2 Tania Lewis
Third, while many South East Asian nations have embraced elements of late
industrializing capitalism, for many ordinary people their lives continue to be
shaped by regimes of living that are often quite distinct from consumer-citizens
of the Global North. As the chapters in this collection suggest, there is much to be
learned about the potential for alternative and sustainable collective life practices
from examining other pathways or modes of “modernity”.
Another key reason behind this edited collection was the desire to expand the
conversation on South East Asia and environmentalism beyond what are often
one-dimensional depictions of the region. The political and cultural agenda of
“development” in parts of Asia is often evaluated through a Western-centric
moralistic critique of hyper-consumerism and imagined as a rupture with
naturalistic ways of living. At the same time, key Asian cities such as Shanghai
are increasingly depicted as the engine room (and future) of a floundering global
economy but against the backdrop of anxieties in the Global North concerning
the precarious state of the world’s ecological resources. In debates around climate
change, in particular, reports on Asia increasingly frame it as a space of aggressive
development, rapidly growing urbanization, and dwindling natural resources.
Thus, where once South East Asia was discussed in terms of a trajectory of
necessary growth and development, the region is increasingly the projected site
of intensifying anxieties within the Global North about population growth, over-
consumption, and the increasingly visible externalized costs of capitalism. From
nongovernmental organization (NGO) reports to press coverage, we are told that
60 per cent of the world’s population now lives in Asia and are moving toward the
urbanized, carbon-intense lifestyles that characterize the high per capita polluters
of the world, such as the United States and Australia. China in particular is a
source of major apprehension here, given that 800 million of its population still
live in low-impact rural lifestyles. Reports suggest that if rural Chinese adopt the
high consumption practices of urban dwellers, the global consequences will be
catastrophic, with flooding likely to impact major cities from Shanghai to Miami
and New York by 2050 (May 2011).
While these troubling predictions are underpinned by very real concerns about
our global future on this planet, they gloss over the complex and uneven nature of
Asian development on the ground, generalizing across a region that is extremely
diverse. Furthermore, while this kind of discourse is often framed in terms of a
shared collective experience or “cosmopolitan perspective” as Beck (2015) has
framed it—an interconnectedness between all nation-states and peoples—there
is a tendency here to project Northern anxieties regarding global environmental
impacts onto the Global South. As Brand and Wissen argue, it is these same
nations who have historically had the role of carrying the global environmental
burden for Western consumers, as providers of resources and labor for Northern
industrialism and the ecosystems able to absorb the emissions produced by
Northern lifestyles (2013, p. 700).
Anxieties about a rapidly developing Asia then are underpinned by a highly
uneven ecological geo-politics (Barry 2012). While notions of a global eco-
consciousness or concepts such as the anthropocene position us all as belonging to