begin this story about how slow ecological revolution was
involved in state formation, different autonomous agricultural communities
and their kami were beginning to be in competition with one another’s fron-
tiers by at least the first century CE. Similar to Norbert Elias’s ideas about the
development of political clientelism,264
this contention began the first docume-
nted distanciated ‘second tier shamanistic elites’ with their jurisdiction extend-
ing over multiple and separate kami-worshipping areas, though associated
with one kami placed over all. This is seen both in the first known territorial
statelet of Yamatai and the larger second one, Yamato.
This increasing human political hierarchy developed out of localist
contention into what became known as Shinto or more appropriately known as
State Shinto. Various elite state purposes of Shinto started a slow ecological
revolution of a territorial state attempting to consolidate ideological
clientelism and material clientelism together across separate areas by selective
appeals to different geographically-embedded identities. This attempted to
make these novel ‘second tier’ distanciated elites ‘from nowhere’ as legitimate
in the eyes of different multiple local populaces. Military conquest aided as
well, though such martial and material issues were only half of the equation. It
was the Shinto hierarchies associated with these nascent royal lines that made
the jurisdictional aspects durable, legitimate, and an ‘extended part’ of
accepted local identities. These elites’ ongoing policies toward both ideologi-
cal consolidation and the political economic consolidation allowed for a slow
delegitimating and undermining of local identity and economic autonomy that
were bound up in each other. This started to lead toward material externalities
that increasingly delegitimated the ideological hierarchy. This set the starting
stage of conditions for the fast ecological revolution simultaneously, and at
least on the surface, a paradoxical break in ideational/identity issues toward
Mark D. Whitaker 307
-------------------------------------
264
Elias, Norbert. 1998. “Game Models.”. In The Norbert Elias Reader: A Biographical Selection,
Johan Gouldsblom and Stephen Mennell, eds. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers.

52. more individuated forms of belief that were abstract while at the same moment
these novel ideas were mobilized as a recovery of more environmental proxy
forms of political pressures.
By the first century [CE] some of these petty states on...[the southern-
most island of] Kyushu were strong enough to send missions to the
Chinese court. Although we have no detailed information about the
sinification process or how it affected the life and organization of
either the nuclear community or the umbrella federation, the follow-
ing conclusion--relevant to the nature and role of the clans that
became the foundation of the Yamato control structure [by around
250 CE]--can be drawn: (1) a small state was formed by one agricul-
tural community that gained supremacy (probably by means of mili-
tary force) over neighboring communities; (2) a small state was
headed by a king or queen who stood above (but apparently did not
replace) the heads [and localized ideologies] of constituent com-
munities; (3) a king or queen had a sacred relationship to, and was
the chief priest or priestess in the worship of his or her guardian
kami, just as the head of each constituent community [uji] conducted
the worship of its community kami; (4) a state kami stood above (but
did not replace) the kami worshipped by the [uji] heads of petty
states; (5) a king or queen was often succeeded by a son or daughter;
and (6) the centralization process was associated with, if not
accelerated by, an increasingly widespread use of iron tools and
weapons.265 266
308 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
265
However, iron was without popular peasant agricultural uses until well into the 1200s CE. (See:
Farris, Heavenly Warriors: the Evolution of Japan’s Military, 500–1300, 214–15.) This describes
a hierarchy of elite martial metal use before that in very iron-poor Japan.
266
Hall, Jansen, Kanai, and Twitchett, The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume One: Ancient
Japan, 134–5.

53. This showed once more the intimate interactions between material legitimacy
and ideological legitimacy as the same phenomenon extended in political rela-
tionships:
It appears that [a particular local kami] Takamimusubi was originally
the tutelary deity of the imperial clan, and many elements of the wor-
ship of Takamimusubi were retained in court ceremonials of later
[larger territorial] periods. He was considered responsible for the
emperor’s long life and prosperity, and he was one of the eight kami
venerated in the Hasshinden, the palace chapel of the government’s
Council of Kami Affairs [created in the 650s, where the emperor
basically worshipped his own clans’s ‘higher kami’ and equally held
a spiritual monopoly as exclusive agricultural-shaman of the Yayoi-
era popularized ‘rice spirit’]. Moreover, he also played an important
role at the Chinkonsai (the annual winter festival held in order to
rejuvenate the emperor’s soul) and the Kinensai (the spring agricul-
tural festival). ‘Musubi,’ the final portion of Takamumusubi’s name,
means ‘the creating spirit.’ In other words, he was an agricultural
kami. He was enshrined along with seven other kami in a temporary
sanctuary near the sacred fields where rice was cultivated for the
[emperor’s temple named] Daijosai....Amaterasu was not enshrined
at the Hasshinden in the imperial court, although from the middle of
the Heian period [by the 800s] the emperor did venerate her else-
where in the palace. Nor did she originally figure in the Daijosai.
Moreover, in the simplest and apparently oldest myth concerning the
imperial ancestor Hononinigi, the grandfather Takamimusubi sends
him to earth as a newborn baby, wrapped simply in a coverlet. The
story that later came to represent the founding of the [royal] line
originally seems to have told how Takamimusubi, the kami of pro-
Mark D. Whitaker 309

54. ductivity, sent to earth the rice kami, Hononinigi [‘the imperial
ancestor’], whose name means 'rich harvest of rice.'267
The connection between [material] meal taking and assumption of
[ideological] legitimacy of the position [was important for the]
emperor. At the Daijosai festival following his enthronement, the
emperor shared a [symbolic] communal meal with Amaterasu, his
ancestral kami. Like the governor of Izumo, the emperor also partici-
pated in similar rites...that were meant to renew his sacred power. In
these rites, performed during the Niinamesai (harvest festival) at the
imperial palace, the emperor partook of newly harvested rice believed
to house the rice spirit.268
This slow ecological revolution of the territorial state in turning local
bioregionalist forms of identity into forms of “ideological subsidies” for state
formation elites is seen clearly in the layers of Shinto created over the
centuries following the Yayoi era.
Because Shinto is a...belief system that has retained [geographically-
locused] elements even while gradually becoming more
[distanciated], the myths themselves represent levels...[of co-option
and slow ecological revolution]....According to Mishina Shoei, Japa-
nese mythology developed in three distinct stages [which more than
accidentally are related to political economic alliance creations, both
material and ideological, between state elites and local separate
elite/peasant populations in their original belief frameworks]. In
310 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
267
Hall, Jansen, Kanai, and Twitchett, The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume One: Ancient
Japan, 347.
268
Hall, Jansen, Kanai, and Twitchett, The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume One: Ancient
Japan, 342–3.

55. the...Yayoi period [without territorial elite state formation] (approxi-
mately 200 BCE to 250 CE), apolitical myths functioned as rituals of
worship and petition designed to secure certain [local material]
effects by magical means. The next period, the ‘ceremonial myth’
stage [and the first two territorial elite state formation attempts of
Yamatai to Yamato] (250 CE to 500 in the Burial Mound stage), is
characterized by [imported agricultural] myths focused on rites for
ensuring the production of good rice harvests [as state-centric agri-
cultural shamanism and its amassed rice fields were ideological and
material adjuncts to military consolidation of such states, since now
centralized kami-legitimated political elites made ideological deals
with local kami-legitimated elites and encouraged the belief that the
former were their hierarchical leadership in a central appeal to their
‘rice spirit’ to secure all local rice harvests].269
As the [geography of
the] Yamato court gradually extended its dominion [from the only
plentifully “rice-capable” area in Japan known as the Kinai] during
this period, myths came to reflect the local chieftains’ [abstract] acts
of submission to central [rice and martial] authority [stretched
increasingly to a distanciated framework of metaphysics off
originally only a local kami-worshipping framework]. The Yamato
ruler’s role as a sacred priest-king was strengthened, and to some
extent, secular government and worship were fused. Thus Mishina’s
Mark D. Whitaker 311
-------------------------------------
269
As noted, mixing the ideological and the material in human political hierarchies of consumptive
alliance expanded the slow ecological revolution: “Veneration of the rice spirit [and agricultural
based state shamanism] was an important element in the development of [more hierarchical]
Shinto. Shinto’s indebtedness to Yayoi period agrarian ritual is disclosed in the construction of
shrine buildings at such early shrines for the worship of the Sun Goddess and another for the wor-
ship of the food kami Toyouke. The main hall of both Ise sanctuaries is built with a raised floor,
ornamental roof crossbeams, and other architectural details that historians believe typify grain
storehouse construction.” (See: Hall, Jansen, Kanai, and Twitchett, The Cambridge History of
Japan, Volume One: Ancient Japan, 332)

56. second-period myths contained both political and religious elements
[as both material and ideological hegemonies embedded in each
other’s infrastructural expansion] that were reflected in rituals con-
ducted by both the Yamato court and local clans. In Mishina’s third
‘political-myth’ period, myths lost much of their religious character
as their [human-only] political overtone was deepened. This period
began in the late sixth century and ended in the eighth, when the
myths--embellished and revised to serve political ends--were
recorded in the chronicles.270
This is a charmingly succinct description of a slow ecological revolutionary
process involved in state formation: pulling local-only forms of identity and
legitimacy into larger humanocentric hierarchies by changing the signified,
instead of the sign’s ongoing symbolic aspects of legitimacy. In the process,
this territorialization legitimated larger consolidated jurisdictions. This set up
forms of consumptive consolation within these larger territories with
increasingly environmental degradation scales larger than before.
As stated above, three statelets facilitated this slow ecological revolu-
tionary development. These three state formation attempts that legitimated
themselves in these increasingly distanciated manners were Yamatai (approxi-
mately 100 through 250 CE, unknown location though known from Chinese
visitors throughout the Later Han); Yamato (from 250s CE onward through
the mid-600s, known from Chinese visits recording its military consolidation
centered on the main and only agriculturally plentiful area of the Kinai though
with clients and jurisdiction in many other areas of Japan--except for North-
eastern Japan and its Kanto Plain that were still heavily forested then); and
what is known as the “Chinese-style” state or “ritsuryo”-state from the 650s
312 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
270
Hall, Jansen, Kanai, and Twitchett, The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume One: Ancient
Japan, 324.

57. through the 1860s (known from Japanese history and archaeology, though
adapted throughout). This third territorial state from the 650s attempted to
extend its jurisdiction throughout the entire Japanese archipelago. In doing so,
it was pushing back a northeastern frontier of native Emishi and Ainu--
different, still-localized agricultural communities who had different foodways
and ethnic origins than the western Japanese. Hokkaido was left out of this
state formation. It was integrated into Japanese territoriality for the first time
after the 1880s.
c. Toward Fast Ecological Revolution: Environmental Externalities of
Japanese Territorial State Formation
Despite the ‘legitimated’ slow ecological revolution described above,
the material aspect of it soon made this territorial state formation illegitimate
and led to fast ecological revolution. This was the political economic con-
solidation and environmental externalities within the statelets. This
phenomenon was sponsored into existence as elite territoriality expanded its
legitimacy off the local, though the environmental externalities undermined
such localities’ durability in the long term as it expanded. This undermined
appeals to ‘shared interests and legitimacy’ that elites utilized to maintain their
policies.
Returning to the jurisdictional consolidation of Yamatai, the second
Chinese report, dated to before 297 CE, about this polity noted that:
...[t]he land is described as [now] divided into one hundred “coun-
tries,” varying in size from one thousand to seventy thousand
households, some ruled by kings and others by queens--possibly a
transition between matriarchy and patriarchy.271
The countries of the
Mark D. Whitaker 313
-------------------------------------
271
Gender inequalities in politics, economics, and culture were being created in this distanciated

58. [south-]western part of the land were under the suzerainty of the
unmarried queen Himiko of Yamatai, who was a sort of high
314 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
framework of political clientelism as well, though this line of discussion is left out in general.
However, there is a very clear gendered level of changes affecting the creation of a male gendered
hegemony during territorial state formation. Arguably, male gendered hegemony results from
changes in the spatial hegemony due to the sexual division of reproduction and how larger terri-
torial spaces magnify spatial differences of travel and concourse in males, capitalize upon that, and
then culturally render the resulting gender hierarchy as ‘normal’ even though it is only an histori-
cal and legally elaborated creation. ‘Second tier’ elites were mostly male. Male military figures of
integration or local kami sacrality came to be the links between many different local matriarchal
and more gender equal polities. Subsequently the unforeseen “systemic power” of males (see:
Stone, Clarence N. 1980. “Systemic Power in Community Decision Making: A Restatement of
Stratification Theory.” The American Political Science Review 74[4], December:978–90) came to
dominate different localities, leading to formal forms of domination and inequalities over time--
though with huge historical case variations. I would argue this was done less because they were
males and only happenstance that they were males due to reproductive specialization issues and
how ‘maleness’ was magnified and culturally created as more distinct for the first time by the spa-
tial sorting of which gender participated in the larger territorial state formation. Such novel levels
of delocalized spatial experience as ‘sociospatial glass ceilings’ for women are an important
window into what was occurring. Such ‘second tier’ elite state formation changes have typically
been built from multiple, local, more gender-equitable matriarchal contexts of female respect and
equal local political participation. This gendered side to slow ecological revolution changes over
generations of territorial state formation experience toward more distanciated patriarchal
clientelism slowly enforced by male-biased systemic power and laws. Typically worldwide this
over time increased marginalization of females legally into being rightless and non-participatory
adjuncts of male-headed family units, protected/dominated by a patriarchal state. In Japan, the
many very equal gender laws in the early law codes from the 700s changed very slowly to a male-
dominated form of inheritance and legal exclusivity over females by the 1200s. Gender
inequalities can ‘grow up’ within the novel political, legal, cultural, and spatial experiences of an
elite territorial state over time. For a comparison of changes in gender hegemony and spatial
hegemony, there are modern case studies of this change from matriarchy to patriarchy that are
instructive. Urry argues how forms of systemic power of male-biased spatial networks of integra-
tion outside the family and matriarchical locality start to lead to stratification within the matriarchi-
cal family later under male gendered hegemony. Urry’s detailed comparison relates the same pro-
cess of changes in matriarchy to patriarchy in Kerala (India) to the changes in matriarchy to
patriarchy in Southeast Asia. (See: Urry, Govinda. 1986. Kinship Systems in South and Southeast
Asia. Jangpura, New Delhi, India: Vikas Publishing House Limited, Pvt.)

59. priestess [ruling through her brother as the ‘external agent’ who was
militarily legitimated by her while she remained cloistered and
unseen], and over whose grave a great mound was erected....[Next,
within a century of territorial consolidation effects against Yamatai
that occurred after this Chinese report, there archaeologically is noted
an increase in “copying” Yamatai/Himiko-type mounds in its
periphery to glamorize multiple peripheral, localist uji elites in com-
petition with each other and with the original Himiko tomb status
perhaps. Further jurisdictional consolidation is noted:....[A later third
source, a]...fifth-century Chinese history describes a Japanese ruler of
the beginning of that century [400 CE] as having conquered fifty-five
“countries” of hairy men (presumably Ainu [who are a distinct eth-
nolinguistic group more hirsute than Japanese]) to the east, sixty-six
“countries” to the west, and others across the sea to the north, mean-
ing southern Korea.272
By around 400 CE the Chinese were talking about the second statelet
in the series, Yamato. Yamato was a large scale Japanese territorial consolida-
tion. Yamato extended into the east and west of Japan and onto the Korean
mainland like the Chinese chronicle said. Earlier, the smaller Yamatai (sup-
posed) ‘queendom’ of Himiko was assuredly one of the areas conquered
and/or integrated by Yamato. Though since it is still unknown in what area of
western Japan Yamatai was located, it is estimated that Yamatai’s jurisdic-
tional consolidation was achieved by around 100 CE to 240 CE and afterward.
This is known because by 240 CE, the Chinese Wei statelet sent Himiko a
gold seal recognizing her authority as “Queen of Japan.”273
This gold seal is a
Mark D. Whitaker 315
-------------------------------------
272
Fairbank, John K., Edwin O. Reischauer, and Albert M. Craig. 1989. East Asia: Tradition and
Transformation, Revised Edition. Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Company.
273
Hall, Jansen, Kanai, and Twitchett, The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume One: Ancient
Japan, xxi.

60. fine example of how ideological, material, and jurisdictional subsidiary issues
are interwoven in significant material gifts between political leaders recogniz-
ing and thus linking (or ignoring) each other’s jurisdiction.The same intra-elite
networks were employed in Yamato status goods between local and ‘national’
elites (particularly allowed funerary furnishings) of Yamato as signs of
approved authority in the peripheries.
To move discussion from the ideological to the material side, what
was the further basis of such power? What was ‘in it for the peasants or local
elites’ to maintain such material support and external jurisdictional inroads
into their areas? Drawing from implications of other cases, as agricultural
techniques came to be widely shared by these mutually-opposed localized
peasant groups, their mutual territorial and agricultural impingements upon
each other for agricultural space and water supplies became hostile. This is a
similar process worldwide noted in nascent state formation called “environ-
mental circumscription,” described by Carniero and others.274
Many villages
for their protection erected stockades that required lots of specialized
maintenance that detracted from agriculture and food stocks. Sometimes it was
‘cheaper’ to allow intra-community agreements to start larger territorial
alliances or to ‘allow’ conquest of their area to stand as a protection against
other areas outside.
Yamatai lost centralized domination via the aftereffects of its success
at solving these inter-regional conflicts. By stabalizing and facilitating con-
sumptive expansion within and outside of its own territory in its peripheries, it
led to novel difficulties of maintaining such consolidation legitimately. With
Yamatai’s lost central jurisdiction, Japan entered what has been called the
“Tomb Period.” This was when many more localized groups--possibly sur-
rounding or influenced by Yamatai’s first examples of these tombs--
316 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
274
Carneiro, “A Theory of the Origin of the State”; Khoury, Philip S., and Joseph Kostiner, eds.
1990. Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East. Berkeley, California: University of Califor-
nia Press.

61. constructed their own keyhole tombs in imitation and challenge to Yamatai’s
more central orientation. Entering this Tomb Period, we see the jurisdictional,
geographic expansion effect of Yamati itself. Soon, in this heightened context
of illegitimacy and material competition fostered by its success in the first
place, Yamatai became overrun by what seems to be evidence of the larger
military consolidation by Yamato.
After Yamato, a Chinese-style “ritsuryo” state based on continental
techniques of administration and institutions was elaborated from around 650
CE onward. It was based around the still durable Yamato (now imperial rit-
suryo) dynasty. The ritsuryo state had larger organizational capacities of social
penetration, environmental degradation, and political economic consolidation.
This is because it was built from a studied injection of elite political economic
consolidation techniques invented in the Chinese warring states and beyond,
even though the direct inspiration was from the Sui/T’ang Dynasty then form-
ing in China from the 580s CE. The Chinese area already had 1,000 years of
experimentation with such elite state formation techniques despite their effects
on facilitating environmental degradation and ecological revolutionary move-
ments against them all the while, predictably leading to their demise.
Scholars agree that these arrangements [after the start of the third ter-
ritorial state formation attempt in Japan from the 650s CE], com-
monly referred to as the ritsuryo (penal and administrative law) sys-
tem, were closely intertwined with economic and social change in the
Nara [major multiple-capital construction] period (710-784). At the
base of the ritsuryo order [was a state penetration for the first time in
agriculture, with]...periodic reallocations of [nationalized] rice land
(handen shuju) [to gain ongoing peasant consumptive ambivalence
and forced clients who were]...linked with an enforced registration of
individuals in every household [for taxation and for peasant military
draft purposes for the first time as well]: laws stipulated that every
Mark D. Whitaker 317

62. registered household be allotted rice land in accordance with his or
her age, sex, and social position....The Taiho penal and administrative
codes of 701 seem to have been quite well enforced during the first
half of the eighth century. But then violations became more
numerous and allocations more sporadic as the state’s [legitimate and
consumptively ambivalent] control over land and people
weakened....275
Ostensibly the ritsuryo system continued to function
as intended, but an increasingly large number of conditions and prac-
tices were beginning to subvert its effectiveness. Historians generally
agree, nevertheless, that Japan’s ritsuryo state structure reached its
apogee during the Nara period and that only in the last half of the
period, particularly after 700, were its foundations undermined by [its
own elite-facilitated consumptive consolidation which led to] chang-
ing social and economic [and environmental externality]
conditions.276
d. Fast Ecological Revolution Already Starting in Late Yamato, Expand-
ing in Opposition Via Larger Penetration of the Early Ritsuryo State
The expanding scale of state formation carried with it forms of
environmental degradation in its political economic consolidation. In
response, there was fast ecological revolution, given a voice through the novel
anti-systemic religious organizational capacities. The exclusive uses of kami-
318 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
275
This was due to several interacting issues: [1] due to ensuing extraction difficulties from
peasants, [2] due to decades of frontier wars, [3] due to ensuing consumptive consolidation that
impoverished them, [4] due to the massive epidemics that were facilitated in this context, and [5]
due to the mounting religio-ecological revolutionary opposition by the mid 700s against this state-
facilitating risk arrangement in their lives.
276
Hall, Jansen, Kanai, and Twitchett, The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume One: Ancient
Japan, 415.

