Tsutsui W.M. A Companion to japanese histоry

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440 MICHAEL LEWIS

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FURTHER READING

An essay limited primarily to English-language works nece ssarily neglects the rich and

varied scholarship on Japanese history written in Japanese. Primary materials, inter-

pretive monographs, and journals abound. These merit use, not just for mining

empirical data, but also to better understand new theoretical approaches in Japanese

scholarship (aka the old ‘‘problem consciousness’’). A case in point is Amino Yoshi-

hiko’s works, of which only a small frac tion have appeared in English or other non-

Japanese languages. Going to Japanese sources imparts a sense of the political context

for contemporary research on the lively issue of center–periphery relations and

broadens the frog-in-the-well perspect ive that results from relying exclusively on

English-language sources.

In Engli sh, addit ional insight into the center–periphe ry model in Japanese history

is provided through archaeology, geography, anthropology, political science, and

other social sc iences. The Fujimura scandal has rocked the world of Japanese archae-

ology, causing a complete reconsideration of Japan’s earliest origins and authentic

original ‘‘centers.’’ Recent works, such as Mark Hudson’s Ruins of Identity: Ethno-

genesis in the Japanese Islands (Honolulu: University of Hawai i Press, 1999), are

instructive as to possible new directions. The English-language works of the geog-

rapher Takeuch i Keiichi – ‘‘The Japanese Imperial Tradition, Western Imperialism

and Modern Japanese Geography,’’ in Anne Godlewska and Neil Smith, eds., Geog-

raphy and Empire (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994) and ‘‘Nationalism and Geography in

Modern Japan, 1880s to 1920s,’’ in David Hooson, ed., Geography and National

Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994) – provide insights into the political implications of

place, space, and empire in discussing the development of geographical science in

Japan. Anthropologists have produced multiple works employing the center and

CENTER AND PERIPHERY 441

periphery model in Japan in which they consider created communities and manufac-

tured local traditions. Jennifer Robertson’s Native and Newcomer: Making and

Remaking a Japanese City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) and

Theodore Bestor’s Neighborhood Tokyo (Stanf ord, Calif.: Stanford University Press,

1989) are among the works that have contributed to this literature. The impact of

local politics on central policies since 1945 has been analyzed in detail in many works,

including Muramatsu Michio, Local Power in the Japanese State (Berkeley: University

of California Press, 1988). Among studies that touch on center–regional relations

and modern interest-based politics, see Gilbert Rozman’s essay ‘‘Backdoor Japan:

The Search for a Way Out via Regionalism and Decentralization,’’ Journal of Japanese

Studies 25:1 (Winter 1999): 3–31.

To return to history, recent works on the idea of the nation in Japan and the

development of mass educational institutions devoted to propagating national iden-

tity bear directly on center–periphery relations. Brian Platt’s Burning and Building:

Schooling and State Formation in Japan, 1750–1890 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 2004) and Mark Lincicome’s Principle, Praxis, and the Politics of

Educational Reform in Meiji Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai i Press, 1995)

consider these issues in works that are the oretically innovative and carefully re-

searched. These recent works, of course, stand on the shoulders of earlier scholarship.

Historiographical essays surveying the history of recent history – such as Carol

Gluck’s ‘‘House of Mirrors: American History-Writing on Japan,’’ in Anthony

Molho and Gordon Wood, eds., Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret

the Past (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), and Christo pher Hill’s ‘‘Na-

tional Histories and World Systems: Writing Japan, France, and the United States,’’ in

Q. Edward Wang and Georg Iggers, eds., Turning Points in Histo riography: A Cross

Cultural Perspective (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002) – provide a

sense of what has come before while suggesting new fields for exploration. Works

critical of the area studies approac h, such as Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian,

eds., Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University

Press, 2002), provide thought-provoking counterpoint.

442 MICHAEL LEWIS

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Modernity, Water, and the

Environment in Japan

Gavan McCormack

Civilization and Water

The quest for a mode of industrial civilization that would be ‘‘sustainable’’ and symbi-

otic with the natural world rather than exploitative becomes in the twenty-first century a

matter of life and death. Humanity cannot, except in the short term, live beyond the

limits of its resources. It cannot for long continue ‘‘future eating,’’ or consuming its

stock, but must lear n to live off the flow, the continuing or renewable surplus.

