Bücher der Reihe Weyerhaeuser Environmental Boo

"This study of Japanese "forest reclamation" in Korea during the period of Japanese colonial rule (1895-1945) holds the notion of conservation up for scrutiny, examining the roots of Japanese practices and ideas about the Korean landscape as well as the consequences and aftermath of the Japanese approach to "greenification" in Korea. The Japanese program for natural resource management included change in how woodland ownership rights were controlled at both the national and village level as well as efforts to change how Koreans cooked and heated their homes and to inculcate "forest love thought" among the Korean people, and culminated with an extreme increase in extraction during the Second World War. This project offers a compelling environmental approach to Korean history but also expands environmental thinking about Japan into colonized lands and contributes to broader conversations about colonial forestry globally"--

A CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLERestores China's place in forest historyThe disappearance of China's naturally occurring forests is one of the most significant environmental shifts in the country's history, one often blamed on imperial demand for lumber. China's early modern forest history is typically viewed as a centuries-long process of environmental decline, culminating in a nineteenth-century social and ecological crisis. Pushing back against this narrative of deforestation, Ian Miller charts the rise of timber plantations between about 1000 and 1700, when natural forests were replaced with anthropogenic ones. Miller demonstrates that this form of forest management generally rested on private ownership under relatively distant state oversight and taxation. He further draws on in-depth case studies of shipbuilding and imperial logging to argue that this novel landscape was not created through simple extractive pressures, but by attempts to incorporate institutional and ecological complexity into a unified imperial state.Miller uses the emergence of anthropogenic forests in south China to rethink both temporal and spatial frameworks for Chinese history and the nature of Chinese empire. Because dominant European forestry models do not neatly overlap with the non-Western world, China's history is often left out of global conversations about them; Miller's work rectifies this omission and suggests that in some ways, China's forest system may have worked better than the more familiar European institutions.The open access publication of this book was made possible by a grant from the James P. Geiss and Margaret Y. Hsu Foundation.