63. worship as the only route of political legitimacy in the Yamato-to-ritsuryo
state started to be delegitimated because the state was justifying a further pro-
cess of expanding environmental degradation, agricultural shakeout, elite mili-
tarism, and suffering in general instead of merely protecting local areas. This
set the stage for the mass popularization of fast ecological revolutionary
effects.
In this first case analyzed, environmental proxy pressures were
expressed through anti-systemic Buddhism. Buddhism in Japan seemed to
have been introduced by the mid 500s, as consumptive consolidation and
peasant dislocations were known to have been more pronounced. By the early
500s there were “sumptuous tribal [uji] headquarters built”277
though they
were located in the midst of what seemed to be increasing systemic immisera-
tion leading support away from State Shinto to support of ‘foreign’
Buddhism.
This Buddhist sponsorship in historical records is claimed to be
traced to the powerful ‘foreign’ Soga family of militarists and their ‘continen-
tal technological specialists’ who worked for the Yamato Shinto aristocracy
and royalty. Soon after, the Soga utilized mass Buddhism and peasant upset as
a base of support to challenge the Yamato Shinto ruling house in a civil war.
The Soga won the civil war in 587 CE, and a Soga Buddhist daughter was
wed to a Japanese Shinto emperor. With such a powerful novel figure in the
court politics of Yamato--a Buddhist Soga father-in-law with his Buddhist
empress-daughter wed to the weakened Shinto Yamato emperor--this was the
period called the Asuka Enlightenment in Japan.
Returning to the topic of consumptive expansion within the Yamato
state that could lead to peasant dislocations, many issues seemed to have been
peaking in the 500s in a variety of ways:
Mark D. Whitaker 319
-------------------------------------
277
Totman, The Green Archipelago: Forestry in Preindustrial Japan, 12.

64. The power and prestige of the Yamato leaders, and clan heads all
over the country, were based on the number and strength of the be
that they possessed. Indeed, these [mass manufacturing and consump-
tive consolidation] occupational groups had become so important that
many clan names came to include the word be, as did several clans
that enjoyed special influence at court during and after their reign of
Yuryaku, such as the Monotobe and Inbe.278
The entire social order was becoming stratified and segmented by (1)
lineal groups or clans (uji) that dominated the lands and people of
entire regions, (2) occupational groups (be), that served clan
chieftains and the kingdom’s rulers by performing services and
manufacturing tools and weapons, (3) royal estates (miyake) that
handed over a large portion of what they produced to the current
Yamato king or queen, and (4) provinces (kuni) and districts (agata)
that serves as arms of Yamato control. The leaders of all these groups
held hereditary ranks (kurai) and titles (kabane) that were marks of
status determined by proximity to the Yamato ruler.279
To summarize before more detailed discussion, against this occupational
group and consumptive consolidated framework there was a mass appeal to
Buddhist individual sentiment starting in the 500s. We know of this mostly
though a powerful ‘be’ family, the Soga, and their increased material (and
Buddhist ideological) domination of the kami-worshipping and Shinto-
legitimated Yamato court. The Soga coup by the late 580s seems to have been
supported and solidified by their mass appeals to Buddhist temple building
320 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
278
Hall, Jansen, Kanai, and Twitchett, The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume One: Ancient
Japan, 140.
279
Hall, Jansen, Kanai, and Twitchett, The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume One: Ancient
Japan, 28.

65. before and afterward. This is comparable to the part played by Buddhism in
China as a ‘binding ideological frame’ capable of mobilizing some of the more
collectivist fast ecological revolutionary movements in the Later Han--
particularly when it came to ‘updating’ Chinese native Huang-lao and Daoist
techniques of health, ecological/local autonomy, and local economic develop-
ment. All these aspects of mobilization were involved within a local Buddhist
church institution and Buddhist social movement frame. So as in China as in
Japan, as some strands of Buddhism were adapted easily to the same anti-
systemic opposition in the same categories of concern.
Other strands of Buddhism in the century and a half after this Soga
coup, particularly among elites, started to move toward world renouncing--
renouncing Shinto legitimacy and toward social withdrawal. This was the way
many reacted to the sociopolitical and environmental degradation of Japan by
the mid 700s as increasing systemic diseases, mass impoverishment, and
environmental scarcity of materials became heavily interlinked for centuries to
come. Epidemic diseases wracked Japan for at least 600 years solidly until at
last “childhood diseases” (meaning when more adults were surviving with sec-
ondary immunity and the diseases were only appearing in children) were noted
for the first time in the early 1200s.
For a more detailed discussion, by the early 600s Yamato state elites
started to come to terms with such anti-systemic capacities within Buddhism.
This was because a converted Buddhist peasantry supported the ‘foreign’ Soga
more than a Shinto-legitimated state. This novel religious settlement and
appeal was undermining Yamato’s whole believability. A once legitimated
elite cadre had been exclusively tied to mass adherences in State Shinto, con-
structed painfully and strategically by slow ecological revolution for centuries.
This waning of adherence to Shinto was due to state actions and the increasing
immiseration that this slow ecological revolutionary process of slow socio-
economic and slow socio-religious consolidation involved.
However, the failing Yamato elites began to find mechanisms to re-
co-opt Buddhism itself and to sponsor it themselves to shore up their elite
Mark D. Whitaker 321

66. state’s legitimate power in a changed cultural context. This additional
‘updated slow ecological revolution strategy’ is always an option to elites
though it seldom occurs in the cases described here. Typically, state elite
reponse is to remain doggedly dedicated personally in identity and politically
in strategy to their own original forms of legitimacy while state delegitimation
and environmental degradation expands with its attendant health, ecologial,
and economic externalities. Typically, state elites mostly attempt to reapply
their own political methods with more repression instead of to reevaluate the
outcome as a result of their own faulty methods being applied in the first
place. Japan’s elite response to Buddhism shows this variable of elite response
as important in the ecological revolutionary process as well as in elite state
durability. Yamato elites began to integrate the novel axial faith quickly to
upstage the Soga with state Buddhist sponsorship (and police-like monitoring
and channelling280
limitations on Buddhist instruction) instead of simply to
oppose Buddhism on State Shinto appeals or with military repression.
In other words, elite response to fast ecological revolution was a
major factor in the outcome of this first interaction between state elites and the
fast ecological revolution they catalyzed with their previous state formation
strategies in Japan. We can highlight the part played by elite response in gen-
eral with a comparison. The Chinese elite response during the Later Han
Dynasty tended to ignore the Buddhist movement building among the
peasantry for generations--until Buddhism allied or was utilized by the equally
anti-systemic Confucian Chinese partisans against the dynasty. It led to the
Han Dynasty being toppled effectively by the 180s CE due to lack of
believability in the previous forms of cultural “stateness” and for hundreds of
years onward. Chinese elites failed to readapt to maintain themselves or to
maintain any believability that a state elite was required in most people’s lives.
322 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
280
Earl, Jennifer. 2003. “Tanks, Tear Gas, and Taxes: Toward a Theory of Movement Repression.”
Sociological Theory 21(1), March:44–68.

67. In China there was an elite response of repression or ambivalent lack of
response to fast ecological revolution, leading to state dissolution from the
internal dynamics that the state created that were left unabated. In Japan, the
Yamato elites attempted to reconfigure themselves religiously and econom-
ically to regain more cultural legitimacy instead. The state elite responses to
fast ecological revolution are an important variable explaining different out-
comes in whether elite states are durable and ‘believable’ or whether most
come to believe elite states are superfluous or hostile to having a good life.
Either way, their strategies of state formation via slow ecological revolution
creates for state elites conditions of environmental and consumptive con-
solidation crises of their own making.
However, this Japanese elite Buddhist sponsorship was somewhat
channeled and carceral in limitations it placed upon what the Buddhist faith
was to be utilized for in Japanese life. Shinto remained the main legitimation
of the ritsuryo state. So the Yamato/ritsuryo Buddhist settlement (after the
Soga themselves were overthrown later) was short lived. Perhaps, taking a
long term view, the Japanese elite acquiescence to Buddhism somewhat in the
600s and 700s bought only a few generations of time for the Shinto-Yamato-
ritsuryo state. This ritsuryo state involved a Buddist sponsorship though com-
bined this with much larger social penetration. The result became a much
more massive ‘uncontrolled’ Buddhist anti-systemic social movement started
in the 700s that rejected state leadership in Buddhist ideas and the state-
mandated limited applications in real life. Particularly during the first four
decades of the 700s CE, Buddhism mobilized many anti-systemic social
movements in the peasantry independently of aristocratic (or state-attempted)
claims to regulate Buddhist proselytization. Previous state channelling of
Buddhist sentiment was being ignored. Then, the fast ecological revolutionary
politics mobilized through Buddhism became an alternative movement of
health, ecological protection, and peasant economic developmentalism work-
ing against state elite designs in these three areas. More details follow, though
Mark D. Whitaker 323

68. after this introduction we require a discussion of how Japanese elite response
to this fast ecological revolution was particular to the politics of Japan during
the 600s and 700s.
e. Soga Buddhist Power in Late Yamato then Mass Peasant Buddhism in
the Early Ritsuryo State: Budding Fast Ecological Revolution’s Anti-
Systemic Material-Ideological Orientation Using Buddhism
Yamatai’s dates of territorial expansion were approximately 100 CE
to 250 CE. After Yamatai, Yamato’s military consolidation and subsequent
internal consumptive consolidation was approximately 250 to 645. It was in
this period that the power in Yamato drifted toward the multiple ‘be’ (pro-
nounced ‘bey’) occupational groups. Particularly among these families were
the Soga family’s aristocratic administrative and military power. The Soga
attempted a separate ideological hegemony since the Soga were the major
sponsor of ‘foreign Buddhism’ in the Yamato state’s Shinto kami-worshipping
sacral kingdom.281
In the later Yamato, this foreign ‘be’ family of the Soga
had brought Buddhism with it from the mainland with all the sociopolitical
and typically state-oppositional implications of Buddhism in East Asia noted
324 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
281
In addition to mostly archaeological evidence before, beginning in the 500s and accelerating
around 587 CE at the moment of the Soga coup, much more detailed information is available con-
cerning state power strategies and peasant and elite ideological change. “Chinese” techniques (in
quotes because there was nothing historically consolidated about China until the first empire of
212 BCE) and solutions for elites were built up over 1,000 years from scratch on how to construct
larger territorial state elite clientelism in the warring states era. Many of these ideas, carried
through the Qin, Han, and Sui/T’ang empires, were imported and adapted in the Japanese ritsuryo
state in the 650s for how to maintain larger elite-led consumptive alliance arrangements both
ideologically and materially. These ritsuryo-ideas began to be selectively appropriated after the
worried and angry Yamato court lost to Soga hegemony in the 587 civil war/coup. From the late
500s through the early 600s CE in Japan more ‘nativist’ elites were attempting to learn how to
unseat the material power of the Soga and simultaneously its informal Buddhist hegemony, in
preparation for their own countercoup by 645 CE that started the ritsuryo state institutions.

69. in previous chapters. A state-facilitated economic consolidation under Yamato
encouraged wider agricultural output in the same era. The Soga were part of
this state developmentalism in Japan. The Soga increasingly took power and
jurisdiction for themselves at the Japanese Shinto court:
...[T]he expanding power of the Yamato kings was manifested in
overseas military campaigns [to the Korean mainland], in the con-
struction of impressive mounds containing iron weapons and horse
gear, and in the development of extensive irrigation systems.282
[The]...400s shift in the locus of power to the Kawachi-Izumi area,
coupled with the concurrent military expansion and [state-military
desired] agricultural development, has sharpened interest in the view
that Yamato was then headed by a new line of rulers.283
The discovery of huge fifth-century burial mounds in Kawachi and
Izumi has led us to determine that Yamato expansion was based
mainly on newly developed agricultural land in those two provinces.
But it is clear that much of this military expansion and economic
growth involved the transport of soldiers and goods [instead of
neutral economic surplus theories about development of urbanization
and states] through the port of Naniwa.284
Mark D. Whitaker 325
-------------------------------------
282
Hall, Jansen, Kanai, and Twitchett, The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume One: Ancient
Japan, 110.
283
Hall, Jansen, Kanai, and Twitchett, The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume One: Ancient
Japan, 128–9.
284
Hall, Jansen, Kanai, and Twitchett, The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume One: Ancient
Japan, 130.

70. Late Yamato’s more aristocratically dominant power dynamics are known. As
a consequence of state elite encouragements to consumptive scale expansion,
they lost jurisdiction over it all:
The Yamato kings had become extremely rich and powerful during
the 400s, extending their influence to areas as far away as southern
Korea, but in the 500s they were plagued by setbacks overseas and
disunity at home. Instead of being known, as Nintoku and Yuryaku
had been, for victorious campaigns in distant places and the comple-
tion of ambitious building projects, Keitai and Kimmei, the most
prominent of 500s kings, are noted for their military failures in
Korea, challenges to their authority in the provinces, and the roles
they played in bitter succession disputes at court.285
These succession disputes and military dependencies consolidated a
hegemonic immigrant ‘Korean’ military and ‘technological’ clan (‘be’), the
Soga. The Soga were gaining hegemony within a jurisdictionally decentraliz-
ing though economically consolidating Yamato state. They were a ‘protector’
of the Japanese emperor. Establishment of this Soga clan’s “Asuka Enlighten-
ment” infrastructure of power in different Buddhist ideological and temple-
oriented consumptive ambivalence mechanisms were shifting even more
ideological power and jurisdiction away from the Yamato frameworks of the
state and its kami worship. A court scene in 538 in the Yamato state recorded
that the powerful foreigner Soga no Iname recommended official Buddha wor-
ship (via a statue presented by Iname) at the Yamato court. He said it could
cure the ills of the Yamato state elites. The native kami-worshipping (and
kami-legitimated) clans and the royal line were opposed.
326 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
285
Hall, Jansen, Kanai, and Twitchett, The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume One: Ancient
Japan, 145.

71. Nakatoma no Muraji, head of an old conservative [kami-sacral legiti-
mated] clan, insisted that adoption would anger the native kami....
Kimmei therefore compromised by not extending his royal blessing
to the foreign faith but instead allowing Iname the freedom to honor
the statue in whatever way he wished. [This is the]...[f]irst known
reference to the presentation of Buddhist statues and Buddhist scrip-
tures to the Yamato court by a [Korean statelet] Paekche king
[though through the Soga].286 287
The Soga pressed for state-sponsorship of Buddhism successfully after its mil-
itary coup in 587. After the Soga victory, the more ‘self-legitimating’ Soga
Buddhism was introduced by the Soga against its nativist kami-sacral chal-
lengers. Buddhism, however, had quick and widespread acceptance and
integration among the peasantry in Japan. It was like the Korean statelet of
Koguryo noted below. Looking at the effects of how central elites, local elites,
and peasant adherences interact in different ways to oppose or to introduce
such axial faiths via different strategies, we should ask why and how elites
respond to fast ecological revolutionary contexts:
Mark D. Whitaker 327
-------------------------------------
286
Soga no Iname was fortunate to avoid being killed and perhaps would have been if he had been
less militarily required by the Yamato court. When a similar suggestion was aired by a minister in
Japanese-allied Korean statelet Silla about ten years previously, that minister was put to death for
the suggestion. “[A]s in the cases of Koguryo and Paekche, Silla was first introduced to
Buddhism, according to written sources, by monks sent to the king from a neighboring state. The
tradition recorded in the Samguk sagi contains three significant points: [1] that Buddhism was offi-
cially adopted in the fifteenth year of the reign of King Pophung (527 or 528), whose name can be
literally translated as ‘the king under whom Buddhism flourished,’ [2] that this event was preceded
by an earlier arrival of a Buddhist monk from Koguryo, accompanying an envoy from Liang bear-
ing incense for a Buddhist offering; and [3] that for a time during Pophung’s reign, only one min-
ister advocated the recognition of Buddhism, a minister who was later put to death.” (See: Hall,
Jansen, Kanai, and Twitchett, The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume One: Ancient Japan, 368)
287
Hall, Jansen, Kanai, and Twitchett, The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume One: Ancient
Japan, 171–2.

72. Why were the Soga and other clans divided over the acceptance of
Buddhism until the Soga military victory of 587? And why did
Buddhism not become a state religion, with imperial patronage, until
the Soga defeat in 645?....When studying the resistance issue, we are
faced with a paucity of evidence that is often contradictory, but we
are beginning to see that Japan was then divided, as Paekche had
been, by two fundamentally different types of clans: those with
chieftains whose spiritual authority flowed from rites honoring the
imported worship of [the abstract non-localized ideas of the] Buddha
and those with chieftains whose spiritual authority arose from the
performance of rites addressing indigenous [pre-axial, bioregional
kami forms of identification with] deities. This division was not
unlike the one that had complicated the introduction...of Buddhism in
Paekche, where kings were heads of the immigrant Puyo clan...and
performed ancestral rites at tombs, whereas indigenous Han
chieftains ruled an agricultural people and performed agricultural
rites held at village sotsu. So when the royal Puyo clan adopted
Buddhism, reinforcing its spiritual sacred-lineage authority with the
sponsorship of imported [axial religious] rites, the native [geographi-
cally self-identified] Han people and their leaders were slow to fol-
low suit. The unresponsiveness of the Han was not due simply to a
dislike of what the immigrant masters did and wanted, but, rather, to
broad and deep assumptions--arising from an entirely different social
and religious situation--concerning the nature of divine power and
how that power could be thus directed to the enrichment of agricul-
tural life. Unlike [another Korean statelet to the further north called]
Koguryo, where Buddhism spread rapidly to the lowest levels of
society [in the similar era of fast ecological revolutionary contexts in
the last half of the Later Han], Paekche’s indigenous Han people
[closer to Japan, further south and isolated on the Korean peninsula
328 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n

73. and influenced by State Shinto Yamato elites], being [still in]
a[n]....agricultural ritual system [of local geographic forms of self-
identification and worship], never fully accepted the [state formation
attempts of abstract Buddhism-sponsoring] Puyo kings and probably
never permitted Buddhism to permeate the life of its villages. Such
social and religious polarity helps us understand why Buddhism was
not adopted by the Paekche kings until more than a century after the
arrival of the first Buddhist monk from China. According to the
[Korean ancient text] Samguk sagi, the first priest to arrive in Paek-
che was sent by the Chinese court of Eastern Chin in 384, but
Buddhism was not adopted by a Paekche king until the reign of
Muryong (501-523), over 150 years later....Roughly the same kind of
sociopolitical division existed in Japan. On its native side, kings rose
above the clan federations in which the divine authority of all leaders,
from village heads to Yamato kings, flowed from their roles as priests
of [local geographic forms of religious identity in rice-based] agricul-
tural rites....On the immigrant side of the division, leaders were heads
of clans who had come to Japan with advanced techniques for con-
structing tombs and buildings, making tools and weapons, and
managing imperial estates and governmental affairs [without that
connection of legitimacy, and instead worshipped the Buddha]. The
Soga, gradually achieving a position of dominance in this immigrant
segment of society, also took the lead in introducing and supporting
Buddhism....Whereas the immigrant Soga chieftains were undergird-
ing their spiritual authority by sponsoring Buddhist rites [and likely
encouraging impoverished peasants to hold novel forms of identifica-
tions and material subsidizations to the Soga] held at temples (tera),
the Yamato kings and Japanese emperors from the native segment of
society were achieving spiritual authority from their roles as chief
priests for the worship of [mostly rice-]agricultural kami at shrines
Mark D. Whitaker 329

74. (jinja).288
So the Soga introduction of Buddhism and the Soga sponsorship of Buddhist
temples for the Japanese populace of kami worshipers was contentious
because other more ‘nativist’ elites had their own localized and
geographically-embedded ideas about jurisdiction, ideology, identity, and
material relationships. They considered the Soga ‘foreigners’ hampering and
damaging their peasant clientelism in the kami-hierarchy that had developed
over centuries that innately legitimated them instead.
In terms of the Yamato state formation and its slow ecological revo-
lution of how exclusively local-only forms of kami worship were turned into
hierarchal socio-political manifestations, it had a lot to do with adaptations to
kami worship by the Yamato state. Over centuries, ther was the slow turning
of of a sense of local self-identification into a ‘stretched’ and geographically
neutered series of justifications for more hierarchal human-only political rela-
tions though still tied to kami worship symbolism alone:
Yamato rulers relied on sacral as well as secular nodes of con-
trol...[like tomb mounds]. Such activity leaves little doubt that the
Yamato kings and queens were attempting to sanctify their positions
as hereditary agents of the country’s most powerful kami.289
In the sixth and seventh centuries [500s and 600s] the Yamato court
gradually deprived powerful provincial clans of their temporal power
and magical religious authority [in its slow ecological revolution of
state formation centralization]. The clans themselves formed a court
330 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
288
Hall, Jansen, Kanai, and Twitchett, The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume One: Ancient
Japan, 373–4.
289
Hall, Jansen, Kanai, and Twitchett, The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume One: Ancient
Japan, 29.

75. nobility loyal to the imperial clan, and their traditions were adopted
by the imperial line and used to enhance the emperor’s authority. A
solar kami [over all geographic variation obviously], Amaterasu (the
sun Goddess), was adopted [and invented] as the imperial ancestor
and promoted to the highest seat in the kami pantheon [hierarchy].
Thus we see the beginnings of the organization and systemization of
Shinto on a nationwide scale [in a slow ecological revolutionary con-
text with Yamato elaborating and ideologically legitimating aspects
of state formation from pre-existing local kami “elite-peasant” rela-
tionships].290
Just as the Yamato kings buried before about A.D. 350 at the base of
Mt. Miwa were thought to have had sacred ties with kami residing on
that sacred mountain, and those buried farther north between about
350 and 400 were linked with the Isonokami Shrine, the fifth-century
kings of Kawachi and Izumi had mythological and ritual ties with the
kami enshrined at Sumiyoshi, even though the secular [martial and
material developmentalism] functions of kings had become more
important than their sacral functions.291
Shinto mythology is described most systematically in the ‘age of the
kami’ chapters of the Kojiki and Nihon shoki, chronicles complied to
justify the efforts of one powerful clan, based on the Yamato plain of
central Honshu, to extend its rule over Japan and call itself the
imperial clan. The Kojiki, in particular, takes hitherto unrelated myths
and weaves them into a narrative tale that moves directly from the
Mark D. Whitaker 331
-------------------------------------
290
Hall, Jansen, Kanai, and Twitchett, The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume One: Ancient
Japan, 343.
291
Hall, Jansen, Kanai, and Twitchett, The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume One: Ancient
Japan, 130.