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Japan deserves attention because it may

constitute a model of such a society. It is sometime s described as ‘‘an eco-society

without peer’’

by contrast with the societies of Europe or North America where

the relationship with nature has tended to be antagonistic and exploitative.

One

major study sugges ts the traditional heritage lives on today, referring to Japan as ‘‘a

highly indust rialized society living in a luxuriantly green realm,’’ adding: ‘‘the people

of Japan have done less to ravage their land and bring ruin upon it than many

other societies past and present that have been favored by a less dense population

and more benign terrain.’’

Some go even further, referring to a ‘‘contest between

the aesthetic sense of Japan and the material power of the West.’’

Japan’s

environmental endowment is both natural and social. Because it escaped the direct

onslaught of the quaternary ice age, it possesses an unusual ecological richness, with

more than 5,000 varieties of higher plant life including 500 species of indigenous

trees (as against 250 for North America and 80 for Western Europe).

Among industrial counties, it is second only to Finland in terms of forest cover (67

percent).

However, it is not so much the mountainous terra in, heavy monsoonal rainfall

(average annual precipitation of 1,720 mm), or wide temperature variation as the

social adaptation to the environment that truly distinguishes Japan. Over the centur-

ies, an intricate network of latticed channels was constructed to filter the humus-rich

waters from the mountains that cover most of the country through terraced hillsides

to the elaborate patchwork of paddy fields on the alluvial flood plains and to the sea.

Underground water bubbled readily to the surface around most human settlements

and was treated with care so as not to pollute or waste it. Irrigation, navigation, and

waterworks steadily extende d the area of cultivation and the density and variety of

A Companion to Japanese History

Edited by William M. Tsutsui

crops. The forest cover broadened and deepened as its essential role in the agricultural

cycle was appreciated.

The work of farming – tending forests, irrigation channels, and paddies – enriched

and replenished the environment. Where other cultures cleared their forests for fuel or

building materials or land to plough, and were forced to steadily expand their ecological

footprint, Japan thrived on the mai ntenance and cultivation of its forests.

Environ-

mental impoverishment occurred in proportion to the degree that the land was not

farmed. Each hectare of well-tended paddy retains 1,000 cubic meters of water.

The

paddies and their water canals constituted in sum a gigantic premodern dam structure,

holding a staggering 8 billion tons of water

and constituting a multifunctional

resource serving not only for rice cultivation but also water conservation (‘‘green

dam’’), flood prevention, landslide prevention, soil erosion prevention, biodegrading

of organic wastes, and improvement of air quality.

The land and environmental

functions of rice paddies remain of incalculable importance and value, worth something

like 12 trillion yen per year, or up to three time s the value of the rice produced.

Few, if any civilizations did what traditional Japan did: flourish while nourishing,

rather than depleting, its resource ba se. Productivity for rice grew about fivefold

in the approximately 1,300 years since rice agriculture was established.

The regular,

monsoonal rainfall, and occasional flooding, enriched and flushed the paddies,

and fertilizer, in the form of ‘‘grass, scrub brush, and leaf fall,’’ was applied inten-

sively.

Repeated cropping was therefore possible. In modern times, the machine

and fossil fuel inp ut introduced a non-sus tainable element, but the process

remained essentially cyclical and eco-sustainable. In contrast to Japan’s virtuous

and sustainable agricultural cycle, European and American ploughed and/or ir rigated

field agriculture tended to progressively impoverish the soil, which unless

artificially replenished soon depleted. ‘‘Western’’ agriculture may be described as ‘‘an

agro-industrial system for the conversion of fossil fuel into food. . . . [F]or each calorie

of food the system harvests, it burns about 2.5 calories of fossil fuel.’’

Japan’s agri cultural society slowly evolved its basic precepts and values, but codifie d

them only during the turbulent seventeenth century. Between approximately 1580 to

1640 resources were drawn down at an unsustainable rate. Countless trees were felled

to construct castle towns, land was reclaimed for agricultural or town building,

and many canals and other large-scale engineering works were undertaken; the

outcome was deforestation, flood, and famine.

