Böcker av Conrad Totman

This inaugural volume in the Ohio University Press Series in Ecology and History is the paperback edition of Conrad Totman's widely acclaimed study of Japan's environmental policies over the centuries.Professor

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 "e;the green archipelago."e; 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 "e;regenerative forestry"e; 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.

By 1853 Japan had been transformed from a sparsely populated land of nonliterate tribal peoples into an elaborately structured commercial society sustaining massive cities and a array of sophisticated cultural production. This work examines the origins of Japanese civilization and explores in the classical, medieval, and early-modern epochs.

A survey of Japan's early modern period (1568-1868) that blends political, economic, intellectual, literary, and cultural history. It also introduces a fresh ecological perspective, covering natural disasters, resource use, demographics, and river control.