76. creation of the universe to the creation of the imperial house. This
neat sequential arrangement suggests manipulation for political pur-
poses. Indeed, political [elite state formation] rather than ethical or
theological concepts lie at the core of this ‘official’ formulation, and
religious emotion is lacking. The myths, embellished and modified to
trace a single line of descent from the ancestral kami to a succession
of human rulers, were clearly meant to strengthen and sanctify the
imperial clan’s control over the whole of Japan.292
According to the thesis proposed by the literary historian Tsuda
Sokichi, the myths were consciously manipulated by Yamato court
nobles of the sixth and seventh centuries [to encourage a slow
ecological revolutionary change of forms of local-embedded identity
stretched to justify consolidating actions of more distanciated elites
into humanocentric interests of clientelistic politics between elites at
the core and the periphery of the Yamato state]. The principal kami--
the Sun Goddess, Susa no O no Mikoto, the creator kami couple
(Izanagi and Izanami), and the kami of Izumo (Onamuchi)--were not
venerated among ordinary people. Rather, myths about these kami,
according to Tsuda, were products of a conscious effort to construct a
political ideology for the Yamato court. Although it is undoubtedly
true that the myths were revised and structured during the sixth and
seventh centuries for political purposes and that the kami pantheon
was arranged with the imperial ancestor kami (the Sun Goddess) at
its apex, most scholars now maintain that these [multiple local
bioregionally-embedded identity] myths and kami originated among
the people, that the kami began as nature spirits, and that the myths
332 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
292
Hall, Jansen, Kanai, and Twitchett, The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume One: Ancient
Japan, 322–3.

77. were originally animistic tales told by peasants and fishermen.
Several factors point to this conclusion. Similar tales appear in popu-
lar folklore...[and] counterparts in Polynesia. Folk tales of the Miao
people of southern China resemble the tale of how the Sun Goddess
became angry with her brother Susa no O’s violence, retreating to a
cave and remaining there until she was coaxed to come out. Korean
myths contain similar motifs to that in the one about the descent to
earth of the Sun Goddess’s grandson (Hononinigi), whose descen-
dants, according to the chronicles, became Japan’s emperors. More-
over, the Kojiki tale of the marriage between a human maiden and the
kami Omono Nushi is similar to Korean and Manchurian myths. It is
thus likely that these imported elements were transmitted through
migrations and visits over a long period of time and were gradually
incorporated into popular mythology. Thus the chronicle myths seem
to have emerged from popular sources [across a wide littoral area
from China, Korea, and Japan] and then to have been consciously
embellished, modified, and arranged for political purposes.293
As the internal environmental effects of consumptive consolidation in terri-
torial consolidation were taking effect, we can see changes in clan activities
moving from a strictly kami-local agricultural arrangement to more self-
interested groups divorced from these legitimated situations.
Early occupational groups were originally established to assist the
court in the conduct of kami ceremonies and to provide personal ser-
vices. But with the expansion of the Yamato kings’ power in the 400s
and the spread of occupational groups from the court to clans in out-
Mark D. Whitaker 333
-------------------------------------
293
Hall, Jansen, Kanai, and Twitchett, The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume One: Ancient
Japan, 323–4.

78. lying regions [similar to the consumptive expansion facilitated by
Yamatai before, as discussed], an increasingly large number of these
groups (gradually coming to be referred to as be) served the court or
a clan by producing such valued articles as iron swords and bronze
mirrors [that had little to do with local agricultural rites and more to
do with conquering others] or by performing technical tasks associa-
ted with the construction of huge burial mounds and complex irriga-
tion systems. [Thus, there were]...[c]oncurrent technological [changes
toward massive scale] in warfare and agriculture [that were stretched
legitimations--increasingly delegitimated--at peasant levels associated
with exclusive kami worship].294
In this context of increasingly self-referential, self-interested royal and major
aristocratic clans, peasants were primed for forms of fast ecological revolution
as their legitimate leadership gained wealth at their expense it seems from the
agricultural shakeout. Fast ecological revolutionary mobilizations started to
employ Buddhist introductions, encouraged by the powerful Soga. Even the
Yamato court by the 530s moved closer to a Soga territorial base of operations
in Japan.295
“Whereas the most influential clan chieftains at court before the
rise of [Soga no] Iname were military men, the Soga leaders enjoyed wealth
and power that flowed from imported techniques of production and adminis-
tration.”296
So when Soga no Iname decided to press the issue of Buddhism at
the Yamato court, the court literally was living on his property and he was
among fellow-feeling peasants, i.e., his own geographic and religious turf.
334 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
294
Hall, Jansen, Kanai, and Twitchett, The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume One: Ancient
Japan, 139.
295
Hall, Jansen, Kanai, and Twitchett, The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume One: Ancient
Japan, 147.
296
Hall, Jansen, Kanai, and Twitchett, The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume One: Ancient
Japan, 160.

79. Indeed, instead of only the Soga, Buddhism was becoming popular already. It
expanded in popularity with more resources available to Soga sponsorship
after the Soga 587 coup at the Yamato court. This period marked by the Soga
coup and the Yamato countercoup from 587-645 became known as the
“Asuka [Buddhist] Enlightenment.”297
[There were]...three candidates for throne [at the death of Bidatsu in
585 which led to]...military conflict between them, [out of which]
Soga no Umako emerged victorious. His candidate for the throne as
Bidatsu’s successor, Prince Anahobe, was thus enthroned as King
Yomei in 587, placing Umako in firm control of court affairs.
Yomei’s queen, another Iname daughter, gave birth to four imperial
sons, the first of which was the famous [Buddhist sponsoring through
pro-royal/anti-Soga] Prince Shotoku (574-622). Now the Soga had
definitely achieved the status of gaiseki [in-law imperial] clan.298
This heightened tension was between the Buddhist-sponsoring Soga and dis-
Mark D. Whitaker 335
-------------------------------------
297
The Soga still allowed the Yamato line of kings to ‘rule’ through the Soga took what became
known as the ‘gaiseki’ (in-law) position of the power behind the throne. After 587 the Soga clan
was successful (typically) in maneuvering and maintaining itself in an ongoing father-in-law rela-
tion to the current or future ‘native’ Japanese emperor. “Two offspring of Soga women were
placed on the throne soon after the Soga victory: Emperor Sushun (son of [coupmaster] Soga no
Iname’s daughter) in 588 and Empress Suiko (daughter of another Iname daughter) in 593. These
arrangements indicate that Umako thought it best to have this control sanctified by following the
ancient gaiseki tradition of exercising power as an in-law-relative of the emperor or empress, not
by placing himself on the throne.” (See: Hall, Jansen, Kanai, and Twitchett, The Cambridge His-
tory of Japan, Volume One: Ancient Japan, 30.) “Rule of this type [gaiseki] had been firmly estab-
lished as early as the 400s, and the Soga dominated state affairs as a gaiseki clan between 589-
645.” (See: Hall, Jansen, Kanai, and Twitchett, The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume One:
Ancient Japan, 46)
298
Hall, Jansen, Kanai, and Twitchett, The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume One: Ancient
Japan, 161.

80. placed kami-worshiping and kami-legitimated clans that lost the ‘imperial
election.’ Buddhism was officially recognized only after this military clash of
587.
The military clash of that year was between immigrant connected
clans such as the Soga and [State Shinto legitimated] Japan-rooted
clans like the Mononobe. While troops were being drawn up for the
showdown, Soga no Umako vowed to propagate the Buddhist faith
throughout the land if he and his allies should win. Accordingly, not
long after his victory, envoys arrived from Paekche bringing
Buddhist priests, Buddhist relics, temple buildings, metalworkers,
potters, and painters. Work was soon started on a great Buddhist
temple, the Asuka-dera, that came to stand at the very center of
[Soga] activity. The [Japanese ritsuryo-state text the] Nihon shoki
goes on to tell of nuns returning from Paekche, a search for timber
with which to build Buddhist halls, the conversion to Buddhism of
aristocratic young ladies, and the arrival at court of Chinese Buddhist
priests.299
The network of temples seemed to have some sort of popular fast ecological
revolutionary basis or support given how extensive the Soga Buddhist infra-
structure became quite quickly. To be this extensive, it had to be able to move
many Japanese peasants away from an exclusive reliance on kami belief:
The prominence of Korean priests among the 1,384 clerics (815
priests and 569 nuns) serving in the 46 temple compounds built by
624, as well as Korean connections to the Soga-dominated court, all
336 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
299
Hall, Jansen, Kanai, and Twitchett, The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume One: Ancient
Japan, 172.

81. suggest that...[Soga Buddhism was] definitely Korean in character.300
Even the [pro-‘kami-nativist’] Nihon Shoki reports leave little doubt
that the leading Buddhist temple of the period, the Asuka-dera, was
erected by Soga no Umako following a vow he made immediately
before winning the military victory of 587. And when the great
temple compound was completed in 596, the same chronicle reports
that his son was asked to serve as temple commissioner (tera no
tsukasa). The Asuka-dera has a clan temple character common to all
temples founded before the Great [Counter-coup] Reforms of 645
[that founded the more royalist ritsuryo state upon the assassination
of major Soga leadership]. Asuka-dera [was]...the centerpiece of an
emerging temple system that by 624 included forty-six temples con-
centrated in and around the Nara basin where the [Korean Buddhist]
immigrant clans were based.301
Showing the health, ecological (here local peasant support and adherence to
intentional lack of centralization) and economic concerns of the peasants,
these religious conversions’ involvement in material social movements allow
us to see similar rationales for fast ecological revolution as in our Chinese
cases before. The same was taking place through Buddhism in Japan, even
though it had been elite sponsored by the Soga first instead of arising indepen-
dently as wholly anti-systemic. The sense that Buddhism was seen as “kami-
and-Shinto-substitutionary” in its medicinal effects was clear:
Another contributing factor was the increasingly popular belief that
Mark D. Whitaker 337
-------------------------------------
300
Hall, Jansen, Kanai, and Twitchett, The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume One: Ancient
Japan, 176.
301
Hall, Jansen, Kanai, and Twitchett, The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume One: Ancient
Japan, 377–9.

82. Buddhist rites had a mysterious power to produce spectacular physi-
cal benefits [for health and economic support]. Early Buddhist
temples were built around a pagoda (a memorial to Buddha), at the
base of which a Buddha bone (shari) was commonly placed, making
a pagoda something like [a substitutionary idea more abstract and dis-
embedded though still based on current Japanese kami styles of wor-
ship architecture. Buddha bone worship was replacing a native]...
inner sanctuary of a shrine where [similarly] the most sacred [kami-
symbolic and local only-identity] object (the shintai or kami body)
was housed. So at both a Buddhist temple and a Shinto shrine, a par-
ticularly potent sacred article was believed to possess an essence of
divinity that could, with the appropriate ritual, benefit the human
community in substantial and concrete ways....We find no evidence
[at this moment] that Buddha was worshipped at a Soga temple for
the purpose of ensuring spiritual enlightenment or rebirth in a
Buddhist paradise after death.302
The Nihon shoki tells us that when
Soga no Umako himself became ill in 623, a thousand men and
women were admitted to the Buddhist priesthood ‘for his sake’ [as a
form of medical magic associated with Buddhism]. Two decades later
[in relation to ‘environmental health’ as well], at the time of the ter-
rible drought of 642 when offerings and prayers to kami produced no
rain, the Soga minister proposed another type of prayer: the reading
of excerpts from Mahayana sutras at Buddhist temples, with the Soga
338 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
302
It was a continuation, like in China, of Daoists seeking ‘new methods of Daoist belief’ through
Buddhist ideas and techniques. In Japan this was the same in what appears to be kami-sacral
believers seeking novel Buddhist methods for the same kami-sacral propitions as before. However,
the movement was already toward more abstract forms of ideas, individually held, instead of geog-
raphically held and embedded. This started the seeds of the fast ecological revolution that came
into its own by the 740s CE when Buddhist movements ‘escaped’ elite sponsorship attempts by
then and mobilized the peasantry’s positional interest more exclusively.

83. minister himself participating. The report says that because rain fell
the next day, the reading of excerpts was discontinued two days after
it had been started.303
The Soga, by making a massive temple construction network of ujidera (clan
temples to worship themselves as much as the Buddha), were creating their
own personalistic frameworks to native Japanese peasant Buddhists. This left
nativist kami-sacral elites outside of the expanding political implications of
these hegemonic networks. The Soga family came to have their own base
group following and alliances increasingly opposed to native royalist groups
of Yamato.
In the light of the [Korean] Paekche model [of elite introduction of
Buddhism that the Soga adopted] (Buddha-worshipping immigrant
leaders ruling over the indigenous, community-centered people of
Han) and of the fact that Buddhist institutions of Asuka Japan were
essentially clan temples (ujidera), we can conclude that Soga no
Umako thought of himself as the high priest and major beneficiary of
rites held at Buddhist temples. He must have considered all temples
of the Asuka period, even those founded by Prince Shotoku [his royal
son-in-law], as units of a particularistic Soga-supporting religious
system. If he looked forward to the establishment of state Buddhism,
he must have seen a Soga state, not a state ruled by a high priest or
priestess of kami worship.304
Elite politics matter as to the outcomes of fast ecological revolution. This led
Mark D. Whitaker 339
-------------------------------------
303
Hall, Jansen, Kanai, and Twitchett, The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume One: Ancient
Japan, 380.
304
Hall, Jansen, Kanai, and Twitchett, The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume One: Ancient
Japan, 386.

84. the Yamato elite line to attempt a slow ecological revolutionary move to create
another consolidated religious settlement for its kami-sacral state with
Buddhism instead of against it. Buddhism was supported soon by the kami-
sacral Yamato royal house to undercut the personalistic ties of the extensive
46 Soga ujidera-Buddhist temples around Japan. This royalist effort to sponsor
Buddhism attempted to oust the Soga from exclusive sponsorship of
Buddhism. State elites were competing for disaffected peasant support. There
was a different elite response in China. In Japan it was assuredly in the
Buddhist peasant interest to be so materially sponsored. On the contrary,
Chinese elites ignored peasant fast ecological revolution through Buddhism in
the Later Han. This competition to please the Buddhist peasants in Japan over
587-645 helps to explain the strange postponement of many fast ecological
revolutionary activities of peasants of this period.
Another elite response variable that was important occurred by the
740s. Less than a hundred years later, state elites buckled in response to shore
up a failing ritsuryo state legitimacy. By the mid 700s, facing a mounting fast
ecological revolution, later royal fears of this independent, anti-systemic
Buddhist movement and its developmental desires for the peasants was impor-
tant in the Japanese royalty switching more openly to Buddhism by the 740s,
effectively joining the peasant movement to the elite state instead of channel-
ing or increasingly openly repressing it, as the ritsuryo state elites had
attempted between 645-700s. This elite response to integrate the fast ecologi-
cal revolution once more avoided a religio-political showdown between state
elites and peasants that might have contributed to a lack of legitimate “state-
ness” in Japanese society as much as it did in China for hundreds of years after
the Later Han. The results of such dynamics in Chinese fast ecological revolu-
tionary conflicts were organized along elite versus peasant. There was a differ-
ent elite dynamic and response in Japan to fast ecological revolution since Jap-
anese elites were more accommodating (and perhaps more fearful of entirely
losing all legitimacy of the Shinto legitimacy framework by such a widely
340 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n

85. popular anti-systemic movement of Japanese Buddhism by the 700s). Instead,
after the 740s, Japanese elite response was to sponsor Buddhism quite readily
and even honor previous ‘outlaw Buddhist leadership’ with honorary state
titles.
In short, there were much elite alliances and support of ‘peasant
Buddhism’ which was different than the Chinese elite reponses. It was
originally introduced by Japanese/Soga elites--first within the dynamic of
intra-elite oppositional politics (Buddhism versus State Shinto), then as a form
of intra-elite competing for peasant Buddhist support equally. So instead of
only the Soga, royal elites became Buddhist supporters who gained an addi-
tional syncretic basis for Japanese Yamato royal power:
[Buddhist Japanese] Prince Shotoku sent to China four student priests
who, according to the...history of [the] Sui [Dynasty of China, 581-
618 CE], were intent on studying Buddhist law. When these young
priests returned to Japan, usually after a stay of ten or more years,
they not only gave seventh-century Japanese Buddhism its special
character but zealously introduced many non-Buddhist skills [of cen-
tral state administration].305
Under their leadership, Japan gradually
Mark D. Whitaker 341
-------------------------------------
305
These styles of royal administrative ideas were being imported as well from Sui/T’ang China:
“The [coup d’état] founder of the Sui dynasty (581-613), born Yang Chien, who reigned until 604
with the title of Wen-ti, had been brought up as a Buddhist, and one of the first things that he did
was to put an end to the proscription instigated by the Northern Chou dynasty and to reinstate
Buddhism [to gain consumptive ambivalence from Buddhist peasant clients, which were the
majority of China then]. He relied on [a] Buddhism [reoriented to his jurisdictional supremacy] to
ensure the reunification of China [in slow ecological revolution] once he had reconquered its
whole territory by putting an end to the Northern dynasties and in 581 and the Southern dynasties
in 589. But he was careful not to neglect Taoism, which had also been proscribed by the Northern
Chou dynasty. He even took for the title of his first reign periods (581-600) the term K’ai-huang,
Inauguration of Sovereignty. This was the name of one of the cosmic periods (kalpa:chieh) that
Taoism, after the manner of Buddhism, had established in the evolution of the world. He was
anxious to foster the spiritual [artificial slow ecological revolutionary syncretic] unity of his [fast

86. turned its attention from the Buddhism introduced from Koguryo and
342 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
ecological revolutionary] subjects and not to favor one of their religious allegiances to the detri-
ment of another....[Another nice example of the emptiness of the elite jurisdictional position, and
its creation exclusively out of informal strategies of public consumption in ideas and materials
organized toward it is]...in an edict issued shortly after his accession to the throne in 581, he
declared that he respected Lao-tzu just as much as the Buddha, stressing that both try to reduce
everything to the One; nevertheless, it was the founding of Buddhist monasteries that was pros-
cribed in this edict. But the next year he created a [state-appointed framework of] Taoist establish-
ment at Ch’ang-an called the Mysterious Capital (Hsuan-tü kuan). There he installed tao-shih
responsible for [channelling and] cultivating those Taoist arts that [exclusively] might serve the
state [clientelism]. This institution had at its head a superior (kuan-chu) through whom the state
controlled the Taoist community. One of the great Taoist philosophical texts...dates back, in its
original form, to the [state-sponsorship designs and uniformity desires of the] Sui dynasty. This is
the Pen-chi ching (Book of the first origin), a work deeply imbued with Buddhism, even to its
title, which corresponds to the Sanskrit pūrva-koţi....In 585 Wen-ti organized a debate on the con-
troversial question of the conversion of the barbarians by Lao-tzu [a highly contentious story that
had been used for centuries by both Taoists and Buddhists to show their side’s prominent quality
and the ‘derivative’ thought of the other. Wen-ti]...attempt[ed] to give a state mandate interpreta-
tion to [this] highly contested topic [and bone of contention between the Taoists and the
Buddhists], in which he probably took the Buddhist side, although in 586 he constructed a temple
to Lao-tzu. Nor was he neglecting Confucianism, whose rites and teachings, he was careful to
maintain in order to win over the educated [Confucian relict] officials, especially in the south. He
also reconstituted literary heritage that had suffered so badly from military upheavals and destruc-
tions of the imperial library. The state let a poll tax on the population in order to pay private col-
lectors a bolt of silk for each manuscript roll that they lent to be copied. We are told that the
Buddhist books collected in this way were far more numerous than the manuscripts of the Con-
fucian canonical texts....Political motives are evident in the steps taken by the Sui dynasty to estab-
lish a rigorous state control over the Buddhist church and its activities, as they had been for the
Northern dynasties. In 600 the [Buddhist] Sect of the Three Degrees was laid under interdict [as it
had gone underground and revolutionary. It was financially powerful, had thousands of followers,
and was opposed to any future state settlement or cultural “stateness” of jurisdiction over
Buddhism], and [it was only 20 years into the Sui Dynasty] in 607 [when] monks were ordered to
bow [for the first time] before the emperor and officials [showing how contentious this was]. The
center for [novel state jurisdictional] control of Buddhism was the Monastery of the Great Restora-
tion of Good [a worthy Orwellian title] (Ta-hsing-shan ssu), the ruins of which are still to be seen
at Ch’ang-an. Ta-hsing was in fact the name given to the new walled capital city, built by Wen-ti,
and shan (good) was taken from the name of the quarter in which the monastery stood, [directly]

87. Paekche to the Buddhism of the reunified Chinese empire of Sui and
T'ang.306
Soon afterward, Prince Shotoku, even though a son-in-law to the Soga, started
acting like a “Wen-ti” (the founder of the Sui Dynasty in China) by establish-
ing a royal centralized association of Buddhism.
Feeling that the prince was acting and thinking like a person slated
for enthronement, some historians have concluded that the prince
propounded an ideology of Japanese sovereignty that made a ruler
the high priest of kami worship and also the chief patron of
Buddhism. Outlines of such an ideology, reinforced with Confucian
Mark D. Whitaker 343
opposite the [equally state-created] Daoist Hsuan-tu kuan. The monastery included an administra-
tive Bureau called the Illuminated Mystery (Chao-hsüan ssu), composed of a whole bureaucratic
hierarchy, headed by a grand general administrator of the Buddhists (ta-t’ung). The bureau had
local branches throughout the provinces. The system of control was inherited from the Northern
dynasties....As a counterpart to their recognition by the state, the Buddhists had to take part in the
dynastic cult. In about 584, monasteries called the Great Restoration of the State (Ta-hsing-kuo
ssu) were set up in 45 prefectures, which were responsible for the religious services due to the
dynasty. The emperor set himself up as a universal monarch modelled on the “kings who turned
the wheel,” of whom the legendary Ashoka was the best-known example. In an attempt to imitate
him, on three occasions after the conquest of the South (601, 602 and 604), Wen-ti distributed
relics over which stupas were solemnly erected. But in all only 111 stupas were built....Southern
China, was not completely conquered until 589, and there the Sui dynasty at first encountered
vigorous opposition, for [the Sui] was regarded as barbarian, just like those earlier Northern
dynasties that generations of [Southern Confucian] émigrés had denounced. The Buddhist clergy,
whose ecclesiastical leaders were replaced by Sui supporters], were implicated in the rebellions,
and their goods were not spared.” (See: Twitchett, and Loewe, The Cambridge History of China:
Volume I, 868–70.) Many examples of fast ecological revolutionary, anti-systemic, long-term
effects of the collapse of the Later Han’s sense of legitimate “stateness” in society were still echo-
ing centuries later in the 600s.
306
Hall, Jansen, Kanai, and Twitchett, The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume One: Ancient
Japan, 384–5.

