Japan

ISBN: 9781848851160 出版年：2014 页码：385 Conrad Totman Bloomsbury Publishing

From the outset, society in Japan hby its environmental context. The lush green mountainous archipelago of today, with its highly productive lowlands, supports a population of more than 127 million people and one of the most advanced economies in the world. How has this come about and at what environmental cost? Conrad Totman, one of the world's foremost scholars on Japanese, here provides a comprehensive and detailed account of the country's environmental history, from its beginnings to the present day. Professor Totman traces the country's development through successive historical phases, as early agricultural society based on non-intensive forms of cultivatimore intensified forms. With each stage came greater utilisation of natural resources but a steady reduction in the richness of the indigenous biosystem. By the late seventeenth century the country wway to ecological disaster.Yet Japan's isolation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries led to an unusually enlightened set of environmental policies, and the system of regenerative forestry brought in during the Tokugawa period prevented certain devastation of the country's forests. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, the country began to go to the opposite extreme, as industrialisation brought wiof unprecedented change. Growth and diversification led to a surge in environmental pollution as it became necessary the country's domestic natural resources to meet the demand for foodstuffs, fossil fuels and the raw materials necessary to an advanced industrial economy. The population was particularly badly affected, aproblems that emerged, especially from the 1960s onwards, provided important test cases not just for Japan but worldwide. What makes the Japanese story particularly instructive is that the country's boundaries are uncommonly clear and the nature, timing, and extent of external influences on its history are unusually identifiable.The Japanese experience, therefore, nimportant insights into the processes of environmental history, it offers important lessons for the wider environmental history of the planet and for our understanding of current global ecological problems. A work of immense erudition and reflecting a lifetime of scholarship, Japan: an Environmental History will be welcomed by all with an interest in environmental history and the historical development of Japan.