ABSTRACT
This introductory chapter traces the development of the East Asian environment as a vibrant teaching and research field in recent years with conferences organized by the Association for East Asian Environment History (AEAEH) since 2011. The text is aimed to give a brief introduction to the 11 chapters collected in this volume. These chapters cover a wide range of spatial, temporal, and thematic considerations, and they are included respectively in five parts. Part I, Landscape Organization, presents the chapter by J. Donald Hughes with three commentaries by Cameron Muir, Brett L. Walker, and Donald Worster. Part II, Managing the Rivers, consists of three chapters contributed respectively by David Pietz, Renlong Hua, and Ya-wen Ku. Part III, Land Use and Food Production, includes two chapters by David A. Bello and Kaihei Koshio, respectively. Part IV, Development of Eco-cities, consists of three chapters written by Kentauou Inoue, Ts’ui-jung Liu, and Huang-Jyuhn Wang and He-Liang Huang. Part V, Falk Belief and Environment, includes two chapters contributed respectively by Jin Liu and Lei Kang, and Chuanfei Liu. Readers can get more details in the abstract of each chapter.
