Although various approaches from social sciences have been made as to the issue of environmental degradation, sociological studies are very limited so far in Japan in terms of both the scope and the number of the study. The scope of the environmental study from the sociological fields are limited to pathological sociology, citizens' movement, or some system's approaches.
This paper proposes a possibility of new field of environmental study, namely environmental history, which deals with environmental problems from the standpoint of cultural and historical studies of local communities. Here, we define the environmental history as the study on the tradition and knowledge of peoples' everyday life which have been accummulated in the number of generations. In other words, this approach emphasizes the uniqueness of each local community in terms of cultual and historical backgrounds of contemporary environmental issues. We also emphasize the rebellious traits based on uniqueness of local cummunities in modernizing society where unifying power on everyday life is strongly permeating.
This paper also deals with the perceptional background of uniqueness of local communites in terms of meanings of space and localities where peoples' daily experiences are usually sublimated into a collective illusion. This collective illusion sometimes plays an important role in the decision making process at local level.