Those are the ways in which Tikopians assure themselves of a sustainable food supply. The other prerequisite for sustainable occupation of Tikopia is a stable, non-increasing population. During Firth’s visit in 1928-29 he counted the island’s population to be 1,278 people. From 1929 to 1952 the population increased at 1.4% per year, which is a modest rate of increase that would surely have been exceeded during the generations following the first settlement of Tikopia around 3,000 years ago. Even supposing, however, that Tikopia’s initial population growth rate was also only 1.4% per year, and that the initial settlement had been by a canoe holding 25 people, then the population of the 1.8-square-mile island would have built up to the absurd total of 25 million people after a thousand years, or to 25 million trillion people by 1929. Obviously that’s impossible: the population could not have continued to grow at that rate, because it would already have reached its modern level of 1,278 people within only 283 years after human arrival. How was Tikopia’s population held constant after 283 years?
Firth learned of six methods of population regulation still operating on the island in 1929, and a seventh that had operated in the past. Most readers of this book will also have practiced one or more of those methods, such as contraception or abortion, and our decisions to do so may have been implicitly influenced by considerations of human population pressure or family resources. On Tikopia, however, people are explicit in saying that their motive for contraception and other regulatory behaviors is to prevent the island from becoming overpopulated, and to prevent the family from having more children than the family’s land could support. For instance, Tikopia chiefs each year carry out a ritual in which they preach an ideal of Zero Population Growth for the island, unaware that an organization founded with that name (but subsequently renamed) and devoted to that goal has also arisen in the First World. Tikopia parents feel that it is wrong for them to continue to give birth to children of their own once their eldest son has reached marriageable age, or to have more children than a number variously given as four children, or one boy and a girl, or one boy and one or two girls.
Of traditional Tikopia’s seven methods of population regulation, the simplest was contraception by coitus interruptus. Another method was abortion, induced by pressing on the belly, or placing hot stones on the belly, of a pregnant woman near term. Alternatively, infanticide was carried out by burying alive, smothering, or turning a newborn infant on its face. Younger sons of families poor in land remained celibate, and many among the resulting surplus of marriageable women also remained celibate rather than enter into polygamous marriages. (Celibacy on Tikopia means not having children, and does not preclude having sex by coitus interruptus and then resorting to abortion or infanticide if necessary.) Still another method was suicide, of which there were seven known cases by hanging (six men and one woman) and 12 (all of them women) by swimming out to sea between 1929 and 1952. Much commoner than such explicit suicide was “virtual suicide” by setting out on dangerous overseas voyages, which claimed the lives of 81 men and three women between 1929 and 1952. Such sea voyaging accounted for more than one-third of all deaths of young bachelors. Whether sea voyaging constituted virtual suicide or just reckless behavior on the part of young men undoubtedly varied from case to case, but the bleak prospects of younger sons in poor families on a crowded island during a famine were probably often a consideration. For instance, Firth learned in 1929 that a Tikopian man named Pa Nukumara, the younger brother of a chief still alive then, had gone to sea with two of his own sons during a severe drought and famine, with the express intent of dying quickly, instead of slowly starving to death on shore.
The seventh method of population regulation was not operating during Firth’s visits but was reported to him by oral traditions. Sometime in the 1600s or early 1700s, to judge by accounts of the number of elapsed generations since the events, Tikopia’s former large saltwater bay became converted into the current brackish lake by the closing-off of a sandbar across its mouth. That resulted in the death of the bay’s former rich shellfish beds and a drastic decrease in its fish populations, hence in starvation for the Nga Ariki clan living on that part of Tikopia at that time. The clan reacted to acquire more land and coastline for itself by attacking and exterminating the Nga Ravenga clan. A generation or two later, the Nga Ariki also attacked the remaining Nga Faea clan, who fled the island in canoes (thereby committing virtual suicide) rather than await their deaths by murder on land. These oral memories are confirmed by archaeological evidence of the bay’s closing and of the village sites.
