As Japan's Countryside Empties, Its Wildlife Vanishes With the Farmers
As the Japanese Countryside Empties Out, Wildlife Is Disappearing
Rural Japan is losing people, and paradoxically, its wildlife is disappearing too. Small foothill farms once created a mosaic of rice paddies, pastures, and woodlands where orchids, rice fish, and fireflies thrived alongside humans. A 2025 study found biodiversity held steady only where human populations were stable; where people left, butterflies, frogs, birds, and native plants declined. The pattern echoes Spain, China, and the Alps, suggesting that people-shaped landscapes need people to tend them.
The broader lesson is that, in modern conservation, the choice isn't simply between farming and biodiversity.
- smallnix
Isn't this because humans killed and took the role of large grazing animals and large predators? After some time this can result in a new equilibrium, and when humans move out it's chaos again for a while. Question is not if nature will deal with it, but rather what we humans want — probably not some ecological desert for millenia.
- bemtevi
I read the study. The "problem" with it is that it only examines biodiversity before and after abandonment, but without the abandoned areas being rewilded in any way.
Some areas are so destroyed by human activities that they need some help in rewilding, which is definitely possible. Of course, this study does point out that some management of the land that resembles previous human activities could help biodiversity. And of course, as the study mentions, they did not include "Mosses, lichens, mammals and invertebrates—including soil organisms such as nematodes and molluscs".
Keep in mind also that biodiversity is difficult to measure can be counterintuitive. Farmland and managed land creates edge habitats, or a confluence of habitats, where measured biodiversity is higher. Of course, when that edge habitat disappears the measurements can go down. But that does not imply that merging a huge number of farmland back ot a more contiguous wild are won't support biodiversity better in the long run.
- michael1999
Every ecosystem on the planet besides recent settlements like Hawaii or Antarctica are co-evolved with human beings. "Pristine wildness" is almost always a myth.
- gwerbin
I suspect this is the opposite in areas of the USA that have seen population declines. There is virtually nowhere in the USA in the 2020s that looks like, say, Ogimachi Village. And even in, say, the 1920s, so much forest had been cut for agriculture, logging, mining, and soon thereafter for the first suburbs, that I can't imagine human development had any positive effects whatsoever on wildlife or biodiversity.
- zug_zug
Seems counter-intuitive and definitely warrants research to understand the mechanism. The most unintuitive part being local plants not returning.