Cb – Bosques

Rc – Diamond – Collapse – Japan – Inventories of their forests

Por Juan Manuel Grijalvo|2021-08-13T18:18:05+02:00octubre 3rd, 2018|

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Both the shogun and the daimyo paid for very detailed inventories of their forests. Just as one example of the managers’ obsessiveness, an inventory of a forest near Karuizawa 80 miles northwest of Edo in 1773 recorded that the forest measured 2.986 square miles in area and contained 4,114 trees, of which 573 were crooked or knotty and 3,541 were good. Of those 4,114 trees, 78 were big conifers (66 of them good) with trunks 24-36 feet long and 6-7 feet in circumference, 293 were medium-sized conifers (253 of them good) 4-5 feet in circumference, 255 good small conifers 6-18 feet long and 1-3 feet in circumference to be harvested in the year 1778, and 1,474 small conifers (1,344 of them good) to harvest in later years. There were also 120 medium-sized ridgeline conifers (104 of them good) 15-18 feet long and 3-4 feet in circumference, 15 small ridgeline conifers 12-24 feet long and 8 inches to 1 foot in circumference to be harvested in 1778, and 320 small ridgeline conifers (241 of them good) to harvest in later years, not to mention 448 oaks (412 of them good) 12-24 feet long and 3-5 1/2 feet in circumference, and 1,126 other trees whose properties were similarly enumerated. Such counting represents an extreme of top-down management that left nothing to the judgment of individual peasants.

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