Divided and Managed Air When the Administration Was Carving Up the World Late 1990s to Early 2000s

Divided and Managed Air When the Administration Was Carving Up the World Late 1990s to Early 2000s
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Japan's environmental administration was based on an understanding of the world in pieces. Air is air, water is water, and soil is soil. Each had its own laws, its own department in charge, and its own measurement methods and standard values. It may seem like a rational and organized system, but it is this division that most eloquently illustrates the limitations of the system of the time. Even though the natural environment could not be separated, only the government drew the boundaries.

This structure was an extension of the anti-pollution measures that took shape during the period of rapid economic growth. In order to deal with pollution with relatively clear causes and damage, such as Yokkaichi asthma and Minamata disease, laws were developed for each individual medium. This framework was basically maintained into the 1990s, and even after the enactment of the Basic Environment Law, stove-piping remained strong in the field of operation. It can be said that the administration maintained the formality of responding to problems by dividing them into manageable units.

In reality, however, substances emitted into the atmosphere are deposited and enter the soil, flow with the rain into the water system, and return to human life through the ecosystem. In the early 2000s, the concept of "combined pollution" finally began to be shared in a movement to redefine this obvious fact in a single term.

Around this time, measures to deal with volatile organic compounds emerged as a social issue in Japan, and around 2004, the Air Pollution Control Law was revised and emission controls began to be implemented in earnest. However, regulating only the air does not eliminate pollution that has already entered the soil and water. In the context of fragmented management, it was always difficult to see the whole picture of the problem. The government was not looking at the environment itself, but at a cross-section of the environment delimited by the system.

Looking back from the perspective of today's integrated environmental policy, we can say that the administrative sense of this period was both transitional and inevitable at the same time. The fact that the term "complex pollution" was still new indicates that environmental problems were in the process of moving from quantitative expansion to qualitative complexity. It was a time when the only way to deal with the problem was to divide and manage the world. The very atmosphere that began to realize the limitations of this approach is the historical background of environmental administration in the early 2000s, and it is a point worth rereading.