1 The purpose of this book is to introduce the history and current status of human use, extinction, and conservation of plants and animals from prehistoric times to the present day.It aims to introduce the history and current status of human use, extinction and conservation of plants and animals from prehistory to the present. Using a historical-ecological approach that integrates archaeology, history, environmental studies, and anthropology, the book addresses issues related to the relationship between modern civilization and the environment. For example, the Amazon forest landscape has recently come to be greatly valued as a cultural product. This book examines whether this concept can be generalized to forested areas around the world, comparing the contrasting landscapes of tropical Amazonia and temperate Japan.2 This book primarily examines human-animal and human-plant interactions in Asian forests (Southeast Asia　and Japan) and inland waters (China). For comparison, cases from the Americas (whales in the Arctic, sea turtles in the Caribbean, and plants in the Amazon) and Central Asia are also included.　This book presents mainly Asian cases. The relationship between plants, animals, and humans in Asia is quite unique from a global perspective. For example, "satoyama" in Japan means ecotone area, or the boundary between a village and a forest. There, as the number of inhabitants declines, bears, wild boars, and other animals increasingly ravage crops, sometimes attacking humans as well.3 By showing the regional nature of human-animal and human-plant interactions in Asia, this book provides for the first time a framework for understanding the world's animal and plant-human relationships. It is assumed that the relationships between humans and animals and plants during this period were diverse, including hunting, taming, semi-domestication, and full domestication. At the same time, for regions outside of Asia, the extent to which these diverse relationships were adapted and how diversity was formed is explained from the perspective of historical ecology.4 Customers can expect to derive perspectives on the coexistence of human-animal and plant-animal relationships from this book in the near future.5 The conservation of rare species, diverse habitats, and biodiversity is a central theme in considering the relationship between modern civilization and the global environment. In post-industrial Japan, one focus has been the protection of iconic animals such as storks, crested ibis, dugongs, and sea turtles, while damage to crops and humans by deer, wild boars, monkeys, bears, and other common animals has become an important social issue. How can the world's 7.7 billion-plus people live in harmony with other species? We would like to get some hints on how to solve the problems we are facing. weiterlesen