Twenty-first-century ecology lessons from seventeenth-century Japan: climate change, deforestation, and moral regeneration

The article sketches the views on ecology of the seventeenth-century Japanese Confucian scholar Kumazawa Banzan, concentrating on his thinking on forestry and climate change. At the same time his views suggest resonances with our twenty-first century discourse around ecology and moral leadership. Banzan applied Chinese cyclical cosmology and thought on the relation of man to nature to diagnose an ecological crisis in the exploitation of nature in his own world. He diagnosed the threat of imminent climate change and, with that, social and political upheaval. His views on political morality and material consumption were underpinned by a Neo-Confucian emphasis on the primacy of agriculture and concept of man's position that recognized the ontological interdependence of man and nature. Human activity, particularly that of the ruler, impinged on the natural order. Towards the end of his life, he felt impelled to remonstrate against the misgovernment of the Tokugawa regime. He made radical proposals for the restoration of a materially frugal but culturally rich and politically devolved physiocratic socio-political order. Complementing his proposals for institutional reform was a concern with individual self-cultivation that stressed man's ontological position in the natural order and the need for moral regeneration at individual and social levels. The text was subsequently published in Japanese translation (McMullen 2011). I am grateful to Professor Komuro Masamichi and Professor Ikeda Yoshihiro, his colleague in the Faculty of Economics and coordinator of the lecture series, for kind permission to publish this revised version. Many themes merely sketched here are discussed in greater detail in my Banzan biography (McMullen 1999).

Automated summary

Kumazawa Banzan used Chinese cyclical cosmology and thoughts on the relationship between man and nature to diagnose an ecological crisis in his world, particularly in the exploitation of nature. He emphasized the importance of agriculture and the ontological interdependence of man and nature, critiqued political corruption and material consumption, and proposed a restoration of a materially frugal but culturally rich socio-political order.