Islands of Rainforest

Agroforestry, Logging and Eco-Tourism in Solomon Islands

Edvard Hviding, Tim Bayliss-Smith

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351778596
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This title was first published in 2000: An original and thought-provoking analysis of modern initiatives in the tropical rain forest. While issues such as logging, eco-timber, eco-tourism have been widely analyzed from an outsider's perspective, this book considers them from the local people's viewpoint, in terms of a long history of the rainforest uses. The authors demonstrate that the relationship of indigenous people to the tropical forest is not essentially timeless, nor is it primarily spiritual or mystical. It is in fact firmly connected to modern realities, while still being rooted in historical beliefs and practices. Standing at the intersection of anthropology, historical geography and rainforest ecology, and also at the interface of the local and the global, this ethnographically grounded study dispels a number of commonly held assumptions. It reveals how processes of 'impact' are actually two-way interactions, as local communities in Melanesia incorporate industries like logging into rapidly evolving post-colonial society and economy.

1 Conceptualising the Rainforest

The tropical rainforest in global discourse

We begin with a question – how to account for the rising importance of the tropical rainforest in the global agenda? The tropical rainforest has emerged as one of the most potent symbols in North-South discourse, but yet its prominence cannot be easily explained. For example, its geographical extent is not particularly impressive. Even before the recent wave of clearance the tropical rainforest only covered about 3% of the earth’s surface. Its proportion of the world’s forested areas is not overwhelming – the tropical rainforest makes up only about 30% of the world’s forest cover (Whittaker and Likens, 1975). Moreover these forests are all located within a handful of mostly poor tropical countries that are bystanders in the deadly geopolitical struggles of the great powers. Until recently tropical rainforests seemed to be almost cut off from the mainstream of world history.

The change in perception has been rather dramatic. Only one hundred years ago the tropical rainforest was constructed in the Western imagination as a place that was simultaneously alluring, mysterious and hostile, while being also seen as a wilderness that was essentially without use and without value. The knowledge of its inhabitants was despised or disregarded, even though Western knowledge of this environment was extremely limited. When Paul Richards published his book The Tropical Rain Forest in 1952, the totality of scientific knowledge about rainforest ecology from English, French and German sources was contained within a volume of only 407 pages. As late as the 1950s it was widely assumed in the West that the rainforest could achieve value in the age of global capitalism only if the disease problems endemic to these tropical regions could be overcome and only if the soils could be made more productive by a transformation in land use (e.g. Gourou, 1947).

Yet today school children in Western Europe organise fund-raising schemes to help to “save the rainforest”. The fate of the tropical rainforest has become part of the political agenda in North-South relations, with concerns ranging widely across the rights of indigenous peoples, wildlife conservation, eco-timber, biodiversity prospecting, smoke pollution from forest fires, global climate change, and more. The tropical rainforest has become an icon for the environmental movement, and its fate is a form of moral discourse with the power to unite or divide the peoples of the planet. In the mass media and across the World Wide Web, the forest is again being discussed in terms of wonder and mystery. Once forgotten corners of Brazil, Zaire or Borneo are being “discovered” as treasure houses of values that we – the “people of the planet” – cannot and should not translate into material terms. Plane loads of eco-tourists from the rich countries are setting out to discover for themselves some of these natural wonders. Meanwhile, even as we complete this book, the efforts of loggers, plantation companies and impoverished slash-and-burn farmers to “destroy” the rainforest are being amplified by huge forest fires across Indonesia and as far as New Guinea, and in the Brazilian Amazon. The image on television screens of thousands of square kilometres shrouded in smoke evokes looming disaster, with global implications for climate change, the extinction of species and human welfare. Rather than discouraging interest these images of disaster probably stimulate the eco-tourism industry, with its promise of providing easy access to the wonders of nature before they disappear for ever.

The rediscovery of the magic and mystery of the tropical rainforest takes us back to an earlier and more innocent phase of globalisation. Modern eco-tourists are following in the footsteps of earlier travellers such as Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin, who in retrospect look almost like pioneers of this cultural phenomenon. Even Darwin’s intellectual curiosity was initially submerged by a much more emotional response. When he stepped ashore in Bahia after a two-month journey across the Atlantic by sailing ship, he wrote as follows in his diary:

February 29th 1832 … Delight is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist who, for the first time, has wandered by himself in a Brazilian forest. The elegance of the grasses, the novelty of the parasitical plants, the beauty of the flowers, but above all the general luxuriance of the vegetation has filled me with admiration. (Darwin, 1839:10)

Our book is also written in a spirit of admiration, but it is admiration for the people who inhabit the rainforest as much as for the forest ecosystem itself. Our focus is not Brazil, Zaire or Borneo, but the Solomon Islands, within the region of Melanesia in the southwest Pacific. As elsewhere globalisation and its effects have become an inescapable feature of the lives of rainforest peoples in this region, even though only a generation ago they would have been classified as among the least “globalised” people on the planet.