To meet that crisis, and to recover

sustainability in a ‘‘closed-circuit,’’ or ‘‘eco-cyclic,’’ system, the water problem

was recognized as paramount.

Chisui (regulation of water) became central to

the science, technology, and philosophy of Edo Japan. In policy terms, it meant

attention to the whole of the water cycle: to the forests and paddies, which served

as dams and dykes by absorbing and holding large volumes of water and releasing

it slow ly; to the holding ponds (yu

suichi), areas deliberately left for retention of

flood waters in or der to protect downstream agriculture areas; to the mid-river forest

belts (bo

birin or kahanrin), designed to block and absorb the immediate forc e

of rising flood waters; and to the levees, usually of stone or earth, constructed

in downstream flood-prone areas. Occasional floods were seen as an acceptable

price to pay for the nutrime nt they brought to the paddies. Forests were divided

into closed, open, and temporarily reserved, the cutting of certain trees was forbid-

den, and in some areas infringement of the regulations was punished under the

444 GAVAN MCCORMACK

uncompromising rule of ki ippon, kubi hitotsu (chop one tree, forfeit one head). The

society practiced what in today’s terminology would be called zero-emission and total

recycling.

Such in broad outline was the design by which Japan’ s ‘‘green archipelago’’

was created and sustained for around two and a half centuries. During the Edo

period (1600–1868) the cultivated area grew by more than two and a half times.

By the year 1700, with around 29 million people, Japan was more populous

than either France (22 million) or Russia (20 million), and in global terms inferior

only to the land empires of China and India.

It flourished at a relatively high

level of equilibrium, balancing population and productivity within a framework of

sustainability.

By the early nineteenth century, the grain productivity of Japanese paddy

was fifteen times greater than that of Europ ean farmland.

Faced with the nine-

teenth-century crisis of European imperialism, however, ‘‘green archipelago’’

Japan chose to adopt not only Western science and technology but Western views

of nature and practices of environmenta l engineering, particularly hydro-engineering.

The Shinto

or Daoist elements in Japanese culture were steam-rolled under a wave

of Confucian abhorrence for nature combined with Western positivism and modern-

ism. The outcome is that the ‘‘green ar chipelago’’ is now no more. Modern

Japan became supremely, perhaps even uniquely, careless of its environment, obsessed

with the achievement of economic growth at all costs, and in the second half of

the twentieth century turned its back on its own history, resolute almost to the

point of obsession in the concreting of its coast and rivers.

The ecological problem

it faces now is both common to contemporary industrial civilization and

yet also distinctive because of Japan’s unique eco-historical circumstances. Though

greenness steadily diminished through what might be called the ‘‘long twentieth

century,’’ that cannot continue indefinitely. Sooner or later, as in the ‘‘premodern’’

future-eating ‘‘short seventeenth century,’’ profligacy will run its course and a

new ‘‘green archipel ago’’ (and indeed a green and sustainable world) will have to

be created. Consumption will again have to be balanced against nurture and replen-

ishment.

Modernizing Water

When the city of Edo/Tokyo became the capital of the bakufu government at the

beginning of the seventeenth century, the Tone River crossed the Kanto

plain and

debouched into the sea by in the vicinity of present day Edo and Ara Rivers,

frequently turning the whole area into a morass of swamp and bog. The present

river, a modest 322 kilometers long, is in fact Japan’s greatest. Especially in its lower

reaches, it is the creation of hundreds of years of intensive civi l engineering, digging

of channels, draining of swamps and wetlands, and the building of dykes, directing

the river eastwards away from the capital. Only when thus secured did the region

begin to flourish.

In the turmoil of political and social change that accompanied the ‘‘opening’’ of

the country in the mid nineteenth century, the traditional eco-system fell into

disrepair and floods began to recur, of considerable severity especially in 1882 and

MODERNITY, WATER, AND THE ENVIRONMENT 445

then again through the 1890s. In 1896, exceptionally severe floods sent a mass of

poisonous copper effluent from the slag dumps left by the Ashio copper mines

pouring over the embankments of the Watarase River (a tributary of the Tone) to

the east of Tokyo. The ‘‘Ashio Copper Mine Incident,’’ which actually extended over

more than a decade, attested to the national priority given to copper, symbol of the

modern and source of national strength, wealth and power, over water and agricul-

ture. The floods happened because the surrounding mountains had lost much of their

water retention capacity when the trees were killed by sulfur-laden winds and rain. So

great was the devastation that recovery after more than 100 years is only partial.

