Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

by Jared Diamond

Japan’s long history of scientific forest management is not well known to Europeans and Americans. Instead, professional foresters think of the techniques of forest management widespread today as having begun to develop in German principalities in the 1500s, and having spread from there to much of the rest of Europe in the 1700s and 1800s. As a result, Europe’s total area of forest, after declining steadily ever since the origins of European agriculture 9,000 years ago, has actually been increasing since around 1800. When I first visited Germany in 1959, I was astonished to discover the extent of neatly laid-out forest plantations covering much of the country, because I had thought of Germany as industrialized, populous, and urban. But it turns out that Japan, independently of and simultaneously with Germany, also developed top-down forest management. That too is surprising, because Japan, like Germany, is industrialized, populous, and urban. It has the highest population density of any large First World country, with nearly 1,000 people per square mile of total area, or 5,000 people per square mile of farmland. Despite that high population, almost 80% of Japan’s area consists of sparsely populated forested mountains (Plate 20), while most people and agriculture are crammed into the plains that make up only one-fifth of the country. Those forests are so well protected and managed that their extent is still increasing, even though they are being utilized as valuable sources...