Whitaker_Ecol Rev book 2009_chap1 Korean bits and conclusion_buchblock_v8-8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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-
-------------------------------------
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.

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.

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
Nettl, J. P. 1968. “The State as a Conceptual Variable.” World Politics 20(4), July:559–92.

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,

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
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.

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-

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.
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.

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.

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
-------------------------------------
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.

‘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.

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
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

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:

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-
A Bird’s-Eye View of World History. New York City, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.
21
Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History.

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-

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
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.

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,

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
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.

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.

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
-------------------------------------
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

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.

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’
-------------------------------------
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
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
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-

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.

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-
-------------------------------------
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

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.

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
-------------------------------------
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;

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.)

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.

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.

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

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
-------------------------------------
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-

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:
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.

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.’
-------------------------------------
263
Hall, Jansen, Kanai, and Twitchett, The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume One: Ancient
Japan, 332.

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
-------------------------------------
264
Elias, Norbert. 1998. “Game Models.”. In The Norbert Elias Reader: A Biographical Selection,
Johan Gouldsblom and Stephen Mennell, eds. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers.

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