Since the 1950s, rapid global development has pushed us toward environmental collapse. Our project looks at historical-ecological changes in Eurasia to understand phases of accelerated development (“social-ecological accelerations”) and predict how the current global "Great Acceleration" might unfold. While much research has focused on Europe, we need examples from Eastern Asia, particularly Japan, for a complete understanding of this phenomenon. Our team has met twice in 2024, and in 2025, we plan to create a detailed research plan, including concrete methodologies to apply and areas in Japan to study.

Why do this research?

Our planet has been changing with unprecedented speed since the middle of the 20th c. The pace of change has been much greater than even during the most intensive decades of the Industrial Revolution. Due to the powerful new technologies, and the knowledge of physics and chemistry, the process of the so-called global “Great Acceleration” destabilized in parallel several life-sustaining systems on the planet Earth. We are still in the midst of this process, and it has become critically important to understand its roots and its future course, and to achieve means of steering it in the desired, safe direction.

The Great Acceleration is such a massive challenge, that all scientific disciplines should be mobilized to address it. In our project, we integrate the methodological of humanities and natural sciences that study the past in order to understand the ecological and social dynamics behind the Great Acceleration, and provide evidence-based future scenarios, including possible stabilizing or mitigating interventions. The Great Acceleration of the 20th-21st c. is not the first phase of rapid development in human history. In fact, the long human history and prehistory is punctuated by short intervals of accelerated growth in population numbers and economy, of the emergence of new, transformative political institutions and cultural phenomena. These societal developments always have an ecological dimension and most often lead to profound transformation of the natural environment – similar to the one we are experiencing now on the planetary scale.

Our project team will focus on a few selected locations in Japan and possibly in other parts of East Asia to look closely at past phases of accelerated social-ecological change. We have serious grounds to expect that such phases occurred several times in Japanese history. There is substantial research in Japanese demographic and economic history that suggests centuries-long periods of stability, punctuated by phases of rapid demographic growth: first, in the 6th-7th c. CE (Nara/Heian), this type of dynamics occurred in the Kansai region, with the establishment of the imperial bureaucracy and the associated agrarian intensification; second, in the 14th/15th c. CE (Muromachi), when there is ample evidence for agricultural and demographic boom, both related to the rise in commerce and the political integration of Japan; third, in the age of political unification of the early Tokugawa shogunate (17th c. CE), there occurred a demographic explosion similar to the one in early modern Europe a century earlier and a full economic integration of the archipelago. Fourth, of course, there was the period of accelerated economic and demographic growth in Japan starting with the Meiji revolution and continuing into the 20th c. CE. Our approach in studying these phases of accelerated development will combine humanities-based methodologies such as the study of archaeological remains and historical documents, developed into digital databases, with detailed analysis of the sediments from selected lakes across Japan, focusing on DNA and pollen analysis.

What you want to do in the future

So far, our group met for two workshops in 2024 and refined the initial concept of a comparative project in Japanese-European environmental history. We formulated the detailed concept of the project, its research questions, and we articulated clearly its policy relevance. We also settled on specific methodologies, which we will now develop in detail, planning our future natural and social science research. We will do it in particular at our third European-Japanese workshop planned for May 2025.