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Interview with Jeff McNeely, IUCN Chief Scientist, on the importance of Satoyama
and similar landscapes for biodiversity, future agriculture and societal sustainability.

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Courtesy of the United Nations University

Satoyama Illustrated - Narration by David Attenborough

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Japan is searching for new ways to conserve and manage the satoyama environments that have been abandoned by modern urban society. Winifred Bird introduces the Ministry of the Environment's Satoyama Initiative, and homes in on the activities of one remarkably successful NPO, Satoyama Net Ayabe.

by Winifred Bird
Japan Journal
January, 2010

Life's not easy for 3,155 species of plants and animals officially threatened with extinction in Japan. There's urbanization and habitat loss to contend with, invasive species to battle, and illegal collectors to dodge. Not to mention¡Ä the under-utilization of the natural environment?

It may seem counterintuitive, but the abandonment of once-well-managed rural environments poses a serious threat to many plants and animals in Japan. Over hundreds of years, humans created a mosaic of rice fields, meadows, coppice woodlands, and agricultural waterways that now covers approximately forty percent of the Japanese archipelago. These areas are called "satochi-satoyama" or simply "satoyama" in Japanese and are recognized by many experts as both models of sustainable land use and hotspots of biodiversity. Giant waterbugs, grey-faced buzzards, harvest mice and dogtooth violets are just a few of the species that thrive in Japan's secondary nature.

Unfortunately, many of these species are now endangered. As Japan transitioned from an agricultural to an industrial society over the past century (and particularly the past fifty years), satoyama areas have been transformed. Urban sprawl, road-building and timber-planting wiped out some areas, while depopulation and new farming methods led to the abandonment of others.

These changes have had a profound effect not only on the human communities in rural areas but on their biological communities as well: 2007's Third National Biodiversity Strategy of Japan identifies changes in satoyama areas as one the nation's three main "crises of biodiversity," and the Ministry of the Environment estimates that over half of the species on Japan's Red List live in such areas. That's added a new urgency to longstanding efforts by government and citizen groups to revitalize rural Japan.

Age-old farming methods helped to cultivate this country's wealth of plant and animal species. But now, as rural areas empty of people, that rich biodiversity is put at risk

In October 2010, government officials from almost every country in the world will meet in Nagoya for the 10th Conference of Parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP10). The aim of the Convention, which came into effect in 1993, is simple but momentous: To maintain the richness of life on earth.

In Japan, contrary to what may seem logical, much of the richness of its biodiversity flourishes where humans have followed traditional rural lifestyles for thousands of years.

Worldwide, however, biodiversity is anything but flourishing. Though exact extinction rates (and even the total number of species on Earth) are unknown, many scientists suspect that we are now entering a mass-extinction episode. Five such plunges in diversity have occurred in the history of the Earth — but this time it looks like the culprit is us.

How can we avoid causing a catastrophic loss that could take millions of years to recoup? That is the question the 191 parties (counting the European Community members collectively as one) of the Convention on Biodiversity have grappled with at the nine COP meetings since 1993.

Next year's meeting is particularly significant, because 2010 has been set as the target year for "significantly reducing the rate of biodiversity loss." It is also the United Nations' "International Year of Biodiversity."

The situation in Japan, as globally, is urgent. According to the Environment Ministry, nearly a quarter of Japan's mammals and plants, and more than a third of its freshwater, estuarine and mangrove-dwelling fish are threatened.

The "Third National Biodiversity Strategy," set out by the ministry in November 2007, identifies the usual slew of threats to Japan's wild creatures — including overdevelopment, overexploitation, invasive species and chemicals in the environment. But the document also focuses attention on something more unusual. Biodiversity is threatened, it says, not just by the loss of virgin nature but by changes in its satoyama — the intensely managed forests and fields that make up Japan's traditional rural landscape.

Sacred Forestry: The Case of Rajasthan, India
by Deep N. Pandey

Abstract
It is estimated that about 25,000 sacred groves and other sanctified ecosystems, varying in size between 0.1 ha. to 500 ha., are in existence in Rajasthan. This is based on the extrapolation of a study based on the ratio of 1027 recorded groves and number of villages of Rajasthan. This is a preliminary conservative estimate; the actual number may be substantially more than this number. This paper is a review of various studies of sacred landscapes conducted in Rajasthan.

KJ #75: BIODIVERSITY
Japan’s Satoyama and Our Shared Future

"This luminous edition of Kyoto Journal is largely a prayer to and for COP10, the UN ’s 10th Conference of Parties to the Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD) that convenes in Nagoya this October. Since the 2020 biodiversity targets it adopts will touch every ecosystem on earth, it may be our last chance to save our planet’s wildness and our own evolutionary ass. The meditations on biodiversity’s preciousness and peril assembled here are thus meant to inspire all COP10 participants to do the right ethical/ecological/ancestral thing, and create a treaty that really works..."

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By Yoichi Kosukegawa
Kyodo News
Feb 17, 2010

The lifestyle of people in Japan around 200 years ago, which was guided by the principle of consuming less, would help to create a sustainable society in the 21st century, an American expert on Japanese architecture said.

Backward glance: Azby Brown, an associate professor at the Kanazawa Institute of Technology and director at the Future Design Institute, is interviewed at his office in Tokyo on Feb. 2. KYODO PHOTO

Just before Japan opened up to the West for modernization and industrialization, there was an "ideal recycling society" in the late Edo Period, where even night soil was traded as fertilizer, said Azby Brown, an associate professor at Kanazawa Institute of Technology and director of the Future Design Institute in Tokyo.

"We think Edo was a kind of static and nonprogressive era, but in fact it was constant innovation in almost every aspect of life, certainly material, culture and technology, and certainly design," said Brown, who published a book in Japan in October about the way of life in the late Edo Period.

The book, "Just Enough: Lessons in Living Green from Traditional Japan," provides a close look at how people lived at the time using the rural setting of the rice farmer, the downtown setting of an urban carpenter and the elite setting of the urban samurai.