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 t...
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.
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Furthermore, having evidence of the general location of some logging projects; bearing in mind that hinoki (the species of choice) prefers relatively moist, shaded, sheltered sites; and being mindful that a major secondary objective of lumbering was to open land to cultivation, it seems most probable that conifer logging occurred in dense stands on lowlands, in shallow valleys, and along the lower reaches of hillsides. (查看原文)
Iyanaga Teizō, “Ritsuryōsei teki tochi shoyū,” 33-78, reports that in regulations of the ritsuryō period the common modern Japanese word for forest, hayashi (rin), meant an area hand planted to trees rather than natural woodland. Hayashi was, in other words, a product of human intent. Rather similarly, in medieval England “forest” identified an area of land, of whatever vegetation, that had been explicitly defined as crown property subject to forest law. Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, 325-26 n. 122, discusses the term’s etymology. J. V. Thirgood, Man and the Mediterranean Forest: A History of Resource Depletion, 83 n. 82, suggests that the term “forest” may trace to the medieval Latin phrase foris stare, meaning “keep out,” which was used by overlords when denying local ... (查看原文)
1 有用 人间别久不成悲 2025-05-15 18:14:47 新疆
无论“环保”这个概念是前现代的抑或工业社会产物乃至后现代的时髦话语，其产生的效果都不会相差太大。但如果只是认为日本人“传统上”“热爱自然”就大错特错了，他们爱的是以（优良）自然环境为依托的（人造）生态系统，其中的核心是人以及以人为核心的生存共同体。从这个角度而言，“先污染，后治理”是正确的