Like a Tree. Jean Shinoda Bolen
and by the men hired to do the job. In developing countries, once the most valuable trees are efficiently harvested, the trees that are still standing are likely to be taken down for firewood or charcoal. On seeing the effects of deforestation when there is poverty, it is easy to see what happened on Easter Island: the trees became extinct, due to the deforestation that was done when the island was prosperous and then, later, when anything that could burn was used for fuel. Until one day, there was no tree left standing.
Like Easter Island, there is nowhere to go if we use up what sustains us on planet Earth. If we continue to pollute the water, use up resources, cut down the trees and the rain forests, destroy the ozone layer, turn fertile land into deserts, continue to create larger, more sprawling, more numerous and unmanageable cities—accelerating all of this through wars and the collateral damage that conflict causes to children and women, and trees, Jared Diamond's description of what happened to the people and trees that once inhabited Easter Island foretells what could happen to Earth.
Reforested Islands: Japan and Tikopia
Earth is a solitary island in space, analogous to Easter Island's position in the Pacific Ocean. Just as Easter Island can provide lessons in what not to do, two other island nations provide examples about how to avoid Easter Island's fate: Japan, an archipelago of islands; and Tikopia, one very small island nation. Japanese forests are now so well protected and managed that their extent is still increasing, even though timber is harvested from them. Despite the highest population density of any First World country, almost 80 percent of Japan consists of sparsely populated forested mountains. These are gorgeous green, primeval-appearing forests that cover Japan's mountains from one end of the island chain to the other, a forest mantle that inspires some Japanese to refer to their island nation as “the green archipelago.” Though they appear to be primeval forests, most of Japan's accessible original forests were in fact all cut down by three hundred years ago, a time when the ingredients for a social and ecological catastrophe as happened on Easter Island or could happen on planet Earth were in place.
In The Green Archipelago: Forestry in Preindustrial Japan, author Conrad Totman describes the contrast between what could have been and what is: “Japan today should be an impoverished, slum-ridden, peasant society subsisting on a barren, eroded moonscape characterized by bald mountains and debris-strewn lowlands. Instead, it is a highly industrialized society living in a luxuriantly green realm” (1998, p. 1). Japan's affluence would be impossible without the ecological vitality of the island chain that has been sustained by centuries of effective silviculture. Silviculture, the branch of forestry to do with the development and care of forests, has the same derivation and sound as “sylvan,” which refers to the woods or forest or to what lives there.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Japan was at a crossroad, with ecological disaster within sight. There had been construction booms and deforestation, soil erosion, decreased crops, periodic famines, and an increase in population, especially in urban centers. But instead of following the Easter Island scenario, over the course of the next two centuries Japan gradually achieved a stable population and reforested its land. Japan had the environmental advantages of soil and rainfall and a lack of sheep and goats to graze and destroy young growing green life, elements that supported nature's reforesting on previously logged land, plus the deliberate efforts by a succession of Tokugawa shoguns to preserve and grow trees and limit population growth during an era of peace. Under their leadership, the Japanese people were made aware of having a long-term stake in preserving their own forests.
A second island success story belongs to Tikopia, a really tiny (1.8 square miles or 4.66 square kilometers) and isolated tropical island in the South Pacific, which Jared Diamond cites as a bottom-up success story of forest management, population stability, and sustainability over three hundred years. Approached from the sea, this island appears to be covered by a multistoried rain forest, like those on uninhabited islands. Turns out that the nature-made rain forest is confined to a few patches on the steepest cliffs. The rest of the rain forest is a multistoried orchard, a forest in which every plant and tree is there because it produces edible food or is of use. This is an island with chiefs who serve as overlords over the four clans' lands and canoes, but from observation, the role of a clan chief appears to be as chief steward. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Tikopians made a momentous decision to kill every pig on the island. This is recorded in oral traditions and confirmed archeologically. According to these sources, their ancestors made this decision because the pigs raided and rooted up gardens, and competed with humans for food. I speculate that significance also lies in that this was done, even though pigs were a luxury food for the chiefs.
The tenacity with which men in power do not want to give up their symbols, perquisites, privileges, or the pattern of competitiveness among them, as they strive to build higher structures and bigger houses, drive more expensive and powerful vehicles or acquire nuclear weapons, or flaunt their wealth through conspicuous consumption makes this Tikopian decision highly unusual. Something is very different about the values of this culture and its male leaders. Tikopia is a Giving Tree, but the leaders of the island do not act like the Little Boy, which is so unlike most male leaders, whose “wants” use up all the resources. This has been especially so when the possibility of armed conflict arises between alpha males or warlords, who want more and bigger weapons, to display as well as use. There is feminine wisdom in the Tikopian psyche that took a long view and an overview in the matter of killing all the pigs. They had to have a caretaking attitude toward their resources and toward maintaining a population that could be sustained by resources, and vice versa. Women practice this sort of thing daily, juggling the budget or food available with the mouths to feed. When women have a say about becoming pregnant, they take resources and long-term needs into consideration.
The success of Japan's forest polices arose as a response to an environmental and population crisis brought on by the peace and prosperity of the 1600s. Beginning in 1570, the first two Tokugawa shoguns, Hideyoshi and Ieyasu, and their daimyo began to clear-cut Japan's forests for timber, according to Jared Diamond, “indulging their egos and seeking to impress each other by constructing huge castles and temples” (Collapse, p. 297). Shoguns then ruled Japan, the daimyo were their loyal barons, while the emperor became a symbolic figure. About two hundred castles were built, with towns growing up around them. The construction boom lasted from about 1570 to 1650, slowing down when timber became scarce. All old growth forests were gone by then, except on the steep slopes of inaccessible areas. Soil erosion had increased, the rivers were silted, watersheds disappeared along with the trees, the soil could not hold rainwater, which now ran off and caused floods. There was not enough food for the increased population and there were major famines after 1600. Japan's male power-elite had behaved like the selfish Little Boy in The Giving Tree.
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