NPO Birth: Bringing people back to nature

NPO Birth is a not for profit organisation in Japan that aims to bring people together with nature, and protect and nurture the green areas around cities. NPO Birth works through partnerships with citizens, public agencies and businesses. Activities include support for local nature groups, park ranger services, volunteer coordination, environmental preservation, and consulting on community partnerships and environmental education programs.

What NPO Birth Does
NPO Birth was founded by four environmentalists in 1998, to help people find ways to incorporate green space into their everyday lives and pursue a lifestyle more in harmony with nature. NPO Birth uses a ‘community land’ framework to support grassroots civic groups.

The organisation works in a number of key ways to better connect humans and nature:
– Advancing partnerships among civil society, the government and the corporate sector;
– Coordination of volunteers to work on community land projects;
– Supporting projects that help grassroots organisations; and
– Providing ranger services to a number of public parks in the Tokyo area.

Satoyama
A focus for NPO Birth in the past few years has been efforts to reintroduce the traditional Japanese practice of ‘Satoyama’ into modern city life. According to NPO Birth: ‘Satoyama (literally ‘village and forested mountains) is a Japanese word that means the entire environment of a rural community, including regularly thinned forests (coppice forests), as well as rivers and streams, ponds, cultivated fields, homestead woodlands and human dwellings. From their immediate natural environs, villagers obtained the fuel (wood and charcoal) and food (wild and cultivated plants) that enabled them to live there.

‘People always carefully maintained their satoyama. The oak tree stands of the coppice forest were cut on 15 to 20-year cycles, keeping the woodland well lit. There were numerous flowering plants and insects. Paddy fields were filled with water and hence with the croaking of frogs, which drew preying snakes and birds. The streams, fields and sky were thronged with creatures. People traditionally exploited nature, and at the same time lived in her embrace. Until just 50 years ago, the satoyama landscape was a way of life throughout Japan.’

In 2006 NPO Birth was given a contract to co-manage the Tokyo Metropolitan Parks at the Sayama Hills, introducing this concept of satoyama, or ‘community land’, to actively involve local residents in the management of the forests, and undertaking park ranger operations. Under the contract, as an affiliate of Seibu Sayama Hills Partners, NPO Birth manages the four parks in the Sayama Hills that are owned by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government: Noyamakita-Rokudouyama Park, Sayama Park, Higashiyamato Park and Hachikokuyama Park.

Park management
NPO Birth summarises the history of the park area, and the work the NGO has carried out there since 2006: ‘The Sayama Hills are in the northwest part of the Tokyo region, extending 11 kilometres east to west and 4 kilometres north to south. With manmade Tama Lake and Sayama Lake at the centre, the area is a ‘water jug’ for Tokyoites, and has an extensive watershed reserve. Now surrounded by urban zones, the hills are a ‘green island’ in the Tokyo metropolitan area. The people living here traditionally grew rice using the natural water sources, and obtained firewood and compost from coppice forests. The Sayama Hills were once covered with beautiful satoyama countryside.

‘From the 1960s the spread of propane gas removed the need to take firewood from the forests, and the national policy of crop reduction gradually led farmers to abandon rice farming. The satoyama countryside of the Sayama Hills had lost its intrinsic value. The Seibu railroad developed commuter belt for Tokyo in the area, and a municipal waste disposal site was opened in the Miyanoiri Valley (now part of Noyamakita-Rokudouyama Park, the largest of the parks in the area). The satoyama that for thousands of years had supported people’s lives, and been carefully cultivated by the people, was temporarily lost.

‘In 1997 the Tokyo government hauled 9000 four-tonne truckloads of garbage out of the Miyanoiri Valley. The government had decided to revive the temporarily discarded landscape of the Sayama Hills, as a regional parkland dedicated to two main goals: a habitat preservation area for plants and animals operating with public participation, and a centre for environmental education with nature studies and farming activities. Today there are more than 300 park volunteers who work the land to produce fuel and food, the traditional purposes of satoyama management, and to build up the satoyama for a new century. Holding lectures and workshops, learning about the area, conducting surveys and thinking and learning some more, they carry out a ‘landscape creation’ program, like in the old days, to create a satoyama landscape that no one has seen before.’

For more information about NPO Birth visit www.npo-birth.org or email [email protected]

The excerpts used in this article come from ‘Tales of the Satoyama in Tokyo – A picture book through ‘Ranger Eyes’, by Masayuki Hachisuka for NPO Birth.

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