Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [183]
Tikopia’s chiefs do serve as the overlords of clan lands and canoes, and they redistribute resources. By Polynesian standards, however, Tikopia is among the least stratified chiefdoms with the weakest chiefs. Chiefs and their families produce their own food and dig in their own gardens and orchards, as do commoners. In Firth’s words, “Ultimately the mode of production is inherent in the social tradition, of which the chief is merely the prime agent and interpreter. He and his people share the same values: an ideology of kinship, ritual, and morality reinforced by legend and mythology. The chief is to a considerable extent a custodian of this tradition, but he is not alone in this. His elders, his fellow chiefs, the people of his clan, and even the members of his family are all imbued with the same values, and advise and criticize his actions.” Thus, that role of Tikopian chiefs represents much less top-down management than does the role of the leaders of the remaining society that we shall now discuss.
Our other success story resembles Tikopia in that it too involves a densely populated island society isolated from the outside world, with few economically significant imports, and with a long history of a self-sufficient and sustainable lifestyle. But the resemblance ends there, because this island has a population 100,000 times larger than Tikopia’s, a powerful central government, an industrial First World economy, a highly stratified society presided over by a rich powerful elite, and a big role of top-down initiatives in solving environmental problems. Our case study is of Japan before 1868.
Japan’s long history of scientific forest management is not well known to Europeans and Americans. Instead, professional foresters think of the techniques of forest management widespread today as having begun to develop in German principalities in the 1500s, and having spread from there to much of the rest of Europe in the 1700s and 1800s. As a result, Europe’s total area of forest, after declining steadily ever since the origins of European agriculture 9,000 years ago, has actually been increasing since around 1800. When I first visited Germany in 1959, I was astonished to discover the extent of neatly laid-out forest plantations covering much of the country, because I had thought of Germany as industrialized, populous, and urban.
But it turns out that Japan, independently of and simultaneously with Germany, also developed top-down forest management. That too is surprising, because Japan, like Germany, is industrialized, populous, and urban. It has the highest population density of any large First World country, with nearly 1,000 people per square mile of total area, or 5,000 people per square mile of farmland. Despite that high population, almost 80% of Japan’s area consists of sparsely populated forested mountains (Plate 20), while most people and agriculture are crammed into the plains that make up only one-fifth of the country. Those forests are so well protected and managed that their extent is still increasing, even though they are being utilized as valuable sources of timber. Because of that forest mantle, the Japanese often refer to their island nation as “the green archipelago.” While the mantle superficially resembles a primeval forest, in fact most of Japan’s accessible