Responses to Environmental Challeges in Japan

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Life environmentalism (seikatsu kankyo shugi 生活環境主義), which originally emerged in the 1980s in Japan, is a set of theories and policy approaches to resolve local environmental problems.

Some of its main tenets resemble the claims of contemporary Anglo-American social science studies, and may no longer appear as novel. 

Dai Yamamoto, associate professor of geography and Asian studies, gave a lecture at Syracuse University's Geography and Environment Colloquium, where he demonstrated that we can still learn useful lessons about what it means to build theories and policies by taking historical geographical contexts seriously, as well as about our deep-rooted assumptions about socio-environmental problems and solutions.