Acid Rain Science and Politics in Japan : A History of Knowledge and Action toward Sustainability

Acid Rain Science and Politics in Japan is a pioneering work in environmental and Asian history as well as an in-depth analysis of the influence of science on domestic and international environmental politics.

Kenneth Wilkening's study also illuminates the global struggle to create sustainable societies.

The Meiji Restoration of 1868 ended Japan's era of isolation-created self-sufficiency and sustainability.

The opening of the country to Western ideas and technology not only brought pollution problems associated with industrialisation (including acid rain) but also scientific techniques for understanding and combating them.Wilkening identifies three pollution-related "sustainability crises" in modern Japanese history - copper mining in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which spurred Japan's first acid rain research and policy initiatives, horrendous post-World War II domestic industrial pollution, which resulted in a "hidden" acid rain problem, and the present-day global problem of transboundary pollution, in which Japan is a victim of imported acid rain.

He traces the country's scientific and policy responses to these crises through six distinct periods related t