Most of these seven methods for keeping Tikopia’s population constant have disappeared or declined under European influence during the 20th century. The British colonial government of the Solomons forbade sea voyaging and warfare, while Christian missions preached against abortion, infanticide, and suicide. As a result, Tikopia’s population grew from its 1929 level of 1,278 people to 1,753 people by 1952, when two destructive cyclones within the span of 13 months destroyed half of Tikopia’s crops and caused widespread famine. The British Solomon Islands’ colonial government responded to the immediate crisis by sending food, and then dealt with the long-term problem by permitting or encouraging Tikopians to relieve their overpopulation by resettling onto less populated Solomon islands. Today, Tikopia’s chiefs limit the number of Tikopians who are permitted to reside on their island to 1,115 people, close to the population size that was traditionally maintained by infanticide, suicide, and other now-unacceptable means.
How and when did Tikopia’s remarkable sustainable economy arise? Archaeological excavations by Patrick Kirch and Douglas Yen show that it was not invented all at once but developed over the course of nearly 3,000 years. The island was first settled around 900 B.C. by Lapita people ancestral to the modern Polynesians, as described in Chapter 2. Those first settlers made a heavy impact on the island’s environment. Remains of charcoal at archaeological sites show that they cleared forest by burning it. They feasted on breeding colonies of seabirds, land birds, and fruit bats, and on fish, shellfish, and sea turtles. Within a thousand years, the Tikopian populations of five bird species (Abbott’s Booby, Audubon’s Shearwater, Banded Rail, Common Megapode, and Sooty Tern) were extirpated, to be followed later by the Red-footed Booby. Also in that first millennium, archaeological middens reveal the virtual elimination of fruit bats, a three-fold decrease in fish and bird bones, a 10-fold decrease in shellfish, and a decrease in the maximum size of giant clams and turban shells (presumably because people were preferentially harvesting the largest individuals).
Around 100 B.C., the economy began to change as those initial food sources disappeared or were depleted. Over the course of the next thousand years, charcoal accumulation ceased, and remains of native almonds (Canarium harveyi) appeared, in archaeological sites, indicating that Tikopians were abandoning slash-and-burn agriculture in favor of maintaining orchards with nut trees. To compensate for the drastic declines in birds and seafood, people shifted to intensive husbandry of pigs, which came to account for nearly half of all protein consumed. An abrupt change in economy and artifacts around A.D. 1200 marks the arrival of Polynesians from the east, whose distinctive cultural features had been forming in the area of Fiji, Samoa, and Tonga among descendants of the Lapita migration that had initially also colonized Tikopia. It was those Polynesians who brought with them the technique of fermenting and storing breadfruit in pits.
A momentous decision taken consciously around A.D. 1600, and recorded in oral traditions but also attested archaeologically, was the killing of every pig on the island, to be replaced as protein sources by an increase in consumption of fish, shellfish, and turtles. According to Tikopians’ accounts, their ancestors had made that decision because pigs raided and rooted up gardens, competed with humans for food, were an inefficient means to feed humans (it takes about 10 pounds of vegetables edible to humans to produce just one pound of pork), and had become a luxury food for the chiefs. With that elimination of pigs, and th
e transformation of Tikopia’s bay into a brackish lake around the same time, Tikopia’s economy achieved essentially the form in which it existed when Europeans first began to take up residence in the 1800s. Thus, until colonial government and Christian mission influence became important in the 20th century, Tikopians had been virtually self-supporting on their micromanaged remote little speck of land for three millennia.