88. principles, come down to us in the Seventeen Injunctions of 604,
which may have been compiled by the prince himself.307
It was Prince Shotoku (d. 622) who started to place royal-granted Buddhist
relics within Soga ujidera Buddhist temples: “Prince Shotoku (just appointed
crown prince) became involved in the Buddhist activities that led to his
reputation as the father of Japanese Buddhism; and Buddhist relics (probably
imported) were placed below the Asuka-dera’s central foundation stone.”308
A third temple of early Asuka period, one which has attracted more
attention than either the Asuka-dera or the Arahaka-ji, is the Isaruga-
ji (now the Horyu-ji). Built near Prince Shotoku’s palace, the Horyu-
ji houses great national treasures of Asuka times. From excavations
made before World War II, two important discoveries were made.
First, the prince’s palace, where the Nihon shiki says he resided after
605, was located in the eastern part of the present Horyu-ji [Buddhist
temple] compound. [The royalist Seventeen Injunctions were issued
the previous year of 604 before he made this very political move to
live in and associate himself (and his kami-sacral royal Yamato line)
with a Buddhist temple compound instead of as oppositional to each
other previously.] The remains of this ancient compound (referred to
here as the Ikaruga-ji) and of the prince’s Ikaruga palace provide
hard evidence around which we can now construct the general out-
lines of Prince Shotoku’s emergence as a dominant figure in state
affairs at the turn of the seventh century, just when the state began
actively to adopt Chinese [Sui/T’ang centralized “ritsuryo”] methods
344 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
307
Hall, Jansen, Kanai, and Twitchett, The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume One: Ancient
Japan, 31–2.
308
Hall, Jansen, Kanai, and Twitchett, The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume One: Ancient
Japan, 172.

89. and ideas for increasing its [penetrating] strength and control.309
Contention between the Soga and more ‘nativist’ elites lasted until
645. In 645, in typical intra-elite contention mixing the criminal/amoral with
formal institutional policy seamlessly, the Soga were overthrown from their
growing hegemonic position in a violent palace coup. It was fomented over
informal disagreements in the Yamato court on formal institutional design,
foreign policy, and religious sponsorship. After the anti-Soga coup, more
‘kami-nativist’ groups took the formal/informal reigns of power and changed
the orientation of the state accordingly though adapted the Soga Buddhist
infrastructure for their own reinterpreted use. Instead of being made an official
religion, the “Bureau of Buddhist Priests and Aliens” was created as merely a
subsection within the civil police. State elite response to fast ecological revo-
lution had changed toward chanelling and repression after the countercoup of
645:
Buddhist affairs, the second wing of Japan’s bifurcated religious sys-
tem, were not assigned to a separate council but to a Bureau of
Buddhist Priests and Aliens (Gemba-ryo) within the Ministry of Civil
Affairs). Late-seventh-century reformers undoubtedly felt, in spite of
increasing official support for Buddhist temples, that kami worship
was the stronger arm of the two-winged religious system. They were
undoubtedly aware that the conduct of kami rites had always been a
basic function of Japanese sovereigns and that the position of every
new sovereign was ritually sanctified and justified by affirmations of
direct descent from the highest-ranking kami of the land.310
Mark D. Whitaker 345
-------------------------------------
309
Hall, Jansen, Kanai, and Twitchett, The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume One: Ancient
Japan, 175.
310
Hall, Jansen, Kanai, and Twitchett, The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume One: Ancient
Japan, 34.

90. The royal positional winners wrote their informal histories to demean the
aristocratic Soga. The Buddhist ujidera Soga temples were ‘nationalized’
instead. These were switched under jurisdictional and administrative frame-
works to subordinate them to pre-existing royalist elites instead of glamorizing
the Soga anymore. The Soga family did remain powerful to some extent as
well. What were toppled were the public hegemonies and jurisdictional
powers linked to them. These were stripped away and re-wired to attach them-
selves to other informal groups. This Japanese “Chinese-style” state after the
anti-Soga coup, despite many importations, was sculpted to fit nativist
ideological patterns.
Buddhism came to be a highly curtailed faith with great state penetra-
tion in the lives, actions, and thoughts of Buddhists. This led to more anti-
systemic mobilization among an illegally autonomous peasant Buddhism
shortly thereafter. By the 740s the state was unable to ignore this autonomous
Buddhist movement’s legitimate power and converted itself to join an
originally anti-systemic peasant movement it found itself unable to control.
f. State-Consumption Section: Facilitation of a More Oppositional Fast
Ecological Revolutionary Process by Denying Buddhist Equality and by
High State Penetration
In more areas than Buddhist religion, after 645 a more penetrating
form of state formation started to enter into social life of the peasantry in areas
once entirely autonomous for them. All land was nationalized. All males were
registered for corvee labor and conscription at very high rates. Consumptive
consolidation, environmental degradation, extensive state-work projects, long
military corvees, ‘paid’ (forced) conscriptions of indeterminate length, and
abuse of actual military conscriptions (for corvees by aristocrats for private
instead of peasant-useful public works) led to large amounts of peasant
despair, poverty, immiseration, and widespread vagrancy. It additionally led to
346 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n

91. VII. CHAPTER SEVEN: CONCLUSION: THE RELIGIO-MATERIAL
ASPECTS OF THE GERMAN GREEN PARTY AND THE GREEN
MOVEMENT INTERNATIONALLY; PLUS ÇA CHANGE?
This conclusion has four sections. It will summarize the combined
slow/fast ecological revolutionary argument. It is followed by a short analysis
of regional areas of the world without a history of axial religions and/or
ecological revolutions. These other cases are discussed for explanations of
their lack of fast ecological revolution compared to the three regional cases of
durable ecological revolutions discussed already. Next follows a short analysis
of global Green politics in Europe. The last section describes several ideas
offered for stabilizing this self-destructive, unrepresentative, and elite-driven
form of territorial political economy associated with such sponsored environ-
mental degradation that historically led toward both state self-destruction and
fast ecological revolution. These stabilizing ideas deal with formal ‘green con-
stitutional engineering’ to allow state politics to be more ‘in sync’ with
environmental issues innately in order to allow removal of environmental
degradation as part of an ongoing political process instead of allowing both
corrupt policies and anti-systemic politics to build toward fast ecological revo-
lutionary conditions and state self-destruction.481
a. Summary of the Ecological Revolutionary Process
This work offered a ‘hybrid’ method482
of environmental sociological
analysis. It analyzed comparative historical patterns of change in consumptive
530 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
481
All instances of bracketed editorial comments, italics or underlining in following quotes of this
chapter will be editorial additions for the purpose of highlighting a particular point being made.
482
Catton, W. R, Jr., and R. E. Dunlap. 1978. “Environmental Sociology: A New Paradigm.”
American Sociologist 13:41–49; Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

92. infrastructures. These consumptive infrastructures are contentious, relational,
historically-contingent, and iterative flows of materials and ideologies that get
constructed in human communities in the process of history. Research using
this method argued for bringing the environment into state formation and state
collapse as involved in changes in these consumptive infrastructures. This was
offered as a method that links the social, historical, biological, and physical
sciences in the same objects and processes of analysis without reductionism.
By analyzing common human-environmental processes worldwide regardless
of era, the research questioned the use of both a presumption of static,
periodization-based, historiographic concepts as well as challenged dis-
ciplinary divisions derived from 19th-century Eurocentric social scientific
assumptions.483
To move social science forward means adopting environmen-
tal sociological methods in hybrid topics. It is a groundwork of more accurate
description for all the social sciences that avoids past forms of methodological
reductionism in topic definition of social phenomena.
Moreover, with consumptive infrastructures as a method, supposed
methodological dichotomies (“individual versus society”; “material versus
ideological” views; “micro versus macro”, “formal institutions versus informal
politics”, “structure versus agency”, or “consumption and beliefs as only
micro”, etc.) evaporate upon analysis of such politicized infrastructures of
materials and identities of domination and clientelism through them--or analy-
sis of rejection of such clientelisms.
Using an environmental sociological method has found a common
historical pattern and dynamic of contention across human societies via the
overlay of a number of significant historical threads. This enviro-historical
pattern involved elite state formation, material and ideological clientelism,
consumptive consolidation, environmental degradation, and anti-systemic cul-
Mark D. Whitaker 531
-------------------------------------
483
Wallerstein, Immanuel, et al., Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission
on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences; Wallerstein, Immanuel, Unthinking Social Science:
The Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms; Second Edition, with a New Preface.

93. tural opposition connected with environmental degradation, and potentially
state collapse. Most of these empirical threads had been analyzed before
though in isolation from each other as well as without discussing the environ-
mental issues involved in each topic. However when analyzed as a group a
common dynamic of contention was seen battling over politicized aspects of
consumptive infrastructure concerning the degree to which they are either
sustainable or are externality-causing and unsustainable. Anti-systemic reac-
tions of fast ecological revolutions are associated with the latter.
The ecological revolution is at best a general prediction of the histori-
cal direction of political economic and ideational drift as well as a discussion
of what mechanisms help to explain this systemic drift. It is unable to predict
particular outcomes because elite strategies and social movement mobilization
strategies as variables matter as to how the slow or fast ecological revolution-
ary process begins. However by analyzing the variables it can anticipate the
patterns that different outcomes could take and why. All discussion of ecologi-
cal revolution depends on human actions in environmental context--dependent
on human inventiveness or, by default, human withdrawal.
To reiterate, most would argue that environmental movements are a
novel feature of world politics. I am arguing that they are a durable feature of
a degradative political economy past or present, and that we can see environ-
mental politics expressed in many major religious movements of the past or
the present as anti-systemic oppositions to environmental degradation. Three
areas of material concern make many religious rebellions into ‘ecological rev-
olution’: their concern with bodily health, their local ecological soundness,
and their local economic development for themselves instead of for state
elites. These were features appearing in many separate movements. They were
features that were intertwined with each other in major hydra-headed, anti-
systemic movements reflecting environmental damages in their eras.
Another point about ecological revolution is the explanation for the
origins of humanocentrism in religious discourse as being environmentally
532 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n

94. related and even pro-environmental by the mechanism of environmental
proxy. Environmental proxy was summarized as the environmental contexts of
human action that make environmental protection part of local political and
economic self-interest against degradative state institutions. In this manner,
many of the world’s major religious discourses were built within the fast
ecological revolutionary changes and were anti-systemic oppositions to
degradative state formation. These were later whittled from their origins and
moderated for completely different uses within slow ecological revolutionary
state formation attempts that re-erected elite-degradative forms of state under
novel legitimated appeals.
These larger elite-driven territorial state formations were the iterative,
originating factors in the anti-systemic mobilizations in the first place. The
novel massive scales of state-facilitated environmental degradation were part
of the origins of the novel massive scales of abstract humanocentrism in world
history by destroying local ecological/economic durability of identities. In this
process, this led to to ecological, economic, and lost identity-based suffering
in refugee situtations and the creation of more humanocentric “Jasperian”
axial faiths.484
However, unlike Jaspers, I am arguing that it is an ongoing pro-
cess in human history instead of ending 2,000 years ago. The ongoing aspect
of the slow/fast ecological revolutionary processes at larger scales continues to
create situations in which axial faiths (or novel faiths) are employed in anti-
systemic ways against state-based environmental degradation. Unlike Jaspers,
first, I am arguing the usefulness of separating the axial faiths from later elite-
based state formation as only selectively adapted to exhibit partial elite
appeals to axial faiths. Jaspers’ artificial merging of these two issues of reli-
gious invention and later state formation built from axial faiths occluded how
selective, pro-hierarchal, and against the tenor of the times were the future
elite-filtered axial heritages instead of the latter being equal to the former
Mark D. Whitaker 533
-------------------------------------
484
Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History.

95. origins. We get a falsely depoliticized view of the axial heritage as the cause
‘driving’ state construction. As a result, we get a false view of these faiths
peaceably leading to future state formation based on these faiths by default.
This is the opposite of what is argued here. The re-erection of state formation
was a hard fought battle against the axial faiths instead of in league with them.
This deserved more nuanced explanations for why this opposition existed in
the first place and how state formation was re-erected against the tenor of the
times. Respectively, explanations of these two issues were given as highly
contextualized to environmental degradation: [1] in environmental issues
involved in both the fast ecological revolutionary context of opposition to
state elites culturally and materially, and [2] in environmental issues involved
in the explanation of the slow ecological revolutionary context of future,
selective elite state formations mostly crushing or moderating originating
causes, short-term material concerns, and cultures of state-opposition of the
axial faiths instead of representing these axial faiths per se.485
Third, from
534 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
485
As mentioned earlier, the axial context of partially pro-hierarchical and partially anti-systemic
Confucianism is somewhat an outlier to most general processes of more generalized state oppo-
sition described in fast ecological revolution. However, this case shows the importance of know-
ing the particular case history, and how it highlighted an important variable making this case’s
ecological revolutionary situation only a difference in scale of the effects instead of a difference in
kind. Confucianism was indeed a Zhou state opposition movement though its approval of state
hierarchies as metaphysical moral hierarchies was entirely oppositional to its times of Zhou blood-
line elite legitimacy. Plus, there was a special context of Confucian popularization. It was limited
to a demographic of support for such ideas, and it was moderated by those who were already in
power looking for novel legitimation for their de facto state power that had already accrued to
them without cultural legitimacy. The shi, or ‘captains,’ were sponsored by the Zhou elite or were
people who were war-displaced Zhou aristocrats themselves, looking for novel forms of cultural
hierarchy that were only somewhat altered instead of entirely removed. As previous chapters
noted, the peculiarities of that earlier Chinese case of fast ecological revolution involved [1] the
fact of shi(h) who were de facto already in political charge of many Zhou statelets or seeking part-
icipation in such hierarchies (like “conservative revolutionary” Confucius himself); and involved
[2] the limited scale of political economic penetration of the state into the larger society in this
Zhou era and the subsequent small political, economic, and environmental disruption limited to

96. these two environmental explanations a cross-cultural model of typical, gen-
eral, historical, human-environmental processes were built coming from their
interaction. It is argued this is the defining process of much of world history.
Thus Jaspers’ occluded the anti-systemic aspect of his axial age con-
cept by arguing its future elite state sponsorship was a clean or welcome
transition. It was not. By separating these issues and then thinking about their
(dual environmental) interaction in ongoing historical time, we can note how
later elite state formation that utilized enviro-axial faiths for legitimation was
only priming future environmentally degradation conditions at a larger geog-
raphic scale legitimated by a popular opportunistic ideology--what had created
the first axial faiths’ mobilizations in the first place. Instead of the axial faiths
providing humankind with stable forms of identity over the past several thou-
sands of years, the actual record was full of the same processes of nested
ecological revolution. Jaspers’ axial faiths were merely the first large-scale
reverberative examples. The ecological revolutionary process is still occurring
in human history fueled by unsustainable state formation arrangements and
elite-biased policies and polities, legitimating consumptive consolidation and
expansion by opportunistic appeals to popular numinous ideas that are
increasingly delegitimated as externalities continue to mount. As identity
Mark D. Whitaker 535
mostly Zhou elite leadership and associated shi ‘captains’ instead of disruptions more widely
shared (due to later deeper state penetration that provide typical contexts for animating wider
mass-based political opposition). The latter is more typically characteristic of cases of fast ecologi-
cal revolution (‘axial movements’). However, it was a question of scale of these effects in Con-
fucianism. Moreover, the mass-based politics that are more typical in fast ecological revolution
were added later in subsequent fast ecological revolutionary situations. These were dependent
upon the unfolding context of the later Zhou dominated by shi--now legitimating their novel scales
of state penetration of society partially off Confucian ideology--that comes to be discredited
among peasant and elite alike. So it was opposition to Confucianism that most of the other fast
ecological revolutionary contexts in this case later organized culturally against, by the warring
states as well as by the Later Han. However even in Confucianism the generalized
humanocentrism as interactive with environmental issues still stands. See the previous chapters on
this topic.

97. mobilization material, the axial faiths have influenced future fast ecological
revolutionary movements though environmental proxy adaptations first toward
humanocentrism and ecologically disembedded populations and increasingly
toward more open envirocentrism and humanocentrism mixed in “ecotheol-
ogy”486
as the frontiers disappeared, bringing a reckoning in world history for
the past process of expansion and consolidation in territorial states. However,
the earlier axial faiths were forms of ecotheology as well, though by environ-
mental proxy. This ecological revolution failed to stop with the axial faiths.
The point was that the cycles repeat (given human decisions to keep them
repeating) instead of a presumption of linear historical replacement or peri-
odization. The same chosen cycles of slow and fast ecological revolution tend
to repeat at larger scales in history as time goes by.
Ecological revolution is in addition a predictive model for state col-
lapse, explaining many comparable features of culture, politics, and environ-
mental conditions during which states collapse. Elite decisions and available
discourses mattered in state/movement interactions that happen in this con-
tentious arrangement. How such ideas were introduced and whether elite and
peasant movements remained isolated instead of mutually transformative
seems to determine one of two paths: whether the elite state collapses in
society (due to common lack of required “stateness” in beliefs--as in China in
the last decades of the Later Han), or whether the elite state attempts to make a
more stable slow ecological revolutionary settlement that only postpones the
reckoning of later larger environmental degradation and state collapse (similar
536 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
486
Kottak, Conrad P. 1972. “Ecological Variables in the Origin and Evolution of African States:
The Buganda Example.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 14(3), June:351–80; Daw-
son, Eco-Nationalism: Anti-Nuclear Activism and National Identity in Russia, Lithuania, and
Ukraine; Gottlieb, Roger S. 1996. This Sacred Earth: Religion, Nature, Environment. Edited by
Roger S. Gottlieb. New York City, New York: Routledge; Smith, Mark J. 1998. Ecologism:
Toward Ecological Citizenship. Concepts in Social Thought. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University
of Minnesota Press; Lee, and So, Asia’s Environmental Movements: Comparative Perspectives.

98. to Japan in the 740s CE).487
Different orientations of elites that refused such a common settlement
might encourage different outcomes. An elite repressive reponse to fast
ecological revolution was seen in the bakufu elite’s crushing of Japanese Pure
Land Buddhism (and the import, Christianity) by the 1600s instead of joining
with them as before. A mixed elite reponse to fast ecological revolution was
additionally seen in selective elite positioning that created territorial ‘con-
fessional’-based, regionalized state formation in sengoku daimyo in Japan dur-
ing the second Muromachi bakufu (approximately, 1336-1573). These elite
responses acted both against the ‘higher’ Muromachi bakufu and against the
‘lower’ local ikko ikki. In Europe, a similar mixed elite reponse was noted
with aristocratic territorial consolidations balustrated by a combination of
‘selective confessionalism’ and ‘selected nationalism’ appeals to the grass
roots of the fast ecological revolution on the one side, while on the other side
strategizing against the Roman Catholic Church’s (‘papal-shogun’ style of)
ideological and material dominion. In Europe, state formation from around
1500-1700 was a mixed elite response in this fashion, with state elites simulta-
neously fighting ‘from below’ for carving out a legitimating context for their
localized states in the midst of a fast ecological revolution by selectively
sponsoring as well as crushing local autonomy as well as fighting against the
dominion of the Roman Catholic Church and Holy Roman Empire ‘from
above.’ Additionally, this mixed elite response was a form of elite repression
response since it was against the many local anti-systemic communitarian
ecological revolutionary groups and reponses that rejected the cultural idea of
the state or the desire of a state religion.
You can still hear some people claim that “economics has debased
religious thought or religious movements,” as co-opting spiritualism with
Mark D. Whitaker 537
-------------------------------------
487
A third path is described to get out of this ongoing “choice of two routes to the same tragedy”
in the last section of this chapter.

