The Green Archipelago: Forestry in Pre-Industrial Japan

Preface

Preface More and more our choices on this planet appear to be fire or ice: the fire of nuclear holocaust or the ice of environmental catastrophe . In both choices the heart of the problem is our continued domination by anachronistic attitudes that blind us to an essential truth: the multibillion-year history of life on earth reached a watershed in the twentieth century. The old history of our ecosystem has ended; a new history has begun. Whether it will be the history of a planet whose living face is much like that of former eons, or the history of a planet with a dramatically new face, isyet to be decided. In either case it will be a new history. For billions of years the earth's ecosystem was immune to the depredations of any of its own. External forces could visit disaster upon it. Particular species could grievously wound one another, but none could threaten life as a whole. Because this condition provided each species or symbiotic group with a secure field of action, each could pursue its own immediate interests, utterly indifferent to the general well-being, confident that the system was self-correcting, self-perpetuating, safe from abuse by any of its members. Today that is all changed. Now one species—our own—can ravage the whole extraordinary structure of life on earth. And we seem determined to do it. We direct our highest skills and our most elaborately organized powers to the pursuit of enterprises that will most assuredly accomplish that pathetic end: we devise ever more destructive explosives and equip them with increasingly intricate and unmanageable triggering devices; we create ever more deadly chemicals and spew out more and more poisonous wastes; and we exploit xi ever vaster reaches of the ecosystem and its physical foundation with little serious attention to the broader ramifications of our conduct. While doing these things, we produce endless streams of rhetoric and information that divert our attention from critical matters to secondary and tertiary issues arising from parochial prejudice and short-term, selfish interest. This performance cannot long continue. Technological romantics may see salvation in flight to another planet, but that is not the solution . We humans are the problem: wherever we go, the problem goes with us. To cope with the problem, we must change. And if we change appropriately, there will be no need to flee anywhere. Our home here on earth will be quite sufficient for us. Like it or not, as our planet enters a new era we humans must relinquish a forty-thousand-year legacy of thought and behavior that is no longer adequate. We must now learn more about how the ecosystem works to understand how we properly fit into it. We must learn how to manage ourselves and how to deal with our environment so that it may endure, thereby enabling our own species to endure. Or we shall ruin everything. Historians cannot ignore the implications of our dilemma. Unless we are content to be part of the problem rather than part of the solution, we too must rethink where we stand and what we do. This study constitutes an effort by one historian—a historian who previously spent twenty years happily reconstructing a political history that is of no consequence to any living creature—to look anew at the human record in hopes of saying something worth hearing. This examination of forestry in preindustrial Japan focuses on human interaction with the environment. From an ecologist's perspective the work will surely be disappointing. It employs a homocentric autecological approach rather than a synecological one; that is, instead of looking at the operation of the ecosystem as a whole, with the human component treated as but one of myriad variables , it focuses explicitly on the relationship of humans to environment . It does so in part because the historical record is radically skewed in that direction: preindustrial Japanese, and the presentday historians who study them, have paid great attention to human affairs but little to the rest of the archipelago's history. In addition, this approach has been used because it maximizes common ground xii Preface with nonecological studies and because my own understanding of environmental history is still embryonic. Despite its shortcomings, I hope this inquiry into the record of Japan's preindustrial use of forests will in its own small way help us understand the dynamics of ecological relationships as...