Tikopians today are divided among four clans each headed by a hereditary chief, who holds more power than does a non-hereditary big-man of the New Guinea highlands. Nevertheless, the evolution of Tikopian subsistence is better described by the bottom-up metaphor than by the top-down metaphor. One can walk all the way around the coastline of Tikopia in under half a day, so that every Tikopian is familiar with the entire island. The population is small enough that every Tikopian resident on the island can also know all other residents individually. While every piece of land has a name and is owned by some patrilineal kinship group, each house owns pieces of land in different parts of the island. If a garden is not being used at the moment, anyone can temporarily plant crops in that garden without asking the owner’s permission. Anyone can fish on any reef, regardless of whether it happens to be in front of someone else’s house. When a cyclone or drought arrives, it affects the entire island. Thus, despite differences among Tikopians in their clan affiliation and in how much land their kinship group owns, they all face the same problems and are at the mercy of the same dangers. Tikopia’s isolation and small size have demanded collective decision-making ever since the island was settled. Anthropologist Raymond Firth entitled his first book We, the Tikopia because he often heard that phrase (“Matou nga Tikopia”) from Tikopians explaining their society to him.
Tikopia’s chiefs do serve as the overlords of clan lands and canoes, and they redistribute resources. By Polynesian standards, however, Tikopia is among the least stratified chiefdoms with the weakest chiefs. Chiefs and their families produce their own food and dig in their own gardens and orchards, as do commoners. In Firth’s words, “Ultimately the mode of production is inherent in the social tradition, of which the chief is merely the prime agent and interpreter. He and his people share the same values: an ideology of kinship, ritual, and morality reinforced by legend and mythology. The chief is to a considerable extent a custodian of this tradition, but he is not alone in this. His elders, his fellow chiefs, the people of his clan, and even the members of his family are all imbued with the same values, and advise and criticize his actions.” Thus, that role of Tikopian chiefs represents much less top-down management than does the role of the leaders of the remaining society that we shall now discuss.
Our other success story resembles Tikopia in that it too involves a densely populated island society isolated from the outside world, with few economically significant imports, and with a long history of a self-sufficient and sustainable lifestyle. But the resemblance ends there, because this island has a population 100,000 times larger than Tikopia’s, a powerful central government, an industrial First World economy, a highly stratified society presided over by a rich powerful elite, and a big role of top-down initiatives in solving environmental problems. Our case study is of Japan before 1868.
Japan’s long history of scientific forest management is not well known to Europeans and Americans. Instead, professional foresters think of the techniques of forest management widespread today as having begun to develop in German principalities in the 1500s, and having spread from there to much of the rest of Europe in the 1700s and 1800s. As a result, Europe’s total area of forest, after declining steadily ever since the origins of European agriculture 9,000 years ago, has actually been increasing since around 1800. When I first visited Germany in 1959, I was astonished to discover the extent of neatly laid-out forest plantations covering much of the country, because I had thought of Germany as industrialized, populous, and urban.
But it turns out that Japan, independently of and simultaneously with Germany, also developed top-down forest management. That too is surprising, because Japan, like Germany, is industrialized, populous, and urban. It has the highest population density of any large First World country, with nearly 1,000 people per square mile of total area, or 5,000 people per square mile of farmland. Despite that high population, almost 80% of Japan’s area consists of sparsely populated forested mountains (Plate 20), while most people and agriculture are crammed into the plains that make up only one-fifth of the country. Those forests are so well protected and managed that their extent is still increasing, even though they are being utilized as valuable sources of timber. Because of that forest mantle, the Japanese often refer to their island nation as “the green archipelago.” While the mantle superficially resembles a primeval forest, in fact most of Japan’s accessible original forests were cut by 300 years ago and became replaced with regrowth forest and plantations as tightly micromanaged as those of Germany and Tikopia.
Japanese forest policies arose as a response to an environmental and population crisis paradoxically brought on by peace and prosperity. For almost 150 years beginning in 1467, Japan was convulsed by civil wars as the ruling coalition of powerful houses that had emerged from the earlier disintegration of the emperor’s power in turn collapsed, and as control passed instead to dozens of autonomous warrior barons (called daimyo), who fought each other. The wars were finally ended by the military victories of a warrior named Toyotomi Hideyoshi and his successor Tokugawa Ieyasu. In 1615 Ieyasu’s storming of the Toyotomi family stronghold at Osaka, and the deaths by suicide of the remaining Toyotomis, marked the wars’ end.