99. material concerns. The point of the fast ecological revolutionary perspective is
to note that the local material concerns have been a major motivation of novel
humanocentric religious discourses, and the division of ‘spiritual and material’
in human history is a figment of a misleading academic imagination. A more
comparative, inductive, and environmental sociological perspective of reli-
gious discourse creation and materialist social movements has shown them to
be intertwined in the health, ecological/local autonomy, and local economic
interests of their periods. Such religious frameworks were always associated
with economic history--particularly anti-systemic peasant protests against
externalities increasing their health, ecological, and economic difficulties.
This has seeded a desire for a novel religious/material order that was
highly anti-systemic. These seeds were scattered widely. As humanocentric
inventions, such fast ecological revolutionary eras of discourse had a thousand
opinions on how to proceed to get better health, ecological, and local eco-
nomic soundness. Even if they disagreed on many of the subjective strategies
chosen, they became a blur of “statelessness” that was difficult for singular
state elites to respond to. The pre-existing believability of state elites was
swamped with an endless series of legitimation crises and material oppositions
to their increasingly degradative and risk-inducing jurisdictional claims. Given
the type of elite response and movement, it left large changes in self-
conception and social identifications yielding difficulty in reestablishing such
elite-based territorial states in the future as a result. The future elite state
formation attempts were widely resisted or ambivalently ignored by more
animatedly localist or politically ambivalent cultural identities.
Most have analyzed culture in state formation before. I think this may
be the first analysis that seeks to merge the role of culture in state formation
with the role of culture in state collapse. Environmental conditions are brought
in to explain the mechanisms of such cultural changes in which human deci-
sions take place, whether toward durable support for a culture of state forma-
tion or cultural opposition and state collapse.
538 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n

100. It was hardly argued that the cultural aspect of fast ecological revolu-
tion was the only factor of state collapse.488
It is however an understudied
form of culture in relation to state analysis since it is innately counter to (most
historical) structural elite desires, and it is counter to political sociological
research so far that mostly specializes in researching the process of state
formation instead of the process of state collapse. By studying both together in
this book, I hope to start a discussion of these larger systemic processes that
are environmentally related that has been occluded by such limited analysis of
the topics. By showing the common thread of modification of the environ-
ment, the consumptive infrastructure, and culture in both state formation and
state collapse it is possible to have one model. How degradative structures of
elite domination interact with anti-systemic religio-environmental social
movements helps us to place environmental sociology at the core of historical
sociology’s discussions of state formation and state collapse.
Mark D. Whitaker 539
-------------------------------------
488
Additionally important and left unaddressed in this book are elite divisions as a variable, that
arise in the politicized consumptive infrastructure of the state itself, as state elites strategize to
recalibrate either against or for supporting ongoing consumptive consolidation (and against them-
selves) in the face of fast ecological revolution. Contention can mount among different elite fac-
tions over how to respond and redesign formal institutions to address the issue of fast ecological
revolution. This potential division can be a structural variable encouraging success of fast ecologi-
cal revolution. Typically, there are three changing styles of consumptive alliance strategies that are
hegemonic throughout the ecological revolutionary process of state formation and state decline
(really just state alteration). A series of different elite informal hegemonies organize different
styles of consumptive alliance with and against different partners becoming dominant or fading in
the elite clientelism purposes of formal institutions and formal policy as consumptive consolida-
tion and externalities mount. This ‘systemic drift’ sees change in the hegemonic uses of the state,
of science/religion, of consumption, and of financial institutions. This state structural issue of elite
pact breakdown is a contributing factor to success of fast ecological revolution, as well as a factor
encouraging ongoing state militarization, encouragements to conquest, and attempts to re-erect a
slow ecological revolutionary settlement with novel state formation. It is possible to write many
fine grained histories about these three cases, documenting both the common systemic drift of for-
mal institutional and formal policy changes in the politicized consumptive infrastructure as the
ecological revolutionary process proceeds, as well as documenting the variations.

101. This puts consumptive infrastructures clearly at the center stage in
‘humanocentric’ history in how both state formation and state collapse involve
a contentiously created process of consumption that has tragic long-term
effects if ignored. This book has implications on how to design a sustainable
state politics that avoids such elite chosen decisions of state formation built
from consolidating political economies that tended to lead to self-destruction
in all historical cases (so far), when this path of state formation and develop-
ment was chosen. Without exception states that created themselves in these
manners were only destroying themselves all the while in these manners.
Moreover, the state political economy implications help to form a different
branch of economics, an economics that analyzes politicized consumptive
infrastructures cross-culturally.
Equally, the book helps us to remove Eurocentric and modernist
biases in the analysis of religion and religious change. These biases range
from interpretations that religious movements are best analyzed as idea-based
movements to judgements that they supposedly represent ‘irrational,’ ‘past
seeking’, and ‘unmodern’ behaviors. These quick pre-judgements have biased
research about past or present religious movements. The book as well as ques-
tioned the inverse assumption that secular elite state power is always rational
and legitimate instead of historically mostly ecologially irrational, illegitimate,
and self-destructive.489
What moderates this false dichtomous view of unques-
tioned religious movement irrationality and unquestioned state rationality is
that most analysis neglected the material elements of religious mobilization
and its environmental contexts. In short, a consumptive infrastructural view
540 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
489
Karl, Terry Lynn. 1997. The Paradox of Plenty: Oil Booms and Petrol-States. Berkeley, Cali-
fornia: University of California Press; Scott, James C. 1999. Seeing Like a State: How Certain
Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, New Edition. The Institution for Social
and Policy Studies. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press; Ascher, William. 1999. Why
Governments Waste Natural Resources: Policy Failures in Developing Countries. Baltimore,
Maryland: The Johns Hopkins Press.

102. influences issues of how to study formal institutions, formal policy, material
choice, and ideological promulgation and social movements among subalterns
in states. It easily admixes state political views with cultural views of power
while preserving the strategic actions of all parties involved--within of course
the effects of larger structural issues like frontiers, warfare, or natural disasters
and how they intervene to influence ecological revolution.
Ecological revolution as a method of approaching historiography can
be considered separate from Eurocentric Hegelianism or Marxism/modernism.
Both have the same common assumptions of static, linear, progressive peri-
odization in history. This book weans social theory from these Eurocentric
modernist perspectives and its assumptions about linear world development
and general rank in history since all cases are just the same iterative ecological
revolutionary process acting itself out at different geographical scales. Static,
“epochal” historiographical concepts have been utilized mostly in historical
writing as a device to separate “periods.” This work has instead analyzed
cross-comparative sociological mechanisms, variables, and common pro-
cesses. As long as there has been written history, it has mostly utilized static
dynasties or other “static” epochs as an organizing concept. These periodiza-
tion ideas typically had a great deal of ideological intention to artificially sepa-
rate and legitimate a current regime as different from the past regime in some
way. In terms of environmental degradation, there is little justification for
making such a periodization difference as it is equally found in the distant past
or the modern present.490
The way the current European-based historiographi-
cal regime was legitimated was that our ‘capitalist epoch’ replaced the pre-
vious ‘epochs of history’ yielding a convenient and pro-European triptych of
ancient, feudal, or capitalist periodizations--our ‘modern dynasties’--instead of
admitting that these are Eurocentric social projections with little social
Mark D. Whitaker 541
-------------------------------------
490
Totman, The Green Archipelago: Forestry in Preindustrial Japan; Redman, Human Impact on
Ancient Environments; Chew, World Ecological Degradation: Accumulation, Urbanization, and
Deforestation, 3000 B.C.-A.D. 2000.

103. scientific use. If environmental degradation occurs throughout all ‘three
periods,’ then it is hard to blame as the result of an ‘epoch.’ If there are more
commonalities of sociological processes of environmental degradation, and if
there are common environmentally-modulated processes of state formation
and state collapse across presumed ‘different epochs,’ then the ideas of peri-
odization and epochs as different are mistaken. A processural model of history
as argued here is more appropriate than a periodization-based one. These
Eurocentric periodization terms came strangely to label contemporaneous con-
quered different geographies as past temporal epochs. This made little sense
except as an interpretive model for reifying or justifying imperialist European
power and invasion worldwide from the 1800s onward that was claiming to
‘improve’ other societies (instead of perpetuating the same, ancient, elite-
driven difficulties on a larger scale as argued here). Therefore, given peri-
odization blinders, there has been little within a still quite Eurocentric social
science and historiography in comparatively grounded analyses of the same
processes of history. Process-based analysis avoids Eurocentric/modernist
periodization assumptions that “Europe is modern, ergo, the rest is pre-
modern.” Instead, Europe is only one case like any other. Most of the
European-American academic disciplines have been simply and unscientifi-
cally adopting and maintaining parochial European social-movement and
imperial-ideological sentiments of the late 1700s and early 1800s.491
These
Eurocentric discourses of periodization--whether revolutionary or elite in
origin--have biased the mental categories that have been utilized to organize
empirical research about history.
It is important to do more openly-comparative historical research
describing dynamics of contention within particular cases as well as compar-
ing dynamics across cases without reference to pre-set parochial Eurocentric
542 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
491
Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric His-
tory; Blaut, Eight Eurocentric Historians; Wallerstein, Immanuel, Unthinking Social Science: The
Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms; Second Edition, with a New Preface.

104. concepts. It would be like, if China had conquered the world, uncritically
adopting Confucian historiographic interpretations.
In conclusion to this section, the main theme running through this
work is that environmental degradation is institutionalized in slow ecological
revolutionary processes of elite-based territorial state formation that take con-
sumptive and ideological consolidation as the route to create territorial states
based on their clientelism. It is argued that there is little else in the human
future if such environmental-degradation slow ecological revolutionary motifs
are continued. The title of this work and the phrase Ecological Revolution
were chosen because it implies three senses of ‘revolution’ simultaneously.
One meaning of revolution is a sudden overthrow and change in social and
epistemological views. This is noted in the research above in how and why the
slow ecological revolutionary process itself encourages the destruction of
more bioregionally-localized forms of human economy and human identity
and later destroys even the elite-to-peasant settlement upon which legitimacy
of the self-destructive past elite territorial state depends.492
A second meaning of ‘revolution’ is a return to the beginning in a
series or cycle, i.e., revolving. The smaller argument is that many ‘radical rev-
olutions’ or fast ecological revolutions in ideas and adherences were hardly
Mark D. Whitaker 543
-------------------------------------
492
This has been described in the ‘slow’ aspects of ecological revolution. This is the state forma-
tion, state-clientelism, and state political economy expansion side of the process, legitimated with
pre-existing ideas and appeals to identity as much as material ambivalence and material alliance
attempts. As environmental degradation mounts (facilitated by this larger state-geographic frame-
work), the legitimacy of state and local forms of identifications are affected for the worse. In these
contexts, the facilitated environmental degradation can lead toward the ‘fast’ ecological revolution
in idea changes, in health strategies, in ecological/localization strategies, and in economic
strategies as both elites and peasants become dissatisfied with the previous state legitimated
hegemonies of ideas that seem to have started to contribute to illegitimate suffering instead of
legitimate solutions. In many cases, select religious movements were more than ideological move-
ments. They contained a material politics of protest and came out of material effects. Many ‘reli-
gious movements’ have been environmental movements and fast ecological revolutionary move-
ments mobilized for material change as much as ideological change.

105. novel: they were returning to forms of local autonomy that had been lost in the
other forms of clientelistic and self-destructive slow ecological revolution.
The third meaning of revolution implies the radical change of social,
political, and cultural institutions by conscious demotion and the creation of
others in their place as part of an ideological program. This is the fast ecologi-
cal revolution, when tends to lead toward the first meaning of revolution once
more.
Combining these three, the wider argument is that if the human
species keeps adopting slow/fast ecological revolutionary based forms of con-
sumptive, ideological, and political organization, it is without a future--or
rather without any different future than the past described herein, unless states
are institutionalized to avoid the clientelism dynamics as the basis of power
that encourges long-term consumptive consolidation and environmental
degradation as the basis of short-term political alliances. Otherwise only large
scale, political-crony-institutionalized degradation, suffering, and
epistemological separation between humans and the environment described
above will get worse. This is despite ecological revolutionary pressures of
environmental proxy politics attempting to deal indirectly with it through
religiously-inspired movements.
This is hardly meant to insinuate that time repeats, or even a denial of
linear time. It is only the argument that social institutions or social develop-
ment within linear time are not carried on by default in an equally linear flow.
To change requires formulating frameworks to stop the past (and
present) clientelism relationships from forming in the first place. Good state
design can be a form of ecological feedback in politics from particular areas
instead of an attempt to mask or ignore such feedback and simply clientelize
different populations into consumptive and ideological ambivalence to facili-
tate further consumptive consolation. Such feedback from good state design
would encourage the stop of this crony elite institutionalized process of
environmental degradation described above. Simply withdrawing is part of the
544 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n

106. ecological revolutionary process itself--and it sets up future military con-
solidation, elite co-option, and slow ecological revolution. In other words,
mere withdrawal is part of the ecological revolutionary process priming the
next state elite consolidation strategy.
Instead of social exit, stopping ecological revolution is done by
removing these delimited uses of formal institutions once designed around
keeping aggregate groups in hegemony through consumptive and ideologi-
cally generalized alliances with gatekeeping elites who guide the territorial
state toward short-term interests that lead to long-term systemic difficulties of
consumptive consolidation, environmental degradation, and widening experi-
enced externalities. The main argument of state-facilitation of environmentally
degradation is that elites are involved in corrupt and unrepresentative elite
purposes of extraction and consumptive consolidation within wider state terri-
torial frameworks. This yields the self-destruction of such states and their
forms of legitimacy worldwide and repeatedly.
However, this ecological revolutionary process is finding its near
denouement with lack of structural factors that have facilitated it as well: the
frontiers, the lack of places to destroy, and other geographic contexts that
allow for the luxury of demoting political voice towards economic exit.493
The
fast ecological revolutionary process has historically been constructed as
dependent upon a frontier expansion--or rather its lack. It was only when
Japan in the mid 700s was unable to expand itself readily into the north that
wider structural features of fast ecological revolution occurred. It was only
during the era when frontier forests had already been felled in Europe that
Mark D. Whitaker 545
-------------------------------------
493
Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States;
Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past; Browder, and Godfrey, Rainforest Cities: Urbanization,
Development, and Globalization of the Brazilian Amazon; Diamond, Jared M. 1998. Guns, Germs,
and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York City, New York: W.W. Norton & Co; Frazier,
Wade. 2003. “Endangered Cultures at the Far Edge of the World (Video).”. In TED Talks.
Monterey, California (Feb. 2003), 22 Min. Http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/69.

107. massive fast ecological revolution started to appear. Others have argued the
same for the situation that China was in by the 1300s.494
Currently a global lack of frontier is challenging such relationship
durabilities of state political economies to maintain environmentally degrada-
tion policies. All past forms of elite-based territorial state were based on fron-
tier expansions in some sense--whether against tribal populations or against
other weaker state entities. This lack of frontiers changes the dynamics toward
a widening pressure that had allowed past ‘durable’ and delimited purposes of
formal institutions and formal policy toward enhancing environmental
degradation. Instead, it becomes something more akin to permanent place-
based environmental proxy pressures. This brings out particular local
prioritization of ideals and materials into state political process more durably--
particularly as ‘risk society’ style of politics becomes unavoidable.495
The relative inequality of power between a delocalized informal elite
(sometimes divided on) utilizing mechanisms of territorial institutions to con-
solidate consumptively a political economy versus multiple, localized,
geographically-embedded groups remains the same dynamic for thousands of
years in human history. It is interrupted only occasionally by peasant or urban
bursts of contention attempting to throw off the mounting senses of experien-
ced risk--from movements of religion, of nationalism, and even of Marxism,
that materialist religion par excellence. These have often been mobilized
through anti-systemic religious change movements that sever or disrupt pre-
existing clientelistic legitimacy of any elite-to-base group in a territorial state.
546 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
494
Gimpel, The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages; Merchant, The
Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution.
495
Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity; Beck, Ecological Enlightenment: Essays on the
Politics of the Risk Society; Beck, “Introduction”; Bronner, “Ecology, Politics, and Risk: The
Social Theory of Ulrich Beck”; Beck, Ulrich. 1999. World Risk Society. Malden, Massachusetts:
Polity Press; Beder, Sharon. 2002. Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism.
White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Pub Co.

108. b. Places Without Fast Ecological Revolution: Three Conditions; Two
Globalized Fast Ecological Revolutions in World History
What about situations of elite territorial state formation that failed to
lead to fast environmental revolution? The three areas analyzed were mostly
autonomous locations chosen because fast ecological revolution occurred out
of previous state formation via slow ecological revolution. As noted above,
this is hardly an argument about static variables ‘causing’ fast ecological revo-
lution. One way to avoid fast ecological revolution is possible through elite
policies changing to surmount expanding degradation difficulties or through
the variable that local groups may have or be lacking in the organizational and
ideational resources to mobilize any challenge. Another way to avoid fast
ecological revolution is more structural, based on issues of frontier dispersal
of those complaining about illegitimacy. The complainers simply exit the
‘state consolidation risk zone’ instead of exhibiting voice, protest, and novel
organizational, autonomous defense of already integrated local regions against
the territorial state elites. In many cases, as noted in British, Japanese and Bra-
zilian Amazon history, state elites aid in the ‘transportation of discontent.’
This state facilitated exit to a frontier is systemically part of what is driving a
state consolidation process further without political opposition. Third, the
degree of chosen state penetration into society matters as well for facilitating
fast ecological revolution since such penetrations contribute toward near com-
plete disruption of autonomous ‘normal life’ capacities combined with
environmental degradation, economic shakeout, social disembeddedness of
localities, and consumptive consolidation. Differing elite or local responses,
frontiers, and the characteristics of the state’s penetration can be tools to ana-
lyze other areas of the world that lacked fast ecological revolution. Places that
avoided fast ecological revolution seemed to coalesce around these three
‘missing’ factors.
A way to explore these ideas is in a set of examples of the rise and
fall of territorial state-based societies that lacked ‘native’ fast ecological revo-
Mark D. Whitaker 547

109. lutionary contexts during or afterwards. Jaspers differentiated between three
areas with ‘native’ Axial Age experiences (European/Levant areas, India, and
China) and other areas like Africa and the Americas that ‘failed’ to develop
their own axial traditions. These latter two areas were subsequently influenced
by the former three areas’ inventions.
Sub-Saharan Africa lacked its own native axial religious
movements--at least until the synthesis of African religions and Catholic saints
in Voodun in Haiti, for example. Leaving aside Egypt,496
large territorial state
formation in West Africa (between the Senegal and Niger Rivers near the
indigenous Sahel agricultural zone497
) seems to have appeared first only as a
‘semi-periphery’ or ‘periphery’ of trading/manufacturing off the global
Islamic Dar-al-Islam stretching to its north from Morocco to Micronesia. West
African statelets southwest of this global Islamic zone show Mali, then Ghana,
then Songhai (ca. 800-1591) developed immediately only after the Islamic
trade connections became pronounced in the early 700s. These sub-Saharan
states dominated major exports of gold, ivory, and slaves from their areas.
They were reliant on wealth from circuits of trade with the Islamic North.
Islam was imported this way as well. However in sub-Saharan Africa Islam
failed to enter into sociological relationships that made it a majority faith like
fast ecological revolutionary contexts elsewhere.
Looking at our three variables, these West African states seem to
have lacked extensive state penetration of their societies. It was a type of state
formation seen in Latin America, a ‘territorial state formation in the
548 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
496
There is evidence of mass environmental rebellious politics in the Egyptian dynasties (see:
Fagan, Brian M. 1999. Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Niño and the Fate of Civilizations.
New York City, New York: Basic Books), though, like China, the theocratic and royal-scribe-
based form of historiography rarely recorded or deeply analyzed such secular movements as
important.
497
Diamond, Jared M., Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies.

