A World Otherwise

Reviews / Votes

This important book investigates how religious worldviews influence survivors' views of industrial pollution at Minamata, one of Japan's best known cases of methylmercury contamination. Through interviews with members of the group Hongan no kai (Association of the Original Vow) and deep readings of their publications, Miyamoto integrates the voices, thoughts, and actions of those who have suffered because of Japan's industrial growth and social discrimination. Observers familiar with the ongoing disaster at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plants and the resulting radioactive contamination will see many grim parallels here. -- Daniel P. Aldrich, Northeastern University; author of Black Wave, Building Resilience, and Site Fights Yuki Miyamoto illuminates a sophisticated vision of a better world-'a world otherwise'-in compelling, approachable language. Japan's disastrous methylmercury poisoning in Minamata serves as her springboard for arguing that modernity's commitment to autonomous individuality lies behind our destruction of the natural world. Only a new environmental ethic rooted in mutuality and humility can stem the poison tide of a devastated planet. -- Julia Adeney Thomas, University of Notre Dame A World Otherwise illuminates a new environmental ethics that arose out of Japan's most consequential ecopolitical movement. Framed as a study of the group Hongan no kai, Miyamoto's timely work shows how decades of political resistance to corporate and government institutions produced a philosophy that challenges the instrumentalization of environment by imagining 'a world otherwise.' The ontological vision for this 'world otherwise' emphasizes relations among human and more-than-human agents. Miyamoto deftly lays out the decades of twists and turns in thought and action that produced an ontology that situates human selves within assemblages of entities rendered invisible by modern institutions. -- Christine L. Marran, University of Minnesota; author of Ecology Without Culture: Aesthetics for a Toxic World