Page 27 - Changing Living Spaces

An Introduction to the Living Spaces Concept

tonishment and sometimes to their dismay – what power, what econom-
ic power, what power over their own peoples had come into their hands’
(Hicks 1969, 162). Regional administrative power did not develop suffi-
ciently, and in other developed countries local and regional-level admin-
istrative power eventually came under the control of overwhelming for-
eign pressure on national governments.
I think this is a question of environmental decision-making: is it an in-
dividual, a company, a government, or an international organization, in-
cluding local governments? The mechanism of decision-making and its
impact on the environment should be critically different between corpo-
rate and government agencies and smallholder economies that are strug-
gling to improve and conquer the environment in front of them. It has
never been recognized that for the actors who determine these environ-
ments, the Living Spaces are different from each other. The Living Spaces
of a nation and the Living Spaces of an individual cannot be identical. In
the study of environmental history, these issues, which have already been
discussed in a fragmented manner, have never been systematically dis-
cussed in conjunction with economic history research. This hypothesis
needs historical evidence in the future.
Au total, les problèmes d’environnement, plus que toutes les autres
contradictions des sociétés économiquement développées, renvoient
à une réflexion sur l’autogestion. [Attali and Guillaume 1974, 197]
[All in all, environmental problems, more than all the other contra-
dictions of economically developed societies, refer to a reflection on
self-management.]

Acknowledgements
I would like to take this opportunity to thank the members of the
Association for East Asian Environmental History (http://www.aeaeh.
org): when the first World Congress of Environmental History was held
in August 2009, there was still no organization in Asia or East Asia to di-
scuss environmental history. Since then, this congress was the starting
point for AeAeH to organize biennial congresses on environmental his-
tory in East Asia from 2011 onwards, and we have learnt a lot from them.
The author himself, as one of the presidents of the association, organized
the third international conference on environmental history research
in Takamatsu, Japan, in October 2015. Since then, further congresses
have been built up, and next year we are preparing for the launch of an
Asian Association for Environmental History. A new research group, The

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