Attention therefore concentrated on ‘‘fixing,’’ then on exploiting, these Tokyo rivers.

From 1872 the Jap anese government had employed a group of Western specialists,

most of them from Holland. Despite the contrasting topography, Dutch irrigation

technology was thought the world’s best. Having studied Japan’s premodern ‘‘low

dyke’’ technology, and been immensely impressed by it, the Dutch expert advice was

that no major change was needed.

However, a ‘‘modernizing’’ faction in the new

Japanese bureaucracy, led by the newly appointed Tokyo Imperial University profes-

sor of civil engineering, argued instead for a ‘‘moder n,’’ technological solution. For

Furuichi Kimitake (1854–1934), recently returned from five years’ study in France,

river policy meant flood control, and modern ‘‘high dyke’’ technology was the

answer.

In adopting the Western way, the Western experts were overruled.

Three ‘‘modern’’ laws for nature control were adopted in 1896: the Rivers Law,

the Forest Law, and the Dyke Law. The emphasis in water administration shifted from

a balance of accommodation and usage, in which flood prevention, transport, irriga-

tion, and forestry were considered as a whole, to a primary, almost exclusive, concern

with flood prevention and control (as chisui came to be redefined). Modernizing

rivers henceforth meant straightening them, containing them within high, continu-

ous dyke walls, and cutting them off from the surrounding countryside, so that their

waters would be channelled as directly as possible from the mountains to the sea. The

flood ponding areas, riverbank woods, and flood plains, rich with the alluvial deposits

of thousands of years, gradually gave way to towns and settlements built closer and

closer to the dykes. Where the ‘‘premodern’’ paradigm had been organic, symbiotic,

and adaptive, the modern one was divisive, dominating, and controlling. The river

and lake came to be seen as a bundle of functions – flood control, town water,

irrigation for agriculture, and (in the twentieth century) electrical power generation

– requiring an appropriate mix of economic, engineering, and agricultural policies.

The ‘‘mode rn’’ changes in the relationship between humanity and natu re, overturn-

ing the wisdom of 2,000 years, constituted a revolution no less far-reaching than the

political changes attendant upon the transition from feudalism to capitalism.

For a time, continuous ‘‘high dyking’’ seemed almost magically effective in stop-

ping the disasters that had occasionally befallen rive rine and coastal Japan. Towns and

cities, industry and agriculture, grew adjacent to the dykes and in the river estuaries.

Determined to overcome the floods that wrought havoc on the Tone River, a ‘‘once

in 100–200 year’’ flood level was calculated at a maximum flow of 3,750 cubic meters

per second at Awabashi (in Saitama prefecture), and work on the ‘‘Great Wall’’ of the

Tone River cont inuous dyke was launched in 1900. In the early decades of

the twentieth century, this project was the biggest engineering works in the world.

Not completed till 1930, it required the moving of 220 million cubic meters of earth,

446 GAVAN MCCORMACK

compared to 180 million in the construction of the Pan ama Canal.

However,

as reliance for flood control shifted to modern technology and the high dyke,

the Edo wisdom of comprehensive care for the environment was gradually forgotten.

The modern calculu s of water failed to take account of the effects of deforestation

in the headwaters or the loss of traditional devices designed to slow and absorb

the flow. Ten years into the Tone project, floods saw the Awabashi flow rise to double

the estimates on which the ‘‘Great Wall’’ had been based (that is, to 7,000

cubic meters per second) and banks and levees were ruptured in many places.

Then in 1935, five years after completion, further, unexp ected floods swept ove r

them. T he ‘‘flood contingency’’ level was reset at 10,000 cubic meters.

When typhoon Kathryn struck in 1947, however, the Awabashi flow reached

17,000 cubic meters, which was unprecedented in the history of Japanese

rivers and nearly five times the maximum that had been calculated half a century

earlier.

