Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive

by Jared Diamond

At the first stage, the shogun, who directly controlled about a quarter of Japan’s forests, designated a senior magistrate in the finance ministry to be responsible for his forests, and almost all of the 250 daimyo followed suit by each appointing his own forest magistrate for his land. Those magistrates closed off logged lands to permit forest regeneration, issued licenses specifying the peasants’ rights to cut timber or graze animals on government forest land, and banned the practice of burning forests to clear land for shifting cultivation. In those forests controlled not by the shogun or daimyo but by villages, the village headman managed the forest as common property for the use of all villagers, developed rules about the harvesting of forest products, forbade “foreign” peasants of other villages to use his own village’s forest, and hired armed guards to enforce all these rules.