Forces of Nature

Bringing together a multidisciplinary conversation about the entanglement of nature and society in the Korean peninsula, Forces of Nature aims to define and develop the field of the Korean environmental humanities. At its core, the volume works to foreground non-human agents that have long been marginalized in Korean studies, placing flora, fauna, mineral deposits, and climatic conditions that have hitherto been confined to footnotes front and center. In the process, the authors blaze new trails through Korea's social and physical landscapes.

What emerges is a deeper appreciation of the environmental conflicts that have animated life in Korea. The authors show how natural processes have continually shaped the course of events on the peninsula—how floods, droughts, famines, fires, and pests have inexorably impinged on human affairs—and how different forces have been mobilized by the state to variously, control, extract, modernize, and showcase the Korean landscape. Forces of Nature suggestively reveals Korea's physical landscape to be not so much a passive context to Korea's history, but an active agent in its transformation and reinvention across centuries.

With support from the Henry Luce Foundation, our goal is to produce all titles in this series both in Open Access, for reasons of global accessibility and equity, as well as in print editions.

David Fedman is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Seeds of Control.

Eleana Kim is Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Adopted Territory and Making Peace with Nature.

Albert L. Park is the Bank of America Associate Professor of Pacific Basin Studies at Claremont McKenna College of The Claremont Colleges. He is the author of Building a Heaven on Earth.

This volume is an invaluable starting place for those looking to expand their understanding of environmental issues to include a non-Western culture and part of the world that, as of yet, has few entries in the environmental humanities corpus.

John P. DiMoia, Seoul National University, coeditor of Engineering Asia:

Forces of Nature is an extremely strong volume whose well-edited essays form a strong, coherent whole—a vision of the Korean peninsula as embedded within the classic questions and concerns of environmental history.

Mary Alice Haddad, Wesleyan University, coeditor of Greening East Asia:

Forces of Nature is beautifully written and covers an important and under-researched topic. An incredibly valuable addition to our understanding of environmental history, environmental politics, and East Asian studies.