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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.

Humans have been shaping the natural environment in Japan for a very long time. Starting with the advent of rice cultivation more than 2,000 years ago, virtually every accessible patch of land on these small and crowded islands has had its vegetation cut, cleared, burned, tilled or otherwise transformed. But surprisingly, say those who study the ecology of Japan's traditional rural areas, that may not have been such a bad thing for the archipelago's biological diversity.

Back before humans settled down in villages and learned about agriculture, Japan's wet and mountainous terrain was mostly wooded.

"Japan was a land of trees," says Kazuhiko Maita, director of the Institute for Asian Black Bear Research and Preservation. "But then, when farming communities began to grow rice in paddies they created, they cut the flatland forests."

As population numbers rose, the area of land under cultivation expanded. So began a major ecological transformation. Forest was lost, but in exchange, aquatic and semiaquatic habitats greatly increased, thanks to rice paddies and the networks of reservoirs, springs and waterways that fed them. These provided a rich habitat for a wide variety of amphibians, insects, water plants, crustaceans and fish.

Rice and vegetable cultivation necessitated draft animals such as cows and horses for plowing, and organic matter to enrich the fields — as well as firewood for cooking. These factors set off further transformations of the land surrounding villages.

While natural forest in remote mountain areas was in some cases logged, the most drastic changes took place close to villages, where fuel wood and "green manure" such as weeds, trimmings and fallen leaves were gathered. Sun-tolerant trees such as Red pine, White birch, or Konara oak grew back in the open patches where shade-tolerant climax forest had been cut.

Villagers regularly collected wood and undergrowth from these secondary forests, often coppicing the trees to enable repeated harvesting for firewood or building materials, and by doing so prevented the forests from returning to their original state.

Due to these routine rural practices, over the years concentric rings of sato (village), satoyama (managed woodland) and okuyama (wild forest) came into being.

The brighter, more open type of forest around villages provided habitat for many wildflowers, butterflies, birds and other species not found in the natural climax forests.

Farmers also greatly expanded the area of pasture and seminatural meadow in Japan to provide grass for their livestock and material for thatched roofs. Taken together, this mosaiclike landscape of rice paddies, secondary forest, meadows, ponds and streams is nowadays called satochi-satoyama, or simply satoyama, in Japanese.

Although each individual element of satoyama provides important wildlife habitat, Kazuhiko Takeuchi, a professor of landscape ecology and planning at the University of Tokyo, and coauthor of "Satoyama: The Traditional Rural Landscape of Japan" (University of Tokyo Press, 2001), explains that it is the close proximity of so many different habitats that sets traditional farming areas apart from modern megafarms where single crops are planted as far as the eye can see.

"The biodiversity in satoyama is significant because management has created a mosaic of forests, grasslands, fields, irrigation ponds and other elements, resulting in the diversity of ecosystems. These features cannot be found in intensive agricultural landscapes," says Takeuchi.

Natural patina: Biodiversity flourishes even on the stone wall outside the house of Yasuko Fukuyama in the hamlet of Nigura, where lichens, ferns and succulents make a beautiful living picture. WINIFRED BIRD PHOTO

The idea that such an intensely managed landscape provides key wildlife habitat is hard to swallow for some wilderness-lovers, says the Environment Ministry's Daiji Kawaguchi. He is in charge of the government-sponsored Satoyama Initiative, which has linked Japan and other countries with similar land-use patterns to promote satoyama as a model of sustainable rural living.

"When I talk about the Satoyama Initiative, many people ask, 'Are you trying to say we should change the Amazon into a satoyamalike landscape?'

"That's not the idea. We realize that overexploitation can be a problem. But there are areas that have been touched by people, and since those areas exist, we have to maintain them to preserve their rich biodiversity and continue to receive benefits from them," Kawaguchi explains.

In Japan, the biological importance of such areas is widely accepted. The Environment Ministry estimates that more than half of the plants and animals in Japan's "Red Book" of threatened species live in satoyama areas, among them once-familiar countryside creatures such as medaka (Japanese killfish; Oryzias latipes) and the golden bekko dragonfly (Libellula angelina).

Ironically, just as their environmental importance has been realized, traditional farming villages themselves are becoming an endangered species.

The tiny hamlet of Akagura, in the Kumano mountains of southern Mie Prefecture on the Kii Peninsula 100 km southwest of Nagoya, is one such village on the verge of extinction.

Located about 20 minutes by car inland from the coastal city of Kumano, the village is open and sunny compared to the dark forest that surrounds it. Little houses and fields cover the hills, with mossy stone footpaths winding up the slopes between them. Water is everywhere: seeping from the mountainside, rushing along the valley floor, and flowing into cascading stone basins in front of every house.

But most of the houses are empty now, and most of the fields overgrown. Where rice once grew along the river, tall Japanese cedar trees now stand. All but three residents have moved away or died. What remains is a tiny ghost town slowly dissolving back into wilderness.

Fifty years ago, however, Akagura was a different world...

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Read the rest of this article at the Japan Times here.