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 Totman raises the critical question of how Japan s steeply mountainous woodland has remained biologically healthy despite centuries of intensive exploitation by a dense human population that has always been dependent on wood and other forest products. Mindful that in global terms this has been a rare outcome, and one that bears directly on Japan s recent experience as an affluent,...