TY - BOOK ID - 77877425 TI - The green archipelago : forestry in preindustrial Japan PY - 1989 SN - 1282355384 9786612355387 0520908767 9780520908765 9781282355385 0520063139 9780520063129 6612355387 PB - Berkeley : University of California Press, DB - UniCat KW - Forest policy - Japan. KW - Forest policy -- Japan -- History. KW - Forests and forestry - Japan. KW - Forests and forestry -- Japan -- History. KW - Japan -- History -- To 1868. KW - Forestry KW - Earth & Environmental Sciences KW - Forests and forestry KW - Forest policy KW - Japan KW - History KW - E-books KW - afforestation. KW - archipelago. KW - central japan. KW - conservation. KW - ecology. KW - ecosystem. KW - edo period. KW - environment. KW - exploitation forestry. KW - forest regulation. KW - forest terrain. KW - forestry. KW - humans and nature. KW - industrialism. KW - industrialized society. KW - japan. KW - kinai basin. KW - land use patterns. KW - land use. KW - medieval japan. KW - national forests. KW - natural world. KW - nature preserve. KW - nature. KW - plantation forestry. KW - preindustrial. KW - private land. KW - regenerative forestry. KW - silviculture. KW - timber depletion. KW - timber. KW - tokugawa. KW - wilderness. UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:77877425 AB - 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. ER -