| Budget Amount *help |
¥2,500,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,500,000)
Fiscal Year 2002: ¥700,000 (Direct Cost: ¥700,000)
Fiscal Year 2001: ¥1,800,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,800,000)
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| Research Abstract |
The aim of this project is to study theoretically and empirically the environmental problems and environmental movements in early industrial Germany. Main research results are summarized as follows.
(1) As to research survey, we try to grasp a new trend by considering the debate on "shortage of firewood" in Germany since 1980's, which revises the thesis insisting on its linkage with the shift to fossil fuels. Nowadays the old thesis is already rejected, and instead an alternative theory, which pays much attentions to fundamental socio-economic changes summed up as the "penetration of a new view of nature as an economic resource", becomes more influential. Such a changing attitude reflects a research stream since 1990's, which try to place an environmental problem within a wider historical context and to draw a lesson to present environmental crisis.
(2) We take the struggle against a glass factory project in a small town Bamberg during 1802-1803 as one of the most representative cases in early industrial Germany. We can reconstruct the process of this conflict basing on many kinds of historical sources. This case tells us a complex character of environmental conflict in this era, which cannot be understood under the concept of absolutism or mercantilism (a decision-making by the top-down-style). Though the private and public (business approval) competence are divided clearly in law, they are fluid in practice. So the last judgment results in a middle way, under the equal consideration of claims presented by the both sides.
(3) This situation alters its fundamental character, which gives citizen a room for a strong influence on the environmental decision-making, in the course of high industrialization. In this sense, the first half of 19^<th> century occupies a special phase of the environmental history in Germany.
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