During the 1930s and 1940s Japan concentrated on war. Not only along the Tone

River, but throughout Japan, the forests and the defenses against natural disaster were

neglected or recklessly exploited, with the result that for fifteen years after the war’s

end around 1,000 people died each year in floods and disasters.

From the 1950s,

priority shifted back to high dyking and intensive seibi (fixing) of the environment. A

second, much more intensive, wave of modernization rolled over Japan’s rivers and

lakes, powered by earth-moving equipment (especially the bulldozer), cheap oil, and

concrete, and driven by growing prosperity and an unquenchable techno-optimism.

Despite the embrace of liberal and then neo-liberal principles by conservative Japan-

ese governments, centralized planning, as originally adopted from communist (So-

viet) and fascist (Nazi) examples in 1930s Manchukuo, continued to play a key role.

The Comprehensive National Development Plans (Zenso

) of 1962, 1969, 1977,

1985, and 1998 outlined the design for the national infrastructure, and the necessary

resource application was conducted under the Zaito

, or Fiscal Investment and Loan

Program. Under Zaito

, the Ministry of Finance’s Trust Fund Bureau admi nistered

the vast pool of national savings in post office accounts and state pension and

insurance schemes,

investing them as required to pursue their grand design for

the rationalization and industrialization of the archipelago. Capital, technology, and

people were concentrated along the Pacific coast and especially around the conurba-

tions headed by Tokyo, while the resources of nature were mobilized and exploited.

High growth industrialization was accompanied in particular by plans for managing

the storage, transmission, and purification of water for industry, urbanization, hydro-

power, flood control, and irrigation.

Already in the late 1950s the first concrete dams were built, and celebrated as

triumphant symbols of Japan’s recovery. Under the 1961 Water Resources Develop-

ment Promotion Law, comprehensive plans were developed for damming all the

major river systems. One thousand dams (defined as held back by a retaining wall

of higher than 15 meters) were built in the dam heyday between 1956 and 1990.

Japan became the most intensively dammed of countries. Through the high, medium,

and low growth phases of its economy, water policy continued to rest on the

assumption that prod uction and consumption of water would and should increase

steadily, as if it were a simple commodity, and that dam construction should be

pursued to the utmost.

MODERNITY, WATER, AND THE ENVIRONMENT 447

The plans drawn up in the 1960s were predicated on steady population

growth. Water supply (industrial, town, agricultural) would likewise have to grow.

In the ‘‘Long-Term Water Supply and Demand Plan’’ of 1978 and the ‘‘National

Comprehensive Water Resource Plan’’ (‘‘Water Plan 2000’’) of 1983, estimates of

demand were based on the assumption of 4 and 2 percent annual growth in demand

respectively.

Projections beyond that date pointed to a further increase of 80

percent.

The gap between projected and actual demand began to widen from

the early 1970s. Industrial water demand declined from 1973 while town water

demand continued to grow until the end of the 1980s, but at rates well below those

estimated.

Despite the spread of an affluent lifestyle and an accompanying extrava-

gance with water, overall water demand peaked in 1991 and 1992 at

89.4 billion cubic tons, before falling by 2000 to 87 billion.

In the city of

Tokyo and its surrounds, planners insisted demand would triple during the fifteen-

year period from 1985 to 2000. Actually it peaked in the early 1990s and began to

decline as water efficiency and shifts in industrial structure took effect. In gross terms,

over that period consumption rose from a 10 million cubic meters per day maximum

in 1985 to approximately 14 million in 1992 and 1994, but declined to 13

million by 2002. Per capita consumption likewise leveled out at 322 litres per

day.

Tokyo came to enjoy a surplus of around 1.5 million cubic meters of water

per day.

Expenditure on rivers as a proportion of public works, and expenditure on public

works as a proportion of the general budget, altered only slightly between 1975 and

1996, but in an expanding economy this meant that in absolute terms expenditure on

rivers tripled. For the period from 1983 to 2000 the target for expansion of water

supply was fixed at 37 percent,

to provide an additional 60 million cubic meters of

water per day.

After 1989, everything in the economy slowed down: agriculture

continued its steady decline, manufacture accelerated its shift offshore, the popula-

tion began to age rapidly, and the prospect of absolute decline in the coming century

loomed ahead. The predictions of the water men in Tokyo strained credibility.

