Hokkaido is Japan’s north, and it feels like a different country: cold, open, thinly populated, with brown bears in the mountains and drift ice arriving on the northern coast each winter from the Sea of Okhotsk, the lowest latitude at which sea ice forms anywhere on Earth. It is the homeland of the Ainu, whose relationship with these forests and rivers long predates the Japanese state.
The Shiretoko peninsula in the far northeast is one of the richest places in the world where sea and land meet. The drift ice carries plankton that fuel an entire marine food chain, which feeds salmon, which run up the rivers, which feed bears and Steller’s sea eagles and, ultimately, the forest itself. It is the same salmon-forest logic as the Pacific Northwest, playing out on the other side of the ocean.
The organizations here restore river connectivity so salmon can run past the dams and check dams that block them, protect the bears in a landscape where tourism brings them into close contact with people, and watch the drift ice, which is arriving later and thinner each decade.
Environmental Organizations in This Bioregion
6 organizations working across this landscape.