The green archipelago : forestry in preindustrial Japan / Conrad Totman.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Totman, Conrad D.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Forests and forestry--Japan.

Forests and forestry.

Forest policy--Japan.

Forest policy.

Japan--History--To 1868.

Japan.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (320 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Berkeley : University of California Press, c1989.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Every foreign traveler in Japan is delighted by the verdant forest-shrouded mountains that thrust skyward from one end of the island chain to the other. The Japanese themselves are conscious of the lush green of their homeland, which they sometimes refer to as "the green archipelago." Yet, based on its fragile geography and centuries of extremely dense human occupation, Japan today should be an impoverished, slum-ridden, peasant society subsisting on a barren, eroded moonscape characterized by bald mountains and debris-strewn lowlands.In fact, as Conrad Totman argues in this pathbreaking work based on prodigious research, this lush verdue is not a monument to nature's benevolence and Japanese aesthetic sensibilities, but the hard-earned result of generations of human toil that have converted the archipelago into one great forest preserve. Indeed, the author shows that until the late 1600s Japan was well on her way to ecological disaster due to exploitative forestry. During the Tokugawa period, however, an extraordinary change took place resulting in a system of "regenerative forestry" that averted the devastation of Japan's forests. The Green Archipelago is the only major Western-language work on this subject and a landmark not only in Japanese history, but in the history of the environment.

Contents:

pt. 1. A millennium of exploitation forestry

pt. 2. The emergence of regenerative forestry in early modern Japan.

Notes:

"A Philip E. Lilienthal book."

Includes bibliographical references (p. 263-290) and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9786612355387

9781282355385

1282355384

9780520908765

0520908767

OCLC:

609850000