Like a Tree. Jean Shinoda Bolen

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СКАЧАТЬ plant and tree is there because it produces edible food or is of use. This is an island with chiefs who serve as overlords over the four clans' lands and canoes, but from observation, the role of a clan chief appears to be as chief steward. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Tikopians made a momentous decision to kill every pig on the island. This is recorded in oral traditions and confirmed archeologically. According to these sources, their ancestors made this decision because the pigs raided and rooted up gardens, and competed with humans for food. I speculate that significance also lies in that this was done, even though pigs were a luxury food for the chiefs.

      The tenacity with which men in power do not want to give up their symbols, perquisites, privileges, or the pattern of competitiveness among them, as they strive to build higher structures and bigger houses, drive more expensive and powerful vehicles or acquire nuclear weapons, or flaunt their wealth through conspicuous consumption makes this Tikopian decision highly unusual. Something is very different about the values of this culture and its male leaders. Tikopia is a Giving Tree, but the leaders of the island do not act like the Little Boy, which is so unlike most male leaders, whose “wants” use up all the resources. This has been especially so when the possibility of armed conflict arises between alpha males or warlords, who want more and bigger weapons, to display as well as use. There is feminine wisdom in the Tikopian psyche that took a long view and an overview in the matter of killing all the pigs. They had to have a caretaking attitude toward their resources and toward maintaining a population that could be sustained by resources, and vice versa. Women practice this sort of thing daily, juggling the budget or food available with the mouths to feed. When women have a say about becoming pregnant, they take resources and long-term needs into consideration.

      The success of Japan's forest polices arose as a response to an environmental and population crisis brought on by the peace and prosperity of the 1600s. Beginning in 1570, the first two Tokugawa shoguns, Hideyoshi and Ieyasu, and their daimyo began to clear-cut Japan's forests for timber, according to Jared Diamond, “indulging their egos and seeking to impress each other by constructing huge castles and temples” (Collapse, p. 297). Shoguns then ruled Japan, the daimyo were their loyal barons, while the emperor became a symbolic figure. About two hundred castles were built, with towns growing up around them. The construction boom lasted from about 1570 to 1650, slowing down when timber became scarce. All old growth forests were gone by then, except on the steep slopes of inaccessible areas. Soil erosion had increased, the rivers were silted, watersheds disappeared along with the trees, the soil could not hold rainwater, which now ran off and caused floods. There was not enough food for the increased population and there were major famines after 1600. Japan's male power-elite had behaved like the selfish Little Boy in The Giving Tree.

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