110. periphery’498
without much local legitimacy reliances, local jurisdictional
inclusions, or great state penetration into society despite extensive wealth and
international connections of such state elites in many cases. So systemic
environmental degradation, state penetration, and state legitimacy among the
population seemed to be limited. The peasant ‘sector’ in these states remained
quite autonomous and localized in its organization and chains of legitimacies
between local elites and state elites. It could somewhat be severed from state
elites in early African territorial states. Such states seemed more dependent
upon international flows of wealth from select commodities instead of agricul-
tural/manufacturing-based taxation and agricultural consolidation of their own
peoples. Therefore sub-Saharan large-scale territorial state formation was a
less autonomously oriented and less penetrating phenomenon.
Besides, a second factor of the frontier is noted. Their populations
could always disappear into the African frontier if they wished, impeding a
context of fast ecological revolution from building a demographic of
support.499
The third variable of elite response was important at least in Ghana.
From what we know of Ghana, Ghanan emperors supported their own forms
of local legitimacy and combined it with their sponsorship of Islam,500
co-
Mark D. Whitaker 549
-------------------------------------
498
Karl, The Paradox of Plenty: Oil Booms and Petrol-States.
499
This was seen somewhat in the warring states period of consolidations after the very thin axial
movement of Confucianism. It was only with the expansion of the penetrating ‘state grid’ pre-
viously described and these states’ closing of the Chinese frontier in the warring states period that
such massive religious identity changed and mobilized material anti-systemic politics.
500
Islam, a radically decentralized religion in many ways, is arguably the world’s first global fast
ecological revolution. This is because of its quick spread in the peripheries and lower classes of
multiple regional ‘faith/state’ arrangements simultaneously from the Roman/Christian world,
through the Persian/Zoroastrian world, thorugh Hindu caste-based India, and into Buddhist/South
East Asia and Buddhist/Inner Asia and Buddhist China. Islam as the world’s first globalized axial
faith instead of a regional faith was built on the slow ecological revolution of many areas instead
of coming out of one region only. It was a fast ecological revolution taking place interregionally
for the first time. It stretched across the core of the central trading zones of the world. Islam is so

111. opting the only form of known common ‘anti-African elite’ identity alternative
then known. This may have contributed to keeping Islam from serving as a
large form of anti-systemic localized identity opposed to the native Ghanan
ideological legitimacy of its state. This elite decision factor interacted with the
two more structural factors mentioned.
In short, for elite decisions and structural rationales (frontier contexts
and ‘global semiperiphery state formation’ special contexts without much state
penetration), West African states somewhat first avoided slow ecological rev-
olution in their native territorial state formation first, and thus later avoided
fast ecological revolution. Another structural factor was that external groups
550 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
anti-systemically decentralized that Hodgson compares it to Quakerism in its ethos. (See:
Hodgson, Marshall G. S. 1970. “The Role of Islam in World History.” International Journal of
Middle East Studies 1[2], April:99–123; Burke, “Islamic History as World History: Marshall
Hodgson, ‘The Venture of Islam’”.) Elite state formation in the Dar-al-Islam had a hard time
reconfiguring itself because most Islamic populations were rendered “immune” to having their
local regional state as a requirement of their being. State formation in the swath of the globally
decentralized (though globally central) and population-mixing Islamic zone only takes place with
the import of gunpowder empires. Even then three ‘brotherly Islamic’ gunpowder empires of the
Ottomans, the Safavids, and the Mughals were a territorial team in many ways instead of battling
each other. The second global fast ecological revolution is perhaps an environmental degradation
extension of this, after previous forms of consumptive consolidation facilitated by Islam (upon
which peripherial European circuits of trade just piggybacked originally, entirely rewiring world
trade into a militarized maritime sector instead of across Central Asia mostly dominated by these
Islamic Empires (see: Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–
1350; Frank, The Centrality of Central Asia; Mancke, “Early Modern Expansion and the
Politicization of Oceanic Space”; Scammell, The World Encompassed: The First European
Maritime Empires, c. 800–1650)). This second global fast ecological revolution is the ‘green
globalism’ coming to prominence in and across many countries of the world. Similarly, it is some-
what a fast ecological revolution context of anti-systemic green action meeting a slow ecological
revolutionary desire by (now global) elites attempting to co-opt popular ‘greenism’ to justify only
a style of widened, ongoing, elite-degradative international forms of jurisdiction that, if they are
only in charge, will only make matters worse. Some have described this green movement as a ‘sec-
ond axial age’ (sic) though they seem unaware that the first so-called ‘axial age’ (really an out-
come of a repeated process instead of a period) was green as well.

112. destroyed their states ‘for them.’ Their states collapsed into nothing in many
cases due to outside Islamic or Western imperial forces particularly in the
steady erosions and horrors of the slave trade stealing millions of people. This
made local autonomy the only trusted form of government for centuries in
Africa. For almost a millennia Islamic traders as well as Western ones contrib-
uted to the dismantling of territorially-autonomous or stable Africa popula-
tions by withdrawing so many millions in the slave trades from the 800s to the
1800s. This was a different structural dynamic than other more isolated forms
of territorial state formation cases analyzed in Japan, China, and Europe.501
Currently in Africa the ‘axial faiths’ and delegitimation movements
in many countries might be said to be secular nationalist movements instead--
though that origin of potential fast ecological revolution still depends upon
interaction with elite ex-metropoles in many cases.502
This is oriented against
(and interactive with the many different attitudes toward decolonization from
the) Western empires in Africa as well as against local, exclusively elder
forms of legitimacy. However, this is still a form of state developmentalism
movement--a form of slow ecological revolution building the legitimation of
territorial state formation instead of a form of grass roots anti-systemic move-
ment of nationalism at least so far. The still-durable localist forms of identity
and legitimacy characteristic of many polities in Africa,503
the facts of
Mark D. Whitaker 551
-------------------------------------
501
Brooks, George E. 1970. “A Schema for Integrating Africa Into World History.” The History
Teacher 3(2), January:5–19; Kottak, “Ecological Variables in the Origin and Evolution of African
States: The Buganda Example”; Bradley, Dawn Voyage: The Black African Discovery of America.
502
Strang, David. 1992. “The Inner Incompatibility of Empire and Nation: Popular Sovereignty
and Decolonization.” Sociological Perspectives 35(2, Studies in the New International Compara-
tive Political Economy), Summer:367–84.
503
Ensminger, Jean. 1990. “Co-Opting the Elders: The Political Economy of State Incorporation in
Africa.” American Anthropologist 92(3), September:662–75; Kaspin, Deborah. 1995. “The
Politics of Ethnicity in Malawi’s Democratic Transition.” The Journal of Modern African
Studies 33(4), December:595–620.

113. mutually interactive geographies (of disasters, collapses, and refugees504
),
peripheral state jurisdictions without grass-roots legitimacy or much state pen-
etration,505
and local forms of identification instead of legitimated state elites
(as their borders are ex-imperial powers in Africa instead of growing up
indigenously) make for very unstable though little-penetrating territorial
states.
In short, if there is a lack of fast ecological revolution in Africa, it is
part of world history that African areas were integrated into global interna-
tional trade structurally before their own territorial state forms developed.
Thus lack of native slow ecological revolution in state formation is a missing
piece in African territorial state formation that has been important there.506
What about in pre-Columbian America?507
Observations like these
552 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
504
Collier, Paul. 2007. The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can
Be Done About It. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
505
Karl, The Paradox of Plenty: Oil Booms and Petrol-States.
506
Some aspects of this slow ecological revolutionary framework are seen currently. There are
cases of some ‘local elders agreeing to be co-opted’ in forms of extension and penetration in their
ex-colonial territorial state. (See: Ensminger, “Co-Opting the Elders: The Political Economy of
State Incorporation in Africa”.) It is this type of process that was seen in setting a stage for
widespread delegitimation of such forms of locality and the state in the future in other areas of fast
ecological revolution (think about the discussion of Japanese State Shinto)--as consumptive con-
solidation proceeds and undermines locality both materially and increasingly delegitimates local
forms of leadership that began to play along as well.
507
Pre-Columbian North American state societies are known (see: Kennedy, Roger G. 1994. Hid-
den Cities: The Discovery and Loss of Ancient North American Civilization. New York City, New
York: Free Press), though their collapses were due to disease demographics from outside (see:
McNeill, William H., Plagues and Peoples; Watts, Epidemics and History: Disease, Power, and
Imperialism) instead of internal self-destruction by consumptive consolidation and ambivalent
elites. In North America, the frontier ‘escapes’ would have been possible alternative responses to
state territorial collapses like in the American Southwest (see: Diamond, Jared, Collapse: How
Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed) or later after the Spanish reintroduced horses, ‘escape’ to a
more nomadic hunting-and-raiding form of lifestyle separate from native forms of agriculture. In
many cases Europeans caused the collapses of such territorial polities before they even physically
arrived due to fast moving disease transfer. Since the collapses were externally related, this

114. for Africa above allow us to explore four major pre-Colombian territorial state
societies in North and South America: the Aztec, Maya, Incan, and
Amazonian.508
Like much of sub-Saharan Africa or for imperial rationales of
invasion from outside, there is only one of these four that can be analyzed for
fast ecological revolutionary forms of dismantling of the state-based society.
This was the Maya, whose collapse was the only one that preceded the Euro-
pean invasions starting in 1492. The other three collapsed in reaction to Euro-
peans from outside after 1492. So it is only in the Maya that we can look
toward internalist views of its collapse. Besides these four state societies in
areas where the Spanish/Portuguese later dominated, the populations
maintained (or collapsed back into) a tribal structure of localized ‘ethnobotani-
cal,’ pre-axial forms of identity and materiality durably to the present (to
update Jaspers’ vocabulary). When the Europeans arrived their American ter-
ritorial states were still in the stage of only recent formation (like the Incan)
and exhibited very similar forms of development of ‘linked elites’ from
locality to territorial state elites like the dynamics of State Shinto’s slow
ecological revolution. This was how the Incan (military conquest) established
their larger legitimacies and material alliances between regional statelets with
very different bioregional cultures. So, first, the Incan empire could be said to
have been conducting a slow ecological revolution from previous localized
forms of enviro-identities. Second, the Incan state was indeed encouraging
much consumptive consolidation under the Incan dynasty. However, in the
Mark D. Whitaker 553
precludes them from being included as forms of fast ecological revolutionary collapses contributed
by environmental degradation and elite ambivalence.
508
The Amazonian has only recently been legitimated as real. It identity had been based on only
one Spanish explorer in the late 1500s and no one after that. It was ‘rediscovered’ through pat-
terned remnants of their ‘dark soil’ (Portuguese: terra preta) anthropogenically created by their
farming practices as well in the recent high-altitude discoveries of still-existant patterns of agricul-
tural grids in now completely-depopulated headwaters of the Amazon and the heart of the Amazon
itself. This is exactly where Bradley summarized from other evidence where they may be. (See:
Bradley, Dawn Voyage: The Black African Discovery of America.)

115. middle of this, there was disruption from outside. Spanish conquistadors con-
tributed to pulling it apart during an Incan royal succession dispute. The same
pattern can be said for the Aztecs. As for the Amazonian form, little is known
about it at all. The Amazonian territorial state disappeared completely without
a trace by the late 1500s assuredly due to huge demographic collapses known
in these areas.509
For the last example, the Maya, it is the only known example of a ter-
ritorial state ‘rising and falling’ before penetration from Europe (starting in
1492) had contributed to altering regional-only patterns of slow/fast ecological
revolutionary politics. Despite their cultural decimation over the past 500
years in current areas of Belize, Guatemala and southern Mexico, the “Maya
without a state” still exist. They once had a large territorial state formation,
and its collapse had a great deal to do with state-encouraged environmental
degradation as well as with elite ambivalence toward doing anything about
it.510
From what is known, the Maya seem to have lacked a form of fast
ecological revolutionary opposition. Pre-Columbian history of the Americas is
still rather sparse on issues of social history. This is because so much of the
Mayan, Aztec, and Incan writings (for the latter, the string-and-knot based
writing in quipus) were intentionally destroyed. So it is hard to know if there
were indeed or otherwise fast ecological revolutionary movements against the
Maya state as it started to destroy itself environmentally during its last
centuries and its elites increasingly built even more sumptuous palaces
instead. The consumptive consolidation is known to have been occurring, and
mass dearth among the population (known from archaeological inferences
from burials and other buildings) was occurring. Since only four written
554 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
509
McNeill, William H., Plagues and Peoples; Watts, Epidemics and History: Disease, Power, and
Imperialism.
510
Diamond, Jared, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.

116. codexes of the Maya survived out of what was reputedly libraries of millions
of books, there is an open question about Maya fast ecological revolutionary
forms. The fact that there is little interest among the remaining Maya in their
previous very state-centric history or their old cities in the jungle may be a
response to how the legitimacy of ‘stateness’ had gone out of their lives before
the Europeans arrived. Moreover, external conquests were continuing from
nearby forms of state societies, so they were submerged as peasant popula-
tions in other territorial states like the Aztec/Toltec (and later the Spanish)
without much structural opportunity to act upon any designs for their own
legitimately larger territorial institutions if they still had them.
In conclusion to this exploration of areas that lacked a fast ecological
revolution, sometimes we know they lacked it like in West Africa where slow
ecological revolutionary prerequisites were missing along with deep state pen-
etration dynamics. Sometimes we know of slow ecological revolutionary con-
ditions in the Americas like among the Incans, though we are unaware
whether fast ecological revolutionary conditions happened or not as in the
Mayan polity’s last centuries and all the missing textual evidence destroyed by
the Spanish Empire. Unlike the African territorial state formation examples,
the pre-Columbian Maya state did seem to develop via the typical slow nesting
types of politics described here as slow ecological revolution.511
Therefore, the
Mayan state had one of the ingredients for a future potential fast ecological
revolution when these nested elites were delegitimated in the midst of con-
sumptive consolidation and environmental degradation. Second, forms of con-
Mark D. Whitaker 555
-------------------------------------
511
Thompson, John Eric Sidney. 1966. The Rise and Fall of Maya Civilization. The Civilization of
the American Indian Series. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press; Henderson, John
S. 1981. The World of the Ancient Maya. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press; Freidel,
David A. 1979. “Culture Areas and Interaction Spheres: Contrasting Approaches to the Emergence
of Civilization in the Maya Lowlands.” American Antiquity 44(1), January:36–54; Cioffi-Revilla,
Claudio, and Todd Landman. 1999. “Evolution of Maya Polities in the Ancient Mesoamerican
System.” International Studies Quarterly 43(4), December:559–98.

117. sumptive consolidation and state-enacted environmental degradation were
seen in the Mayan state. Third, elite ambivalence as the reaction is recorded
for the later Mayan state.512
Fourth, we have the durable ‘statelessness’ of the
Mayan polity--though it is hard to judge whether this was caused by internal
cultural development because of larger external pressures always upon them
afterwards. Therefore, many of the ingredients that would facilitate fast
ecological revolution were there for the Maya. It is difficult to know much
about the social history of the Mayan religious movements given the paucity
of evidence. However, many factors exist to point to a likelihood it could have
occurred there. It could be argued for the other cases that they had ‘yet’ to
develop fast ecological revolution, as they had already developed slow
ecological revolutionary forms (and many hostile subsumed peasants ready for
opposition) though were interrupted from outside. There were plenty of large-
scale territorial state formations in Africa (from Egypt, Ghana, Mali, Songhai,
etc.) that might fall into this situation as well--if they were left to develop
without the external invasions of the Alexandrian Greeks (for Egypt) or
without destabilization via the Islamic/European scales of a mercantile slave
trade (for the rest).
c. The Global Green Movement as a Religious, Fast Ecological Revolu-
tionary Movement: Plus Ça Change?
A conclusion is hardly the place to introduce another case, though
this third section illustrates the general theme throughout this book: that all
ecological revolutionary movements, previously analyzed as only forms of
ideological religious mobilizations, are like green political movements, and
vice versa. Analyzed here is one state’s version of this global-scale green
movement: the nascent, anti-systemic Green movement in West Germany in
556 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
512
Diamond, Jared, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.

118. the late 1970s and 1980s.513
This movement can echo themes about elite
response and identity change as the past. Other authors have echoed a theme
of this book in analyzing the importance of state elite response to green move-
ments: how different elite decisions in states interact with this global ‘novel’
movement in the new millennium to keep their self-destructive environmental
degradation intact and unchallenged (in a further slow ecological revolutionry
co-option as they conduct greenwashing and symbolic politics514
) or how state
elites change their degradative behavior and institutional design in response to
the green movement.515
The nascent West German green political movement of the 1970s
came out of a combination of those with a lack of “stateness”516
in their lives,
mostly unmotivated to participate in their current political forms and preferr-
ing direct action. This was why a political party was opposed strongly among
the movements that became known as the Greens. It began from a network of
different, autonomous, anti-war, anti-systemic, local economic developmental,
and religious movements. Many members had a high degree of spiritual
motivation for their arguments about changed material politics being associa-
ted with changed ideals in life. Members vacated both the right and left
orientations in German politics to support Die Grünen, the “party wing” of the
larger Green anti-systemic, pro-localization movement. The Green party
vehicle failed to represent the movement and was considered by many to be
one branch of many fellow-travelling citizen movements or the voice of the
Mark D. Whitaker 557
-------------------------------------
513
Spretnak, and Capra, Green Politics.
514
Edelman, Murray. 1964. “Chapter Two: Symbols and Political Quiescence.”. In The Symbolic
Use of Politics. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press; Gaventa, John. 1980. Power and
Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley. Urbana, Illinois: University
of Illinois Press.
515
Dryzek, Downs, Hernes, and Schlosberg, Green States and Social Movements: Environ-
mentalism in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Norway.
516
Nettl, “The State as a Conceptual Variable.”

119. anti-systemic movements in government instead of a regular political party per
se. The Greens were not a variant left movement in origin, though currently
they had been co-opted into the existing German state by the early 21st
century by the left mostly (echoes of slow ecological revolution) and are cur-
rently treated as such.517
However, earlier a major leader of the Greens
through the 1980s was an ex-West German military general from the right
wing, merging with others who had had a complete change of identity in the
religious change movements by the 1970s. This was a time when the hard
Marxist student movements in Germany and Europe were being discredited.
Another of the Greens’ more charismatic leaders had links with Polish Catho-
licism in the USSR. Another was linked with Catholicism in Germany and
American peace and Black civil rights movements inspiration (mobilized out
of the Black American Church as a religious-civil movement historically, by
the way).
Like the argument about fast ecological revolution before, the Green
movement in Germany came out of just such a combination of a plurality of
individual withdrawals and more collectivist withdrawals from social politics.
The original leaders attempting to organize the Greens as a ‘state legitimating
party’ were fired from their leadership positions for daring to turn an anti-
systemic religious and social change alliance of different movements into a
statist political party.
The dynamics of how Die Grünen became a ‘party’ of non-dogmatic
and mostly decentralized political views was involved with the interaction of
West Germany’s proportional representation framework, since third parties of
any sort are dependent upon such styles of democratic state arrangements
worldwide.
558 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
517
Whitaker, Mark D. 2007. “The Dying of Die Grunen and the Birth of the Bioregional State:
Shortcomings of Limiting Sustainability Strategies to a Single Co-Optable Party.” Toward a
Bioregional State: The Blog. Http://biostate.blogspot.com/2007/07/dying-of-die-grunen-and-birth-
of.html.

120. During the 1970s citizens’ movements, most of them environmentally
oriented, merged into political parties in various countries around the
world, from the Green parties in Belgium--the first to win seats in a
national parliament. The Green movement has been strongest in the
highly industrialized countries where the environmental problems are
most urgent and most visible, and its success has depended largely on
the electoral systems in those countries. Wherever there is a system
of proportional representation, Green representatives have been
elected locally, regionally, and in some cases nationally.518
Beyond the structural electoral arrangement that allowed durable minority
voices to enter the political debate as parties, religious and identity change
rewired individuals in West Germany after the German historical void from
the Nazi era. That void was a result of many forms of values being discredited
due to their manipulation and use by the Nazis. By the 1960s and 19670s, that
void combined with environmental protection movements and a novel sense of
economics.
These factors overlapped and helped to organize a religious change
movement. Its more immediate connection was the failure of the leftist student
movement and equally a felt sense of a failure of values on the political right.
This disaffection from both the conservative Christian Democratic right and
the Social Democratic left came together, led mostly by those with a back-
ground from a plurality of individual disciplinary religious movements. These
were more supportive of ‘drop out’ movements--individual and collective anti-
systemic opposition and ambivalance--than public German politics. This
welter of loosely-allied, anti-systemic, citizen-action movements formulated a
series of ever-growing “alliances” and adopted the name The Greens (Die
Grünen).
Mark D. Whitaker 559
-------------------------------------
518
Spretnak, and Capra, Green Politics, 172–5.

121. [A novel elected party] walked through the streets of West Ger-
many’s capital on 22nd of March 1983 with a huge rubber globe and
a branch of a tree that was dying from pollution from the Black
Forest. They entered the lower chamber of their national assembly,
the Bundestag, and took seats as the first new party to be elected in
more than 30 years. The new parliamentarians insisted on being
seated in between the conservative party (Christian Democrats), who
sat on the right side of the chamber, and the liberal-left party (Social
Democrats) [They had originally been assigned a ‘far left’ position in
the chamber which they rejected]. They called themselves simply die
Grünen, the Greens....The Greens proposed an integrated approach to
the current ecological, economic, and political crises, which they
stressed are real [and]...interrelated and global in nature. They spoke
of the “spiritual impoverishment” of industrialized societies [i.e.,
ideological/religious and material critique as one]. They asked ques-
tions that neither of the major parties nor the government could ans-
wer and amplified with playful humor the ironies that resulted. Next
to the starched white shirts in the assemblies, the Greens looked
unconventional and their [anti-systemic, decentralizing and pro-
environmental] innovative proposals cut through the traditional
boundaries of [elite] left and right.519
In short, both the massive environmental damage of the post-WWII “German
miracle” in West Germany and a radical discontinuity and separation caused
by the ‘people without a past’--i.e., Germans silent about the Nazi era--were
instrumental in forming Die Grünen. It was an alliance of politically-
concerned citizens mobilized by religious-change movements as the lead-
ership. They came from a plethora of anti-systemic backgrounds instead of
560 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
519
Spretnak, and Capra, Green Politics, xix-xx.

