• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1894 0

armies at home, correctly anticipated that they were at little risk of a revolt at home or an invasion from overseas. They expected their own Tokugawa family to remain in control of Japan, which in fact it did for 250 years. Hence peace, political stability, and well-justified confidence in their own future encouraged Tokugawa shoguns to invest in and to plan for the long-term future of their domain: in contrast to Maya kings and to Haitian and Rwandan presidents, who could not or cannot expect to be succeeded by their sons or even to fill out their own term in office. Japanese society as a whole was (and still is) relatively homogeneous ethnically and religiously, without the differences destabilizing Rwandan society and possibly also Maya and Anasazi societies. Tokugawa Japan’s isolated location, negligible foreign trade, and renunciation of foreign expansion made it obvious that it had to depend on its own resources and wouldn’t solve its needs by pillaging another country’s resources. By the same token, the shogun’s enforcement of peace within Japan meant that people knew that they couldn’t meet their timber needs by seizing a Japanese neighbor’s timber. Living in a stable society without input of foreign ideas, Japan’s elite and peasants alike expected the future to be like the present, and future problems to have to be solved with present resources.

The usual assumption of Tokugawa well-to-do peasants, and the hope of poorer villagers, were that their land would pass eventually to their own heirs. For that and other reasons, the real control of Japan’s forests fell increasingly into the hands of people with a vested long-term interest in their forest: either because they thus expected or hoped their children would inherit the rights to its use, or because of various long-term lease or contract arrangements. For instance, much village common land became divided into separate leases for individual households, thereby minimizing the tragedies of the common to be discussed in Chapter 14. Other village forests were managed under timber sale agreements drawn up long in advance of logging. The government negotiated long-term contracts on government forest land, dividing eventual timber proceeds with a village or merchant in return for the latter managing the forests. All these political and social factors made it in the interests of the shogun, daimyo, and peasants to manage their forests sustainably. Equally obviously after the Meireki fire, those factors made short-term overexploitation of forests foolish.

Of course, though, people with long-term stakes don’t always act wisely. Often they still prefer short-term goals, and often again they do things that are foolish in both the short term and the long term. That’s what makes biography and history infinitely more complicated and less predictable than the courses of chemical reactions, and that’s why this book doesn’t preach environmental determinism. Leaders who don’t just react passively, who have the courage to anticipate crises or to act early, and who make strong insightful decisions of top-down management really can make a huge difference to their societies. So can similarly courageous, active citizens practicing bottom-up management. The Tokugawa shoguns, and my Montana landowner friends committed to the Teller Wildlife Refuge, exemplify the best of each type of management, in pursuit of their own long-term goals and of the interests of many others.

In thus devoting one chapter to these three success stories of the New Guinea highlands, Tikopia, and Tokugawa Japan, after seven chapters mostly on societies brought down by deforestation and other environmental problems plus a few other success stories (Orkney, Shetland, Faeroes, Iceland), I’m not implying that success stories constitute rare exceptions. Within the last few centuries Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, France, and other western European countries stabilized and then expanded their forested area by top-down measures, as did Japan. Similarly, about 600 years earlier, the largest and most tightly organized