Though proved wildly inaccurate, they were nev er revised.

However, the dam development imperative was national policy. As such, it was

beyond the scope of political intervention. The bureaucratic development designs,

once adopted, held absolute sway. Accustomed only to graphs of increase, expansion,

and growth, bureaucrats, having completed works to ‘‘proof’’ rivers against the risk

of once-in-30-years flooding, raised their sights to once in 50, once in 100, and once

in 200 years. By the early 1990s, the y still had hundreds more dams at the planning

stage or under construction, which we re likely to cost many trillions of yen eventu-

ally.

In 1987, when most rivers had been engineered to withstand nominal once-in-

100-years force flooding and the major river systems to once-in-200-years level,

works began on a whole new generation of ‘‘super-dykes’’ (or ‘‘super-levees’’ as the

Construction Ministry preferred to call them in English) designed to withstand

floods of even greater, what might be called biblical, force. In the following decade,

7.8 of a planned 800 kilometers were built, mostly in strips of a few hundred meters

here and there. The cost ran to about 50 billion yen per kilometer. Progress, at about

one kilometer a year, seemed slow, but was on schedule.

It was, however, an

unusual schedule, even by Japanese bureaucratic standa rds, for it was to continue

448 GAVAN MCCORMACK

for 1,000 years, with completion anticipated around the year 2987. Not only would it

‘‘flood-proof’’ much of Japan, but it would ‘‘qu ake-proof’’ it too. In the late 1990s a

fresh justification was adopted – as a stimulus for the stag nant national economy.

sei University’s river specialist, Igarashi Takayoshi, howeve r, commented that the

Ministry was simply prioritizing bureaucratic privilege. These were, as he put it,

‘‘works for the sake of works.’’

The public works and water policy was riddled with contradictions. While on

the one hand the state insisted on the need for massive and continuing dam con-

struction, on the other it instructed farmers to take their fields out of production.

The 700,000 hectares of padd y field removed from agricultural production under

this gentan policy between 1966 and 2001 amounted to the demolition of a

‘‘dam’’ of 700 million cubic meter capacity, more than twice the capacity of all

the concrete dams together. The official estimates also tended to belittle the difficul-

ties associated with the mass application of concrete to Japan’s mountainous

landscape, especially the fact that the dams silt up twice as quickly as in the United

States. The possibility of addressing water needs and flood control by alternative

means – including reinforcement of the natural capacities of the forests – was

neglected.

Kawarayu (Yanba Dam)

In the Kanto

plains, with Tokyo at their center, industrialization and urbanization

during the high growth decades from around 1960 were intense. Much river,

coastal, and lakefront land was designated as sites for industrial or other development.

Dykes and flood control systems, hydro-power generation, sewerage, and water

supply issues became prime policy concerns. Under the 1969 ‘‘new’’ Zenso

, the

Kanto

region was transformed by huge projects, among them the New Tokyo

International Airport at Narita, the Tsukuba Research Complex at Tsukuba, and

the Kashima Coastal Industrial Zone. Dams were designed and built up into the

headwaters of the Tone River system. From 1974, Lake Kasumigaura was sealed off

from the sea as the Hitachi River Locks, completed in 1963 as a flood prevention

measure, were permanently closed, and the lake, together with the Tone River, was

assigned the role of ‘‘town water’’ supply for Tokyo. Banks and channels of the lake

were reinforced by concrete, sections of the adjacent wetlands reclaimed, and parts of

the forest cleared for housing and urban development, and the waters were drawn off

through giant pipes for long distance transportation and application to industrial,

agricultural, and town water purposes, in effect turning Japan’s second largest lake

into a dam.

The cry of future need served to justify major plans. Following a series of unusually

dry summers and occasional water restrictions in the late 1980s and 1990s, the

question of water supply in the Tokyo area became very sensitive. However, although

the shortages were bureaucratically manipulated to legitimize dam construction, and

the bureaucrats insisted that dams would have to be constructed at more than thirty

sites deep into tributary rivers of the Tone and Arakawa River systems,

the connec-

tion was forced. Such summer shortages could be addressed without great difficulty

by temporary diversion of water from agriculture (which took over 60 percent of the

MODERNITY, WATER, AND THE ENVIRONMENT 449