What emerges is a deeper appreciation of the environmental conflicts that have animated life in Korea. The authors show how natural processes have continually shaped the course of events on the peninsula—how floods, droughts, famines, fires, and pests have inexorably impinged on human affairs—and how different forces have been mobilized by the state to variously, control, extract, modernize, and showcase the Korean landscape. Forces of Nature suggestively reveals Korea's physical landscape to be not so much a passive context to Korea's history, but an active agent in its transformation and reinvention across centuries.
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David Fedman is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Seeds of Control.
Eleana Kim is Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Adopted Territory and Making Peace with Nature.
Albert L. Park is the Bank of America Associate Professor of Pacific Basin Studies at Claremont McKenna College of The Claremont Colleges. He is the author of Building a Heaven on Earth.