122. actually being another singular ideological classification. Many of these
citizens-movements leaders from the 1970s were highly influenced by the
widespread, personalized, spiritual searching of the Germans in the first gener-
ation after World War II as well as by the discredit of both the left and right
spectrum in dealing with various issues of concern.
The ages of Green party members fall mainly between 20 and 45. We
were told that the West Germans who are now over 60 are the
“economic-miracle generation,” who rebuilt their country from the
postwar rubble into affluence. They and their children feel they have
been served well by the industrial and political mechanisms of mod-
ern “progress” and are not interested in questioning its problematic
aspects. However, the Greens do attract some members from the over
65 group specifically because they remember life before heavy pollu-
tion, industrially processed food, dying forests, and nuclear missiles.
The greens are not starry-eyed romantics attempting to turn back the
clock, but the older Greens’ experiences of a prewar childhood
enable them to gauge environmental damage and agree with the call
for an ecologically wise society....As we travel around West Ger-
many talking with Green party officials and legislators in villages, we
noticed a refreshing contrast to political parties in the United States:
the Green party is not run by lawyers!....The Green Party’s executive
committee in that state was comprised of two university students, a
teacher, a business consultant, a sales trainee, and a social worker.
The Green city council members in the university town of Freiburg
consist of two homemakers, one of whom is a grandmother and for-
merly a farmer; an architect; and a sociologist. The profession with
the largest representation in the Greens is probably teaching, and reli-
gious studies was often cited as the area of specialization among
Green teachers....The cultural and political forces that led to the
Mark D. Whitaker 561

123. formation of the Green party have been subject of much speculation
in this country....Several publications have asserted that forming
green-type movements is simply something German youths do every
few decades....A second assumption is that the greens have their roots
“in the counterculture of the 1960s” (Los Angeles Times, 18th of Sep-
tember 1983). This is a [false] projection of the American experience.
While Amsterdam, London, and San Francisco were inundated with
the colors, music, flowers, blind trust (of people under 30!), surging
optimism of the hippies, West German youth were enmeshed in the
angry, Marxist-dominated student revolt of 1968 and its [failed self-
discrediting] aftermath. It is true that one can connect certain aspects
of green politics to strains in German culture such as regionalism and
a romantic love of nature. However, the Greens must be understood
as a postwar phenomenon because their roots, their context, in their
memories lie on the side of the great trauma that severed the con-
tinuity of the German experience: the Nazi era....The majority of the
Greens were born during 15 years following World War II. The col-
lapse of the “Thousand Year Reich” which fortunately lasted “only”
for twelve, destroyed all the ideologies and values that had guided
the culture, leaving a void and a shocked aftermath. History and tra-
dition were put under the carpet because they could no longer be
shown--not to other countries, not to other people, not to one’s own
children. Adults threw themselves into the task of rebuilding an
industrialized Germany and reflected little on the Holocaust. Their
children grew up in a world without a past, knowing only that their
parents had done something wrong....By the 1960s a youth rebellion
erupted to challenge the older economic-miracle... generation, which
had lost its authority because of its Nazi past. [It originally leaned
toward the left, though after 1969 became more of an individual
change movement with religious overtones or direct religious
‘revivification’ operationalized into Green politics.] The young
562 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n

124. people censured their parents for their cooperation during the Nazi
regime, and they chided them for their obsession with material
accumulation. The [anti-systemic] group...resist[ed] every attempt to
ideologize or moralize or mystify their social context and develop-
ment. They felt betrayed because the continuity of their tradition and
their existence as people have been broken by their parents’ genera-
tion, which had allowed the Third Reich to prevail. The “angry young
Germans,” as they became known, were rebels with a cause.520
After 1969 the [failed] Marxist/student movement splintered into
dozens of communist groups, or K-Gruppen, which can be categori-
zed as either the “dogmatic left” (adhering to the Communist Party
lines of the Soviet Union, China, or Albania) or the “nondogmatic
left” (unaffiliated and less doctrinaire Marxist). Related to the latter
are the Spontis, that is, spontaneous movements, who call for “per-
sonal emancipation” in addition to versions of a traditional Marxist
formula. Urban communes were formed in which property, privacy,
and monogamy were eschewed. Some people joined what Rudi
Dutschke labeled “the march through institutions,” entering social
and political institutions in an attempt to change the system from
within. Some people became impatient and went underground, sur-
facing in the mid-1970s as terrorists, of which the Baader-Meinhof
gang was the most famous--or infamous. However, most people left
the movement to become apolitical, either inside or outside the estab-
lishment, disillusioned with the...failure to support New Left politics
[that] had led to a revival of more orthodox Marxist thinking, as well
as, a detachment among many intellectual currents from politics,
leading to forms of hyper-intellectualism. At the same time other
Mark D. Whitaker 563
-------------------------------------
520
Spretnak, and Capra, Green Politics, 8–10.

125. New Leftists sought a form of political development that would be
more comprehensive and vital than the intellectual dialectical form.
Many of them took part in what was called the “inner migration,”
focusing on personal growth, spiritual work, and group dynamics.
They made trips to India, Africa, and other Third World countries as
well as discovering books from the American counterculture. From
1974 on, the radical-left [secular] avant-garde, found themselves sur-
rounded by--and largely ignored by--the burgeoning citizens-
movements against environmental destruction and a proliferation of
nuclear power plants. In the student protests, the citizens had learned
the possibility of questioning the underpinnings of “Model Ger-
many.” The first time, a broad range of “the Germans” who are
socialized to be obedient and loyal to the dream of the economic
miracle, questioned the government’s plans for more freeways, more
high-rise-oriented urban renewal, more plutonium-producing power
plants, and more pollution of the rivers and the air. No longer can
authorities plan in the dark as public awareness of government mach-
inations grew dramatically through the 1970s, it is true that some
groups in the ecology movement attracted “brown” elements, that is,
reactionary people [though pro-statist and pro-hierarchy] who had
been raised with Hitler’s notion of Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil),
which located sanctity specifically in Germans and Germany. How-
ever, most people in ecological protest movements were apolitical or
politically moderate. They have become materially comfortable
enough to pause and question the ongoing destruction they see all
around them....We’re told by many greens that the ecological con-
cerns being formulated during those years were given a focus by the
widely read Limits to Growth, published by the Club of Rome (Uni-
verse Books, 1974), and later by Ein Planet Wird Geplundert (A
Planet Is Plundered, Fischer Verlag, 1978) by Herbert Gruhl, a con-
servative politician, who subsequently became a founder of the
564 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n

126. Greens. Also popular were Ivan Illich’s [anti-systemic, anti-statist
education] books and his articles on institutions. By the late 1970s,
main Marxist groups had begun to work with the citizens’ move-
ments, or merely because the Marxist women convinced the men that
people’s everyday concerns are as valid as abstract rationalism.521
The major lesson in the extremely heterogeneous citizens’ move-
ments was the importance of tolerance and compromise and the pos-
sibility of unifying diverse perspectives, a process that continues
today within the Greens522
....By the mid-1970s another movement
arose that was related to the student protests, the citizens’ move-
ments, and the “inner migration” phenomenon: the alternative [ec-
onomics] movement. Very much influenced by the counterculture in
the United States and England, these people focus on addressing the
Mark D. Whitaker 565
-------------------------------------
521
The Greens were (and are) additionally committed toward non-gendered and/or pro-feminist
viewpoints, that has a lot of commonality with the social-revolutionary and anti-hierarchical
aspects of many gender equality movements of Early Christianity--or like the Priscillianists,
Waldensians, or Cathars.
522
The current ‘state settlement’ (slow ecological revolutionary co-optive) Greens have tended
increasingly to be forms of statist leftism over the past twenty years, because immediately split
from their ‘alliance’ settlement was a portion of Greens who disagreed on bundling the Green
movement with a singular interpretation of the feminist movement and bundling it with generali-
zed civil rights for immigrants instead of immigration control to protect local autonomy in certain
areas of Germany. This more localist Green party variant split from the Greens movement in 1982
as the Ecological Democratic Party. This branch seems far more interested in formal institutional
change on the local level for decentralization. It became quite influential within its chosen venue
of exclusively the German federated state of Bavaria instead of becoming a mass-Green party of
the federated state of Germany. Another issue of statist leftism in the German Greens is how many
past secular and non-religious leftist revolutionaries have ended up on top of Die Grunen in the
statist federal structure even though these groups were intentionally left out of formative Green
movement congresses at the beginning. There is an equal tendency of the same territorial state
formation elites to co-opt and steer Green conceptions to formalize only larger globalist statist
institutions as well as a Green ‘solution.’ One might argue that this represents the state-elite slow
ecological revolutionary co-option of the Green movement.

127. practical needs of an alternative culture, for example, [material
issues in a religious movement of] appropriate technology,
renewable-resource energy systems, organic agriculture, and holistic
health care. [For the ecological/localism aspects of fast ecological
revolutionary religious movements,]...[t]hey were particularly
inspired by E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If
People Mattered (Harper and Row, 1973) and Ernest Callenbach’s
novel Ecotopia (Bantam Books, 1977). More than 4,000 of them
joined the Self-Help Network, a fund started in Berlin in 1978 to sup-
port “alternative development.” Members paid 14 Deutschmarks
(about $5.60) per month, which resulted in funding of nearly 50,000
DM per month that was distributed by a Board of Directors to various
projects. The alternative movement was roundly attacked during its
early years by the radical left as being “individualistic utopianism,”
but as more and more people saw the need for developing real
alternatives to what they were protesting against, the combination of
political activism [influenced by religious identity change] and
alternative [economic] projects became accepted. The alternative
movement fostered multiple developments with similar intentions,
rejecting forced adherence to any one dogmatic line of thought
[similar to the Radical Reformation Anabaptists, Lollards, Quakers or
Unitarians], a mode of politics they associate with both the Nazis and
the Marxist-student protests. They emphasize the connection between
inner power, or spiritual strength, and political power....By 1978 all
the elements that form the green movement were in place. A small
group of liberal and conservative ecologists, the Action Committee
of Independent Germans...AUD...had been advocating a number of
green positions such as environmental protection and [pacifistic] non-
alignment for West Germany since 1973, when they had published
their first program, based on the American Declaration of Indepen-
dence. August Haussleiter and other leaders of the AUD contacted
566 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n

128. [conservative Christian Democratic Party member] Herbert Gruhl,
author of A Planet Is Plundered, and then a Christian Democrat par-
liamentarian in the Bundestag, urging him to leave the CDU and join
them. Instead, Gruhl decided to form his own group, Green Action
Future. It was [the ex-right wing politician instead of the left wing]
who created the slogan “we are neither left nor right; we are in front.”
During 1978 local groups of ecologists in the states of Lower
Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia, and Schleswig-Holstein ran green
electoral lists for the legislatures, but did not win the 5% of the vote
necessary for representation....A decision was made by Gruhl [from
the ex-conservative wing in Green Action Future] and the [separate
left and right ecologists of the] AUD people to form a Green Associ-
ation in order to run candidates for election to the European Parlia-
ment, the Common Market’s political organization, in June 1979, and
thereby acquire enough money [in a ‘backwards’ sense] to build a
[local German] Green party. (West German law award[ed] parties--
and political associations in local or European elections--3.5 DM
[$1.40] for every vote received.) They contacted two members of the
executive committee of the BBU, the umbrella organization of anti-
nuclear-power and other ecological groups: [religiously motivated]
Petra Kelly and Roland Vogt. Many members of the [anti-systemic]
BBU vociferously opposed the proposal to enter electoral politics
because they feared co-optation and corruption. Rather than
responding with a groundswell of enthusiasm among those citizen
groups for a new party, the grassroots were more or less dragged
into the earliest stage of the Green party by Kelly and Vogt, who
were expelled from their positions for six months [showing the true
“Radical Reformation” and individual change minded views of many
of the BBU and associated ecologists in Germany disliking entering
larger state-facilitative politics]. Hearing of plans for a new party,
two other groups who had been meeting together to discuss pos-
Mark D. Whitaker 567

129. sibilities for alternative politics became interested. One was Action
Third Way, followers of Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual teachings known as
Anthroposophy, the most widely known manifestation of which is the
worldwide network of Waldorf schools [and lesser known is the reli-
giously intergrated agricultural practices of biodynamic
agriculture--a form of organic agriculture]. Anthroposophists seek
“the spiritual in the material,” and their interest in Steiner’s complex
system of organic agriculture inclined them toward the ecology
movement when it arose. Action Third Way was composed mainly of
those...pacifists interested in developing a new social and economic
order that would differ from both communism and capitalism. The
other group was the Free International University (FIU), consisting of
people from the non-dogmatic left. The two organizations wrote to
Gruhl to express interest in joining the new party, but he rejected the
FIU as being too leftist....At a founding convention near Frankfurt in
March 1979 the “Further Political Association (FPA)--The Greens”
was established. The groups mentioned above were invited to send a
total of 500 delegates. Gruhl limited the leftists to 15 delegates [once
more demonstrating the artificiality of calling the origins of the
Greens a ‘left movement’], one of whom was Lukas Beckmann, who
became the general manager of the Green Party. The convention
approved a platform consisting of two major issues: a nuclear-free
Europe (opposition mainly to the European Economic Committee’s
investments in nuclear power plants) and a decentralized “Europe of
the regions.” The FPA-The Greens ran a volunteer-staff, a low-cost
campaign for approximately $120,000. They won an impressive
900,000 votes,...br[inging] them...$1.3 million, although their 3.2%
of the total vote fell short of the 5% necessary for representation.523
568 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
523
Spretnak, and Capra, Green Politics, 15–18.

130. In the next Bundestag election they surprised everyone (even themselves) by
winning over 5%--and with increased gains ever since. Showing a large
degree of anti-systemic identifications, they were the only West German Party
to dislike the idea of German reunification--with these ideas even coming
from an ex-military leader involved in Die Grünen, Gert Bastian:
The Greens [were] probably the only party in West Germany that
[did not] favor a reunified a German state [and did not believe in
legitimate larger “stateness” and were inert on issues of nationalism].
They believe the modern nation-state is inherently dangerous, partic-
ularly now that security is construed within the framework of
nuclearism. As Petra Kelly expressed it, “Nation-states are very
egotistical, chauvinistic, and competitive.” An additional reason to
seek an alternative to reunification was relayed to us by Gert Bastian,
who, with Kelly, is the foremost architect of the Greens’ anti-
militarism proposals and spokesman for withdrawal from NATO.
Unlike the postwar generation of young Germans, who seem sur-
prisingly oblivious of the hard feelings toward Germany that linger in
many people’s minds because of World War II, Bastian knows that
“the wounds are still real.” He continued, “German national unity
brought unhappiness, and was not a success for Germany or Central
Europe or the world at large; it is better that the German-speaking
people organize themselves into several small states. I believe this is
a necessary concession to the other European countries and the
world.” Bastian’s own argument for regionalism is only one com-
ponent of the official Green position....The Greens agree that the bor-
der should be dissolved but for a far different end than that of their
political colleagues: they wish to see the population organized
according to regions....A means of self-defense for the regions
[which sounds exactly like the sentiments and purposes of Mozi]--
Mark D. Whitaker 569

131. and also for the existing nation-states during a transition period
[before they were dismantled]....[This] has been proposed by Bastian
in his book Frieden schaffen! (Create Peace: Thoughts on the Politics
of Security, Kindler Verlag, 1983). The series of actions he recom-
mends are endorsed by the Greens and are being developed further
by many peace researchers and West Germany. First, he would have
West Germany ban nuclear weapons and reduce the level of troops
there. Next, it would withdraw from NATO and establish itself as a
nonaligned country and what he hopes will become a block-free
Europe. It would defend its borders with a relatively small number of
active troops, backed up by a large reserve army, a contemporary
practice that has proved to be efficient in other neutral European
countries [and back in the Chinese warring states with Mozi]....In
developing the concept of [local] social defense, Bastian, Kelly, and
numerous other strategists in the German peace movement were
influenced by the [highly religious and metaphysical] examples of
Gandhi, Thoreau, and Martin Luther King.524 525
In short, given all these qualities, the effects of religion and culture has been
unfairly misspecified as only a contributing factor in state formation,526
when
it more typically has been a contributing factor in state demotion.
Another example of the ‘axial religious change’ seen in many of the
Green leadership is the Green career of Rudolph Bahro:
570 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
524
Spretnak, and Capra, Green Politics, 60–61.
525
Green decentralizationists Bastian and Kelly died in a suspicious “double suicide” before Ger-
man reunification.
526
Gorski, The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern
Europe.

132. Perhaps the most interesting, visionary Green theorist is Rudolf
Bahro, who evolved into post-Marxist politics all the way from the
inner circles of the East German Communist Party. On the 30th
anniversary of the German Democratic Republic, 6th October 1979,
20,000 criminals were released from prison under a general amnesty.
Bahro was included because of public outcry from the West at his
sentencing for writing The Alternative in Eastern Europe. Some
people had discerned “a hidden Green” in his book, and when he
moved to West Germany he was warmly welcomed by the non-
dogmatic leftists who were part of the FPA-The Greens. Only a few
weeks later he was a keynote speaker at the Green Association’s
assembly at Offenbach, where he surprised the radical-left Greens by
stating, “In our own civilization, Christ was incontestably the first
teacher of our ultimate goal, the first teacher of the general eman-
cipation of humanity.” He has continued to surprise and confound the
left--and to inspire the majority of the party--with statements such as:
“The Greens are to Marx and Marxism what Einstein was to Newton
and Newtonian physics--in short, a qualitative transformation of a
worthwhile system whose time, however, is up.” Of the tensions
within the Greens he told us: “Although no one any longer contends
that Marx was correct in a general sense, a big problem with any
Greens is that we are still operating within the remains of Marxism,
legitimizing things in terms of the old tradition.”527
The local defense of a pacifistic “health, ecology/localism, and economics”
of the Green movement has parallels with previous cases of fast ecological
revolution in ‘religious movements.’ For the health aspects of this ‘religious’
movement:
Mark D. Whitaker 571
-------------------------------------
527
Spretnak, and Capra, Green Politics, 25.

133. The starting point of green politics is the recognition that we find
ourselves in a multifaceted, global crisis that touches every aspect of
our lives: our health and livelihood, the quality of our environment
and our social relationships, our economy, technology, our politics--
our very survival on this planet....While worldwide military spending
is more than $1 billion a day, more than 15 million people die of star-
vation annually--32 every minute--most of them children. Developing
countries spend more than three times as much on armaments as on
health care. Thirty-five percent of humanity lacks safe drinking
water, while nearly half of its scientists and engineers are engaged in
the technology of making weapons. [State-facilitating] [e]conomists
are obsessed with building economies based on unlimited growth
[and the same consumptive consolidation purposes of state], while
our finite resources are rapidly dwindling; industrial corporations
transport toxic wastes somewhere else, rather than neutralizing them,
and not caring that in an ecosystem there is no “somewhere else.”
Modern medicine often endangers our health,528
and the Defense
Department itself has become a threat to our national security.529
Early members of Die Grünen were “[v]ery much influenced by the counter-
culture in the United States and England, these people focus on addressing the
practical needs of an alternative culture, for example, appropriate technology,
572 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
528
As an editorial aside, In the United States the choices taken by the medical establishment itself
have become the annual leading cause of death. Some doctors note that when one unpolitically and
undiplomatically compile medical statistics concerning death and treatment (leaving out medical
malpractice), the “proper, accepted procedures” of the U.S. health care industry are a greater killer
annually than cancer or heart disease. (See: Null, Gary, PhD, Carolyn Dean, MD ND, Martin Feld-
man, MD, Debora Rasio, MD, and Dorothy Smith, PhD. 2004. “Modern Health Care System is the
Leading Cause of Death, Part I -VI.” Dr. Joseph Mercola’s “EHealthy News You Can Use,” July
7. Http://www.mercola.com/2004/jul/7/healthcare_death.htm.)
529
Spretnak, and Capra, Green Politics, xxiv.

134. renewable-resource energy systems, organic agriculture, and holistic health
care.”530
Since the mid-1970s, a growing number of alternative projects have
sprung up in West Germany. Today over 10,000 of these projects are
in existence, involving approximately 100,000 people. Alternative
projects are typically carried out by small, self-organized, and self-
determining groups of 5 to 10 members, predominantly 18 years and
[older] young adults. The projects may be craft or repair shops;
restaurants or cafés; newspapers, theaters, or other forms of media; or
social services such as child care or therapeutic groups. They may
form around citizens’ initiatives dealing with environmental or social
issues. In West Berlin 25% of these alternative projects provide the
only source of income for the people involved, while 40% are spare-
time projects carried out without pay, and the rest have mixed struc-
tures....According to the Greens, alternative projects represent grass-
roots responses to the alienation of work in large industries and large
offices, to the evident uselessness and senselessness of large portions
of industrial production, and to the quantitative and qualitative lack
of care in social institutions...”531
The American holistic health movement has spread to West Germany
in recent years via a stream of books, pictures, and workshops. Since
that movement is a leading force in the development of a new under-
standing of human nature, the relationships between people, and our
indebtedness in the surrounding ecosystems, it is not surprising that
the Greens’ Federal Program calls for a system of “ecological medi-
Mark D. Whitaker 573
-------------------------------------
530
Spretnak, and Capra, Green Politics, 15–18.
531
Spretnak, and Capra, Green Politics, 95–6.

