A Forest for the Future
A new book captures a vast and visionary landscape that’s as much about people as it is about plants.
In 1990, Mitsushige Hayashi, a Japanese media entrepreneur, purchased a plot of forest land on Hokkaido, the northern most island of Japan, to be managed in such a way as to offset the carbon footprint of his national newspaper.
However, preserving the land and preventing further loss of habitat to development and agriculture were only the beginning. Hayashi’s “big idea” was to create a public park that would be sustainable for a thousand years, a time frame well beyond the control of our lifetime. In a country where most of the population lives in densely populated urban centers, far removed from a natural environment, the goal was to design a charismatic landscape that would make people feel connected with the land, so much so that their experience would engender stewardship and ensure that the responsibility for its tending would be handed down from one generation to another.
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