gives a fresh urgency to research trajectories around climate and environment in historical research. We use examples from African, Japanese, and medieval European environmental history to chart new ways to mobilise collaborative research into the planetary past in academic and public discussions. Our main points are, first, that COVID-19 has underlined the entanglements between human and planetary life, which historians must better account for. Secondly, it is pertinent to decentre knowledge production. COVID-19 and climate crisis are both global phenomena. Yet patterns of knowledge production that propose 'universal' frameworks and solutions obscure highly unequal power relations. We call for more plural historiesin time, space, and species -to confront the complex crises of our times.

What does it mean to discuss ‘political ecology’ in art and architecture now in the East Asian context? I investigate this through the historiography of Japan, re-examined in the light of present-day practices of art and architecture. It will consider how alternative notions of ecology, art and architecture there became neglected about 100 years ago in the shadow of the society’s hurried western modernization, and how their resurgence now may cast a new light on our contemporary crisis. Concurrently, it will provide a new theoretical reading of ‘socially engaged art’ that derives from buried intellectual currents of Japan, alternative to dominant Euro-American theories.

In the intellectual history of modern Japan, the late 1880s epitomized the Meiji government’s effort to ‘civilize’ through Westernization, driven by the social Darwinian vision of the survival of the fittest. During this period in the United States, the ideas of civilization theory, informed by the very antithesis of the Meiji state’s understanding, surfaced in the life and work of the aspiring young naturalist-botanist Minakata Kumagusu. He imagined a ‘different kind of civilization’ as he re-examined the nature of social evolution in microbes by turning to Indian-and-Chinese-derived knowledge of his home region of Kii, Japan. Buddhism, persecuted by the Meiji regime, most notably enabled his scientific enquiry, while the encyclopedic work of Wakan Sansai Zue (The Illustrated Three Knowledge of Sino-Japan) became another key inspiration. Chinese historiography and Confucian thoughts additionally facilitated his reasoning. What interconnected all of these strands was what the author refers to as ‘queer nature’: the basis for truths whose ontological and experiential qualities resembled the microbe slime mould. Similar to this microbe that captured Kumagusu’s imagination, with queer nature the process of knowing defied the epistemological dichotomies and hierarchies that were fundamental to the social Darwinian theory of evolution. Experientially, it attracted the knower’s attention, induced their desire for intimacy with strange and curious others, and propelled greater intellectual enquiries. The article thus demonstrates a queer theory of intellectual history rooted in modern Japan, whose intellectual lineage derived from India and China instead of the West.