Already in 1603, the emperor had invested Ieyasu with the hereditary title of shogun, the chief of the warrior estate. From then on, the shogun based at his capital city of Edo (modern Tokyo) exercised the real power, while the emperor at the old capital of Kyoto remained a figurehead. A quarter of Japan’s area was directly administered by the shogun, the remaining three-quarters being administered by the 250 daimyo whom the shogun ruled with a firm hand. Military force became the shogun’s monopoly. Daimyo could no longer fight each other, and they even needed the shogun’s permission to marry, to modify their castles, or to pass on their property in inheritance to a son. The years from 1603 to 1867 in Japan are called the Tokugawa era, during which a series of Tokugawa shoguns kept Japan free of war and foreign influence.
Peace and prosperity allowed Japan’s population and economy to explode. Within a century of the wars’ end, population doubled because of a fortunate combination of factors: peaceful conditions, relative freedom from the disease epidemics afflicting Europe at the time (due to Japan’s ban on foreign travel or visitors: see below), and increased agricultural productivity as the result of the arrival of two productive new crops (potatoes and sweet potatoes), marsh reclamation, improved flood control, and increased production of irrigated rice. While the population as a whole thus grew, cities grew even faster, to the point where Edo became the world’s most populous city by 1720. Throughout Japan, peace and a strong centralized government brought a uniform currency and uniform system of weights and measures, the end of toll and customs barriers, road construction, and improved coastal shipping, all of which contributed to a trade boom within Japan.
But Japan’s trade with the rest of the world was cut to almost nothing. Portuguese navigators bent on trade and conquest, having rounded Africa to reach India in 1498, advanced to the Moluccas in 1512, China in 1514, and Japan in 1543. Those first European visitors to Japan were just a pair of shipwrecked sailors, but they caused unsettling changes by introducing guns, and even bigger changes when they were followed by Catholic missionaries six years later. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese, including some daimyo, became converted to Christianity. Unfortunately, rival Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries began competing with each other, and stories spread that friars were trying to Christianize Japan as a prelude to a European takeover.
In 1597 Toyotomi Hideyoshi crucified Japan’s first group of 26 Christian martyrs. When Christi
an daimyo then tried to bribe or assassinate government officials, the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu concluded that Europeans and Christianity posed a threat to the stability of the shogunate and Japan. (In retrospect, when one considers how European military intervention followed the arrival of apparently innocent traders and missionaries in China, India, and many other countries, the threat foreseen by Ieyasu was real.) In 1614 Ieyasu prohibited Christianity and began to torture and execute missionaries and those of their converts who refused to disavow their religion. In 1635 a later shogun went even further by forbidding Japanese to travel overseas and forbidding Japanese ships to leave Japan’s coastal waters. Four years later, he expelled all the remaining Portuguese from Japan.
Japan thereupon entered a period, lasting over two centuries, in which it cordoned itself off from the rest of the world, for reasons reflecting even more its agendas related to China and Korea than to Europe. The sole foreign traders admitted were a few Dutch merchants (considered less dangerous than Portuguese because they were anti-Catholic), kept isolated like dangerous germs on an island in Nagasaki harbor, and a similar Chinese enclave. The only other foreign trade permitted was with Koreans on Tsushima Island lying between Korea and Japan, with the Ryukyu Islands (including Okinawa) to the south, and with the aboriginal Ainu population on Hokkaido Island to the north (then not yet part of Japan, as it is today). Apart from those contacts, Japan did not even maintain overseas diplomatic relations, not even with China. Nor did Japan attempt foreign conquests after Hideyoshi’s two unsuccessful invasions of Korea in the 1590s.
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