Author: Robert Stolz
“Bad Water” is a sophisticated theoretical analysis of Japanese thinkers and activists’ efforts to reintegrate the natural environment into Japan’s social and political thought in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth.
Robert Stolz argues that by forcefully demonstrating the mutual penetration of humans and nature, industrial pollution biologically and politically compromised the autonomous liberal subject underlying the political philosophy of the modernizing Meiji state.
In the following decades, socialism and moral economy were marshalled in the search for new theories of a modern political subject and a social organization adequate to the environmental crisis.
With detailed considerations of several key environmental activists, including Tanaka Shozo, Bad Water is a nuanced account of Japan’s environmental turn, a historical moment when, for the first time, Japanese thinkers and activists experienced nature as alienated from themselves and were forced to rebuild the connections, according to a review on goodreads.com.
