Integrating the Primary Industries

The nature-related problems now occurring across Japan are caused by past policies. Bear sightings, mass outbreaks of stink bugs, water shortages: all of them stem from the impoverishment of forest ecosystems.

Clean Air, Clean Water, Clean Food

Since ancient times, the forest has been a sacred place, cherished as the source of “clean air, clean water and clean food.” Many creatures live there and build a flexible, robust homeostasis. That homeostasis acts as a filter, creating a cycle in which air, water, soil, plants and animals are purified one after another.

The dynamics of the mantle, crust, oceans and atmosphere, from Earth’s inner core out to its surface, are interlinked, circulating the energy of the Sun’s heat and light that pours down on Earth. As the blessing of that energy cycle, we living things can breathe clean air, drink clean water and eat clean food, and so sustain our lives.

Water Is Circulating Particles and Waves

Rice paddies need clean fresh water. Where does that water come from? From the mountains: it is water stored in the forests. It does not flow upstream from the sea against the current of the rivers; it travels as groups of tiny water particles, that is, as clouds and mist. It falls as raindrops, soaks into the soil, flows into the groundwater, and returns to the sea by way of the rivers. Water that soaks into the soil is held by the roots of plants.

Broadleaf trees are long-lived, and when these trees with their broad leaves form a forest, dappled sunlight filters through, many birds and insects make their homes there, and a rich ecosystem forms, home to an enormous variety of creatures from small animals to large ones. Such an ecosystem lasts for hundreds of years.

An ecosystem is a mirror-image world made up of an aboveground world and an underground world. In the underground world, invisible to us, roots spread out in every direction, and a great diversity of microorganisms lives in the grains of soil that form its crumb structure. Rainwater that soaks in is held there by surface tension.

The Impact of the Policy of Planting Coniferous Plantations

I do not believe it was done deliberately to destroy that delicate balance, but the policy of creating coniferous plantation forests¹ has fundamentally destroyed Japan’s nature. That is the cause of the ecosystem problems we are seeing now.

The water shortages are due to cutting down broadleaf trees and increasing conifers. Conifers do not produce rich forests. Without rich forests, the mountains cannot store water. If water cannot be stored, the rice paddies cannot be flooded. If the rivers run low, salmon cannot swim upstream. Bears cannot eat enough beechnuts, from the broadleaf beech tree, or salmon. With almost nothing to feed their cubs, mothers and cubs widen their range together, searching for food even at the risk of danger.

Because the mountains are impoverished, constantly hungry bears are in the worst possible mood. It is not hard to imagine that if one runs into a human there, it will bare its fangs to protect its young. Bears are a symbol of the richness of mountain ecosystems. When bears come down to the villages, it is a sign that something has gone wrong in the mountain ecosystem.

From the perspective of the natural world, one-sided planting of conifers is nothing other than an abnormal outbreak of conifers. Every plant has insects that correspond to it. One of the insects that corresponds to conifers is the stink bug. The mass outbreaks of stink bugs are neither seasonal nor cyclical; they are the effect of past policies. Almost without exception, whenever some insect breaks out in huge numbers, including locust plagues such as those of the desert locust, some plant has also proliferated abnormally. And that is usually caused by humans.

The Breakdown of the Green Dams

When the mountains’ capacity to store water falls, the people living in the villages below suffer from water shortages. And so the talk turns to building artificial dams at enormous cost. Store water there, and you can use it whenever you like: this “brilliant idea” was the result of shortsighted thinking. People turned their eyes away from the problems of the mountains and forests, nature’s own dams, and the water shortage seemed to have been solved.

The water for the rice paddies flows down from the mountains. If you want top-quality rice, you need clean spring water from the mountains. That water is something that, as the Japanese saying goes, “fell from the sky and welled up” (futte waita): rain that fell and was stored at the roots of the forest trees. If almost all the rain that falls simply runs off, there is no water to use. It merely returns to the sea, muddying the rivers along with soil that, because of tillage, never formed a crumb structure, and along with fertilizer. Without water, rice cannot be grown.

Water changes form through gas, liquid and crystalline phases and travels endlessly. Cut off the water cycle that runs from the sea to the mountains, to the rivers and back to the sea, and the rain stops falling. Before worrying about the abnormal situation of concrete dams that won’t fill with water, we should have thought carefully about the effects concrete dams have on nature, and repaired the breakdown of the “green dams” that nature built at zero cost and let us use. A mountain shrouded in mist is precisely the natural dam that holds water in abundance; the Japanese word for “abundant,” takusan (沢山), is written with the characters for “marsh” and “mountain.”

Integrating the Primary Industries

Those who work in the primary industries must understand the cycles of nature. The reason is to avoid situations like the ones described above: the many decidedly unwelcome “gifts” brought about by our past wrongdoing toward nature. These negative-feedback gifts arriving one after another for us today are also something we absolutely do not want to pass on to the children who will carry the future.

At Polymath Research, to counteract the negative effects of the policies past generations imposed on nature, we are planning an enterprise that integrates the primary industries, as the mission the present generation must fulfill for Earth. We do not take a political view such as “some foreign country schemed to destroy Japan’s rich forests.”

We believe this is a structural problem brought about by competition and specialization, and that it is what led to the creation of coniferous plantation forests. There are many other problems like this one, but they are patterns produced by the structure. The impoverishment of forest ecosystems is one such pattern, and however many times symptomatic treatment is repeated, a complete cure cannot be expected unless the structure is changed.

The vector pointing the opposite way, the one that resolves this problem, is to adopt a principle of cooperation and act polymathically (versatilely). The direction of industrializing and bloating particular parts of the primary industries promotes the denaturalization of the natural world and makes its many problems worse. We believe that by integrating all the work done by agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry and fisheries and handling it more comprehensively, it becomes possible to manage nature in a way that is necessary and sufficient, joined with the natural economy.

Supernatural Action, Right Now

Broadleaf trees are said to take 20 to 50 years to mature. The longer-lived the broadleaf tree, reaching ages of several hundred years, the longer it takes to grow. While the broadleaf trees grow, the problem of impoverished ecosystems will only accelerate. Earth, its homeostasis weakened, will keep getting warmer and warmer.

On the other hand, there is a rule that growth speeds up in a warm climate. That means the time to maturity might be shortened. Considering, too, the principle of the completeness of life and the principle of diversity, if we humans take supernatural action now, we may be able to contribute to Earth’s natural healing.

Global warming can also be seen as a fever: Earth’s self-cleansing response, the exercise of its natural healing power. Whether the global warming now under way becomes a mass extinction event for life on Earth, including modern humans, or an evolutionary event toward the next species, Homo supranatura (supernatural human)², depends on what we do now.

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Footnotes

1. “The expansive afforestation policy was nothing less than ‘government-made forest destruction’ carried out under the leadership of the Forestry Agency. At the time, the phrase ‘beech subjugation’ was frequently heard among people in the forestry industry. As a result, while plantation forests accounted for only 27% of all forests in 1954, the figure exceeded 44% by 1985. During this period, an estimated 17 million beech trees were ‘subjugated.’ Worldwide, plantation forests make up about 3.5% of total forest area, which shows how rapidly planting was pushed forward in Japan.” (Quoted from The Lineage of Forest Conservation) ↩

2. A term coined by Polymath Research. As of July 2024, no species with this scientific name yet exists. ↩