The Forests Are Growing Poorer

Bears are coming down into human settlements not because their numbers have grown, but because they can no longer find food in the mountains.

To begin with, bears do not reproduce quickly. Among mammals, their numbers increase quite slowly. Asian black bears take about three to five years to reach sexual maturity, usually give birth once every two to three years, and have one or two cubs (occasionally three) per litter. A mother raising cubs does not breed again. And the chance that a cub survives to adulthood is limited. Bears are not r-strategists, whose populations can explode like those of mice; they are K-strategists.

Experts who say that “sightings in human settlements and harm to people have increased because the bear population has grown” are failing at basic logic. Even with abundant food, and even with neglected satoyama (the managed woodlands and farmland bordering villages), the ecology of bears does not allow their population to increase rapidly. It is simply that they are appearing more often. So why are they appearing more often?

Look at the rivers and you can see the state of the mountains

What is needed is not a count of the bear population but the expansion and secure supply of the broadleaf trees (beech, konara oak and others) that provide the nuts bears live on. What we need to grasp is whether bears are being supplied with enough food, that is, the current state of the beech forests and other woodlands. The diagnosis of the cause is fundamentally wrong.

There is a simple way to grasp the state of the mountains: look at the rivers. A river is the very process of rain that fell on the mountains returning to the sea. If there is a problem in the mountains, symptoms appear in the rivers.

Because the mountains have no beech forests, the rivers are drying up. After rain, the water runs muddy. Because the mountains cannot hold water, the rivers flood often. The creatures of the rivers are dwindling too. In “rich mountains” where sweetfish and eels are disappearing and salmon can no longer be caught, how are bears supposed to live? It is inevitable that bears struggling to find food come down from the mountains.

Bears appear because the forests have grown poorer

Until conifers were planted indiscriminately in the expansive afforestation of the Showa era, the mountains were covered with beech and other broadleaf trees. The staple food of bears is beechnuts. Just as humans live mainly on the seeds of a grass called rice, bears have foods they mainly prefer. Bears eat nuts and help broadleaf trees spread and keep them in balance.

Without broadleaf trees, a forest cannot sustain itself, the mountains cannot store water, and they cannot support many living things. When the forests grow poorer, the water decreases, the rivers grow poorer, and the seas suffer barren coasts where the seaweed beds die off (isoyake).

Enriching the mountains is the only true solution

Bear sightings increase in years when acorns fail badly. If so, isn’t “why do acorns fail so badly?” the important question we should be asking? Apart from solving that, there is no proper way to stop bears from appearing in human settlements.

If there is plenty of food in the mountains, bears will not come down from them. If they are not hungry, they will not attack humans. If the mountains are rich, they will probably live quietly deep in the mountains. Would a well-fed bear that has eaten its fill take the risk of attacking a human? Just as humans instinctively find bears frightening, bears find humans frightening too. If they could, they would surely rather not leave the mountains where they can live in peace.

Even if we tidy up the satoyama, and even if we make sure there are no high-calorie resources in human settlements, the problem of bear sightings will not be solved. But it will be solved if we resolve the poverty of the mountains, that is, the problem of food resources deep in the mountains. It will take decades, however, before nut-bearing broadleaf trees begin producing nuts in earnest and reliably. Until then, we should plant the faster-growing nut-bearing species, such as chestnut and hazel¹. Society must accept as common knowledge that restoring rich forests to the mountains takes a long time by human standards.

The Symbiotic Farm, which enriches ecosystems

What is frightening about the public debate over bears is, first of all, the notion of controlling the population of bears, which are wild animals, for human convenience. The decline of agriculture, forestry and fisheries is the result of impoverishing natural ecosystems as industry developed. The Tohoku region is the only one where food self-sufficiency exceeds 100%. That is proof of how rich its mountains are. What kind of future awaits if, in that very Tohoku, we bring a misguided hammer down on the bear, the guardian deity of the mountains? We find ignorant, cruel humans more frightening than bears².

Rather than growing a single crop, we have started running “Symbiotic Farms” that grow the entire ecosystem, in Morioka and Ninohe. We also plan to start working with collaborators to bring beech forests back to the mountains. Few people reflect on the mountains that were ravaged in the Showa era, but our generation, which received yutori education³, will cut the chain of negative cause and effect inherited from the previous generation and, thinking of future children and of our descendants seven generations from now, will spend 50 to 100 years bringing rich beech forests back to the mountains.

---

Footnotes

1. Monocultures must be avoided, however. Just as the one-sided planting of conifers such as Japanese cedar and cypress has led to today’s destruction of ecosystems and degradation of ecosystem services, monoculture impoverishes ecosystems. Polymath Research is carrying out practical research on the “Symbiotic Farm,” which moves away from monoculture and aims for diverse vegetation that enriches ecosystems. ↩

2. More and more people lack “love for nature,” “love for life” and “love for children.” That is what “poverty of the heart” really is. Our hearts have grown poorer in exchange for material wealth. ↩

3. The generation that received yutori (“relaxed”) education does not “read the air” (bow to unspoken social pressure). Air is for acting, and for breathing. ↩