In Our Own Words Decolonising East Asian Epistemologies of the Environment

This chapter deliberates on the question of what it means to have an East Asian perspective on environmental sociology in theory and in practice. It examines why the uncritical use of “Western” theories are inadequate to provide explanations that properly reflect the nuances of environmental contestations in the region. Classic frameworks like environmental justice, the New Ecological Paradigm, and Actor‑Network Theory illuminate power imbalances, inequality, epistemic shifts and the agency of non-humans but they misalign with East Asian contexts shaped by post‑colonial politics, state‑led economic development, and post-war nation-building. Racialised environmental injustice is important but this chapter points to other socio-economic and cultural fault lines like class, ethnic groups, clans, kinship ties, etc., that better account for the unequal distribution of environmental risks and benefits. Instead of drawing on elite narratives on environmental issues, this chapter rather presents a dialogue between dominant scholarly frameworks and local epistemologies and everyday actors such as a 4th century B.C. Chinese poet, a Japanese fisherman, a 21st century Chinese farmer and my grandmother. It critiques “scalable sustainability” and instead advances the notion of “patchwork sustainability,” linked to traditions of a shared commons and small‑scale, reciprocal practices. It further questions elite techno‑utopian futures, arguing for rehabilitating the past as a resource for more just futures, and concludes by reflecting on binaries, whose knowledge counts as theory, and the author’s own location in colonial and settler histories.