135. cine”....[Quoting the Green Federal Program:]...“Ecological medicine
is holistic medicine. The sick person must be treated as being subject
to various environmental conditions. His or her self-conscious and
self-determining personality must be strengthened and placed at the
center of all care. Ecological medicine supports people’s bodily
defense mechanisms. Treatment should not focus on a single organ,
as it often does in the current medical system. The patient must nei-
ther serve as a guinea pig for the pharmaceutical industry nor as a
factor in the cost-benefit analysis for expensive pieces of equipment.
Hence ecological medicine must avoid the over consumption of
drugs, unnecessary surgery, and overly technological mega-
clinics....In addition, alternative health care projects exploring meth-
ods of natural healing and promoting healthy life-styles should be
developed....” The Federal Program of the Greens identifies old-
paradigm thinking as a major part of the problem with health care,
not only the invasive allopathic treatments mentioned above, but also
the unrealistic separation between health problems, environmental
conditions, and “our work, our leisure, our life in general.” They
maintain, “The forces destroying our health and the health of our
environment are the same forces driving the present economic sys-
tem.”532
A Green response to the rising tide of interest in holistic medicine
[historically mostly connected with a particular religious tradition]
would encourage that movement to avoid the pitfall of “victim-
blaming” in analyzing illness and [being] truly holistic [as the] proper
way [to integrate] all the factors that contribute to ill health: not only
inner dynamics, but also environmental factors (such as exposure to
574 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
532
Spretnak, and Capra, Green Politics, 121–2.

136. lead, asbestos, or toxic chemicals), employment conditions (such as
stressful, tedious or demanding tasks) and societal phenomena (such
as competitive situations, impersonal city life, and the threat of
nuclear holocaust).”533
Being an ecologically-attuned, anti-elite, anti-statist, pacifist, decentralization
movement inert to state legitimation calls is typically characteristic of fast
ecological revolutionary movements. Die Grünen exhibits this as much as
other historic cases do:
[T]he concept of a non-military, decentralized Europe of the regions
is the official Green position, in West Germany as well as many other
European countries. The idea of a regionalized Europe has resonated
especially strongly in Belgium which, perhaps more than any other
European country, is an artificial unit composed of three cultural
groups--Dutch-speaking Flemish, French-speaking Walloons, and a
small German minority....For many Belgians their state has no real
[legitimate cultural] significance and the Green concept of ecological
and cultural regionalism seems very natural to them.534
Economic decentralization issues are involved in the ‘religious movements’ of
the fast ecological revolution. In the case of Die Grünen, a short discussion of
their Green perspectives on technologies and materials is in order:
One of the most urgent and complex issues is the control of genetic
engineering. The new biotechnologies are backed in Europe by huge
pharmaceutical and chemical corporations. Among their aims is the
Mark D. Whitaker 575
-------------------------------------
533
Spretnak, and Capra, Green Politics, 215.
534
Spretnak, and Capra, Green Politics, 189.

137. production of high-yield crops grown from seeds that are fertile only
once and hence must be repurchased every year. In 1983 the West
German government spent more than $40 million on biotechnology
research, and corporations spent several hundred million dollars
more. Although the field is dominated by American firms, Europeans
are entering the race to develop and market products synthesized by
“bugs,” that is, biological organisms produced from gene-splicing or
fermentation....The Greens, like many Americans, warn against the
unforeseeable effects of releasing the altered organisms into the
environment, for example, in the food industry, medicine, and other
applications as well as farming. Erika Hickel, a Green par-
liamentarian and professor of the history of science and the history of
pharmacology at the technical University of Braunschweig, intro-
duced discussion of genetic engineering in the Bundestag in fall 1983
and called for the formation of a permanent committee on the subject.
(Like so many other Green proposals, this one was rejected by the
rest of the Bundestag.) She told us of her plans for this area of social
control of technology: “Two steps are needed. The first is an edu-
cated program now to change the consciousness of people and make
them aware of the issues. Later there should be a democratically con-
trolled [economic policy] committee in every community where
genetic engineering is conducted that would be composed of people
working within the field who have doubts about the wisdom of pur-
suing such a path, people in the immediate area who might be
affected, and people who have been involved in ecological education
and activism. The committees would discuss whether the genetic
engineering companies should proceed as they wish, or with some
limitations, or not at all in certain areas. Such citizens’ groups are
being organized now in Braunschweig, Heidelberg, Bielefeld, and
Munich. What I will try to do is bring together the critics from the
ethical, philosophical, and religious side to maintain that for ethical
576 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n

138. reasons we should not do genetic engineering at all, other people who
want genetic engineering outlawed only with humans, and others
who believe there is some middle path between the two positions.
Then we will try to develop a political program and make that a topic
of public discussion. We cannot stop it, of course, because of the
huge corporate interests, but we can bring it into the public arena as a
discussion within the government.” Hickel, who did postdoctoral
work at the University of Wisconsin and has lectured at Yale, told us
that the German citizens’ movements have been very much inspired
by the consumer movement in America and by such groups as Ralph
Nader’s organization. Even so, the successful aspects of the con-
sumer movement are far less ambitious than what the Greens’
theoretical statements in the Federal Program would require [local
decentralized] social control of the huge “high-tech” industries.
When we wondered about the practical possibilities, Michael
responded that the “watchdog” groups must become more political
and that a fundamental reassessment of science and technology must
occur [on the issue of local scale and local political participation that
technology should reflect and institutionalize]. “The whole issue of
the politics of science and technology is not developed yet in the
Greens’ program at all. It is missing. We must introduce into the
scientific field our ecological thinking and our belief in participatory
democracy. That is the key to responsible development in the future.
The problem is that in Germany, as in the United States, we had the
attitude that science is value-free, but it was obvious to me as a
woman--and also clear to me as a historian of science--that science is
not at all value-free. It is a male-oriented endeavor in a system of
male-oriented institutions dominated by male attitudes and male
values [as well as the sense of supply-sided, consumptive consolida-
tion facilitation as state policy and most private policy designs]. Only
with the rise of the ecology and the Green movements did we began
Mark D. Whitaker 577

139. to realize that society must establish, by democratic means, the values
that are to be held in science. Here, as in your country, large tech-
nological corporations do whatever they want because they pretend
they are doing value-free work.”....Although the ecological
worldview promoted by the Greens is clearly supported by modern
science, in particular by the emerging systems theory of life..., the
scientists developing this theory, who are profoundly holistic thinkers
and often deeply spiritual individuals, are still a small minority within
the scientific unity, as are the ecologists within society. The majority
of scientists and scientific institutions cling to the mechanistic and
reductionistic concepts of Cartesian science and do not realize this
framework is no longer adequate to solve social, economic, and tech-
nological problems in a fundamentally interconnected world. That is
why our high technologies are often unecological, inhumane, and
unhealthy....They must be replaced, according to the Greens, by new
forms of [economic] technology that incorporate ecological princi-
ples and are consistent with a new system of values....The Greens
hope that ecologically responsible scientists and engineers will take
an active role in steering research away from the purely [supply-
sided] economic interests of corporations--a problem in American
technology, as well--toward a science in the service of humanity
[optimized for particular local areas or consumers] and nature. They
propose commissions composed of scientists and representatives
from the public that would gather and present information on the con-
sequences of various research projects. The Greens would also like to
see strengthened support for research into ecological processes and
relationships, and they support all efforts to maintain, or re-create,
free scientific and political inquiry within the universities.535
578 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
535
Spretnak, and Capra, Green Politics, 115–20.

140. The first ‘proto-Green’ party in the world was New Zealand’s short-lived and
internally-divided Values Party from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Like
Die Grünen, it called for “human centered technology” in its economic
decentralization platform.536
Although the demand for the necessary shift from hard to soft, that is,
environmentally benign, technologies runs through the entire Eco-
nomic Program, the Greens have not yet been able to clarify their
basic position vis-à-vis technology. One school of thought is quite
[anti-systemic and] hostile to new technologies and demands slowing
down or even blocking new [consolidated] developments. Another
favors new technologies and sees problems, merely in the applica-
tion; some Greens would even support fully automated factories as
long as the machines are taxed and new forms of meaningful work
are developed. A third school, perhaps the most thoughtful, questions
the values underlying various kinds of technology. Müller, who
belongs to that third school of thought, asserts, “The way in which
we develop technology today is not only a question of application;
what we need is a radical restructuring and rethinking of the broad
way in which to practice science and produce technology.”537
The general point should be clear: ecological revolutionary movements should
be understood on their own terms, instead of artificially classified into left and
right, or artificially classed as ideological-only religious change movements.
They are typicaly anti-systemic, religious movements with materially holistic
interactions of health, ecological, and economic implications inherent within
their priorities. This places the environmental sociology of religious move-
Mark D. Whitaker 579
-------------------------------------
536
Spretnak, and Capra, Green Politics, 172–5.
537
Spretnak, and Capra, Green Politics, 94.

141. ments as well as the environmental sociology of state formation (and state
collapse--its cultural and institutional decline into disbelief in elites) in the
forefront of research. Such fast ecological revolutions as the Greens come out
of a context of widespread, felt externalities connected to an elite-state politi-
cal economy developmental drive toward wider consolidation and externalties
of that consolidation that no one believes is legitimate anymore, and they lead
to state and cultural devolution on material issues of concern through religious
mobilization. This becomes exhibited in a plurality of social forms: a com-
bination of anti-systemic, individual ‘drop out’ forms and more localized
political reorientation forms.
The paradox that I have been attempting to convey is that despite the
disembedding and discrediting of previous forms of identity and political
economy that are innately involved in ecological revolutionary contexts
toward more individual and even dissociative metaphysical frameworks of
human community, these human communities are still influenced by particu-
larities of the places and situations in which they live. This has facilitated their
fast ecological revolutionary issues in the first place. This leads to the sense of
environmental proxy politics through religious mobilization. This is typically
seen as a concern with turning (or tuning) a religious-change movement
toward one that incorporates health, ecology/localism, and economics mobi-
lized through a religious movement.
d. Toward a Bioregional State
The bioregional state is the first attempt at proposing “green constitu-
tional engineering” as a route towards sustainability for anywhere in the
world. It is a route toward demoting the repeating, unrepresentative elite-based
state cycles of ecological revolution and its environmental, state, and social
destruction. Detailed institutional descriptions of the bioregional state are
580 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n

142. found in the book Toward A Bioregional State.538
Throughout history, terri-
torial states with their mechanisms of delocalized elite-based, centralized, and
locally-unrepresentative polities demonstrate self-destruction. They have self-
destructive effects that are mostly degradative and ecologically irrational on
the populations, economies, and ecologies they dominate.539
In this way poor
state design has contributed to their own demise. Therefore, it is important to
bring into the political equation what the territorial state has historically
lacked: durable issues of local health, ecological, and economic optimality as a
permanent systemic power within territorial states instead of demoting this
“ecological self-interest” of all people’s of the world. The bioregional state
argues that over 60 additional checks and balances are required to make for-
mal democracy more sustainable and in sync with ecological variegation and
its specific localized human political economic concerns in health, ecological,
and economic externalities. The aim is toward providing more accurate politi-
cal feedback regarding ecological degradation. The bioregional state adapts
the “half complete” humanocentric democratic conceptions that came out of
the European Enlightenment toward a more complete humanocentric and
ecocentric democracy.
The bioregional state aims to remove via additional formal demo-
cratic checks and balances a common ‘mid-layer’ of gatekept democracy and
its corrupt forms of elite gatekeeping on polity and policies that have arguably
become a state-mandated, state-subsidized, crony form of environmental
degradation that has created an ecological tyranny of politically-forced,
limited material choices. This unrepresentative, corrupt developmentalism is
self-destructive of human health, ecological soundness, and economic
sustainability--and even the state’s durability itself.
Mark D. Whitaker 581
-------------------------------------
538
Whitaker, Toward A Bioregional State: A Series of Letters on Political Theory and Formal
Institutional Design in the Era of Sustainability.
539
Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have
Failed, New Edition.

143. First, in terms of what Enlightenment theorists neglected,
different formal institutions of democracy always are involved in dif-
ferent informal political and environmental contexts which have been
left under-theorized as to their interactions with the formal institu-
tional frameworks. These three factors of formal institutions,
informal politics, and environmental contexts should instead be con-
sidered holistically as one piece in the bioregional state, instead of
simply concentrating on a biased approach that only analyzes formal
institutions by themselves. Otherwise, only formally degradation
states which facilitate and underwrite informal politics of environ-
mental degradation can result because existing formal institutions are
based on ignoring and denying these innate interconnections. Second,
following from this, I would argue that on these informal political
and environmental factors that influence all formal states, existing
democracies are innately biased on levels of formal design by
informal political interests toward expanding environmental degrada-
tion and ignoring citizen input from particular geographic areas that
aim to re-prioritize state politics toward more sustainable develop-
mental paths. Formal institutional biases are what are maintaining an
informal politics of environmental degradation. It is a gatekept
arrangement of informal frameworks of power that receive little for-
mal feedback as to their degradation organization itself. Instead, at
present, formal institutions are seen only as something by informal
groups to enhance environmental degradation instead of provide a
feedback against such depredations. This “appropriation” of formal
institutional frameworks--whether state, science, finance, or
consumption--to organize only environmental degradation will keep
occurring unless additional formal checks and balances are intro-
duced to check and balance on the level of informal politics in the
name of geo-specific localities....[U]nless additional checks and
582 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n

144. balances are added that address from the beginning these biased
interactive effects, nothing called democracy can ever be achieved or
sustainable—socially or environmentally. Without the bioregional
state, all that democracy will ever become is a repetition of
aristocratic-royalty states under different symbolic legitimations and
under an ecological tyranny. Environmental degradation as a process
of informal corruption expansion is innately wound around expand-
ing ecological and social tyranny in informal and formal politics as
much as in economics. The issue becomes the formal illegitimacy of
existing democratic institutions when it comes to sustainability
because they are the facilitators for, instead of the feedback mechan-
isms against, this ecological tyranny.540
Removing this ecological tyranny of unsustainable developmentalism
in currently existing formal democracies and states in general is to move
toward the “Ecological Contract,” an update of Rousseau’s humanocentrist
Social Contract, “for understanding how both citizenship is changed and for
understanding how the responsibilities of the democratic state are changed in
an era of sustainability.”541
That the state’s Social Contract implies an
Ecological Contract is being noted increasingly, as in Ecuador’s recent inclu-
sion of the ‘civil rights of the environment’ as a legal person within its latest
constitution. Ideas for an Ecological Contract has been aired in France as well.
The French President Chirac mentioned publicly in 2001 something to the
effect of an Ecological Contract requirement of democratic states, and the
French elites generally demurred. Chirac repeated this call in 2004 at the
opening ceremony of the founding of the Congress of the World Organization
Mark D. Whitaker 583
-------------------------------------
540
Whitaker, Toward A Bioregional State: A Series of Letters on Political Theory and Formal
Institutional Design in the Era of Sustainability, xi, xviii.
541
Whitaker, Toward A Bioregional State: A Series of Letters on Political Theory and Formal
Institutional Design in the Era of Sustainability, xviii.

145. of United Cities and Local Governments.
“To help the State and public authorities take full account of the
ecological aspect, I have called for France to have an Environmental
Charter incorporated into our Constitution. The right to a quality
environment will hence be protected in the same way as the rights of
man and the citizen stated in the declaration of 1789 and the eco-
nomic and social rights laid down in the Preamble to the 1946
Constitution. The Charter was drafted following a major national
public debate and has been submitted to Parliament. It states the place
of Man in his natural environment, without which he would not be
able to survive, and the detrimental consequences of excessive pres-
sure on natural resources. It declares everyone’s right to live in a
balanced environment that is not harmful to their health.”
The bioregional state argues that Chirac’s call for an Ecological
Contract requires a method of ongoing enforcement. Within democratic states
that have hardly had the political wherewithal to implement such arrangements
before, a simple statement about wanting an Ecological Contract is very differ-
ent from actually institutionalizing it. Without remodeling the democratic
state, institutional implementation of an Ecological Contract will likely be a
dead letter. Facilitating more than mere administratively loose and politically
variable regulatory standards for environmental amelioration implies demoting
the formal bases of political corruption. These are arguably based on informal
political-party gatekeeping and its anti-environmentalist biases against the
green supermajorities of the world noted in recent polls that support such a
‘humanocentric green’ sentiment to represent their varied local ecological self-
interest.542
584 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
542
Whitaker, Mark D. 2007. “POLLS: Planet Earth Has Green Majority--in Ungreen States.”

146. In the bioregional state, the Ecological Contract requires facilitating
multiple additional formal democratic institutional checks and balances that
allow for a more competitive party framework to force parties to be more rep-
resentative of the full electorate and to be more competitive for the voter’s
support instead of having a form of elite polity appealing only to a partial
gatekept electorate instead of the full electorate. An Ecological Contract
achieves these additional checks and balances by arranging more explicitly
local-environmental feedback against informal corruption and unsustainable
developmentalism. In formally unsustainable states without an Ecological
Contract, our geographical feedback is still there--though it is registered only
in informal gatekeeping ways into the state in “out of phase” ways and as a
consequence historically builds into fast ecological revolutionary dislocations
of the entire state framework. The bioregional state instead keeps a
geographically-specific expression of politics registering against (or checking
and balancing against) an informally-managed elite state developmentalism
toward consumptive consolidation and environmental degradation.
In the frameworks of the bioregional state supporting the Ecological
Contract, a direct geographic citizenship pressure merges with many addi-
tional checks and balances that build democratic state institutions upon a
geographically specific foundation more synchronized with the state’s
ecological variegation. The bioregional state does this in a way that removes
capacities of pre-existing informal party gatekeeping to impede the Ecological
Contract. Within the bioregional state, elites wanting to maintain power would
be competing for fulfilling the Ecological Contract. This is why the
bioregional state is considered a fulfillment of formal democracy while simul-
taneously providing political feedback toward sustainability. Solving dif-
ficulties of informal elite and informal party gatekeeping in formal democracy
Mark D. Whitaker 585
Toward a Bioregional State: The Blog. Http://biostate.blogspot.com/2007/03/polls-planet-earth-
has-green-majority.html.

147. is the same as solving unsustainable developmental biases maintained through
them.
Historically, original Enlightenment democratic theory along with
Rousseau’s Social Contract overlooked this later essence of democracy: com-
petitive informal factions and parties.
The previous theoretical proposals and institutional designs of the
18th–19th centuries had huge oversights about human-environmental
interactions, and oversights of considerations of how to check and
balance or understand the power of informal political groups. When
the Enlightenment ideas of formal checks and balances were
invented, there was nothing called a party politics in sight to worry
about. After informal parties became the basic mainspring of for-
mally democratic states, a whole different level of informal corrup-
tion dynamics in the formal state, gatekeeping against citizenship
pressure, became involved in practice. This was sold as “natural dem-
ocratic politics.” The lack of experience with what the mounting dif-
ficulties were becoming was ignored in legitimations of the formal
state.543
The bioregional state continues an interest in facilitating competitive
party democracy as much as human health, ecological, and economic security.
The common thread through all the additional checks and balances coalesces
around the demotion of a single factor working against competitive democracy
and environmental amelioration. This single obfuscating factor that the
bioregional state demotes is the unrepresentative, informal elite clientelism
issue of power that destroys both competitive democracy and citizenship
586 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
543
Whitaker, Toward A Bioregional State: A Series of Letters on Political Theory and Formal
Institutional Design in the Era of Sustainability, xvi.

148. developmental feedback toward ecological security. That same issue of
unrepresentative, informal gatekeeping in formal democracy takes the blame
for supporting and expanding ecological and human health damage and for
holding back with strategies of quiescence the widespread public outcry
against it.544
In the bioregional state, the issue of competitive political party
democratic facilitation and ecological security circle back on each other.
The bioregional state argues that sustainability is a completed demo-
cracy, and argues unsustainability is an institutionalized, gatekept, crony,
informal corruption in developmentalism that innately creates an ecological
tyranny over people’s health, ecological soundness, and economic
sustainability and destroys the state’s own capacity to survive.
Sustainability is the demotion of informal elite-preferred gatekeeping
principles that have delimited most of human history to service informal elites
and to expand support and subsidization of environmental degradation through
issues of state organization, science/religion, finance, and consumption instead
of serving or being representative of social relations as a whole across a vari-
ety of geographies and peoples. However, the chosen strategies of slow
ecological revolution in the elite territorial state formation fail to ‘rise and fall’
by itself unless it is intentionally demoted by institutional design and, of
course, I imagine elite choice reacting against widespread fast ecological revo-
lutionary threats to organize in a novel suggested way. Instead of only with-
drawal and decentralization alone (which only perpetuate the process), this
requires a bioregionally-aware state apparatus, i.e., novel ecological checks
and balances on elite informal hegemony to move away from the predictable
self-destructing depredations of past and current process.
What is required is a novel affirmative framework of formal institu-
tions and formal policy arranged to avoid the clientelistic frameworks that lead
Mark D. Whitaker 587
-------------------------------------
544
Gaventa, Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley;
Whitaker, “POLLS: Planet Earth Has Green Majority--in Ungreen States.”

149. people and elites to support environment degradation. A seamless form of
environmental feedback is required. “Perfecting” democratic formal institu-
tions for ecological feedback and developmental feedback is the major lesson
to be learned from history, or one shall get the preceding pattern endlessly.
The broken state breaks the whole society and itself.
It does not have to be this way, though it will likely continue this way
until additional formal interferences and interruptions in informal elite state-
facilitated environmental degradation have been formulated. My book Toward
A Bioregional State545
aims to add these ecological checks and balances on
history’s short-term, unsustainable processes and relations, to yield
state/civilizing durability.
Without formal change, there is little future in the repetitious ecologi-
cal revolutionary process described. However, a future can exist at any
moment if such institutions affirm local ecoregional variations instead of con-
tributing to undermining and destroying them.
588 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n
-------------------------------------
545
Whitaker, Toward A Bioregional State: A Series of Letters on Political Theory and Formal
Institutional Design in the Era of Sustainability.

150. Mark D. Whitaker 589

151. 590 E c o l o g i c a l R e v o l u t i o n

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