Inevitably the present-day concerns in the West have also influenced our choice to work among the people who depend on Solomon Islands rainforests, and certainly this upsurge in interest on environment-development interfaces has facilitated the funding of our research. However, we have chosen as our starting point not the global rhetoric of rainforest conservation and eco-tourism, nor the global reality of an uncontrolled scramble for tropical hardwoods by the logging companies. Of course these new external pressures do influence how Solomon Islanders are now using their forests, but we would argue that global processes do not provide a good starting point. Indeed, these processes are part of the cultural baggage of pre-conceptions and stereotypes that any Westerner must jettison before attempting the task of understanding the forest through the eyes of its inhabitants rather than through the optic of global discourse.

Instead of starting at the present day and with the “global” concerns of environmentalism and logging that now dominate perceptions of the rainforest in the West, we therefore begin our analysis with the past and with the local. We examine the meanings and uses of forests by the men and women who live in small village communities on the shores of the Marovo Lagoon, situated in the New Georgia archipelago in the Western Solomons, and we approach these topics initially through a reconstruction of historical change. The assumed unchanging character of rainforest peoples has been part of the mythology of Western observers ever since this zone of the world came under the gaze of the agents of Western imperialism. It is a particularly unhelpful stereotype when we come to consider the long-term interactions between local culture and global process. Like so many others seemingly left on the periphery of the “world system”, tropical rainforest peoples are far from being “people without history” (Wolf, 1982; and see Tsing, 1993). Nor have the Pacific islanders of New Georgia been the victims of any “fatal impact” from “the West” along the lines of widespread popular assertions (e.g. Moorehead, 1968).

From an analysis of historical change it is possible to argue that the Marovo people have been successfully (according to their own criteria) confronting the challenges and opportunities offered by remote worlds for more than 150 years, ever since first contact with Europeans in the pre-colonial era. Since whaling ships started calling in the New Georgia islands around 1790 to replenish their stores and to weather the cyclone season, most contacts of Marovo people with faraway worlds have been dominated by the miscellaneous outsiders’ aspirations to reap benefits, in one way or another, from the resources of Marovo’s lands, reefs and seas (Hviding, 1996a). Only by piecing together this story of encounters and confrontations with, and adaptation to, the outside world can we appreciate the present-day pattern of response in Marovo to outsiders in their various forms. Today’s outsiders include Malaysian, Indonesian and Korean loggers, North American and European eco-tourists, and New Zealand and Australian conservationists – as well as Melanesians from neighbouring islands of the Solomons, more interested in access to cultivation in the Marovo forest than in its commodification to meet global needs.

Beyond historical ethnography

The story we are about to tell contains many strands leading towards more general statements about people’s relationships to their environments and about the comparative study of social and ecological systems. On the surface this book may well be seen by some to fall under the very topical umbrella of “rainforest studies”. If that helps to spread our messages to audiences concerned with tropical rainforests in particular, that is fine. But in the realm of scholarship we would prefer to situate the book somewhat differently. Acknowledging other recent contributions from Melanesian anthropology (such as those of Frederick Errington and Deborah Gewertz) towards understanding Melanesian lives in relation to worlds beyond, we follow their ambition to “make grounded sense of how [local] people have actually lived with and engaged in some of the rather large and compelling issues of our time” (Errington and Gewertz, 1995:1, italics in original). From a starting point in ethnographic analysis we attempt in this book to establish a truly holistic viewpoint, with a focus on the local in relation to the global and on the complexities of colonial and post-colonial situations. In order to understand the interactions of the various agents, local and global, who are currently operating in and near the forests of Marovo, we have been forced to extend our time horizon back into the past beyond the reach of ethnographic observation.

Our overall objective has been to remain ethnographically well-informed while also pursuing general theoretical perspectives and comparative debates. Thus, despite working in a time and age of intensified specialisation within sub-disciplines, in this book we draw on concepts, approaches and published and unpublished material from a diverse number of disciplines such as anthropology, geography, history, archaeology, linguistics, ecology and botany. We set out to define the basic parameters of forest utilisation in Marovo, while also considering how the environment is perceived, experienced and known by the Marovo people themselves. Our approach to understanding the shifting nature of Marovo people’s relationships to their rainforests, then, has aspirations extending beyond those of specialised “cultural ecology” or “human ecology” and far beyond the more nebulous gaze of the fashionable but ill-defined realm of “environmental studies”.

Although being based in two different disciplines, we are both field ethnographers who give analytical priority to detailed knowledge of what unfolds on the ground, understood not only through general more or less objectivist languages but also – and in many respects more significantly – through the cosmological frameworks and epistemological evaluations of “the people” themselves. But our attempts to reconstruct and analyse the structures and dynamics of Marovo people’s involvement with their lands and forests range over some 150 years, and this time scale dictates that this can be no synchronic work built up from glimpses of events and activities that were all observed by us in the field. In theoretical and methodological terms we feel compelled, therefore, to attempt yet another expansion of recent historical-anthropological approaches of general bearing but developed with particular reference to Oceania (cf. Sahlins, 1985; Thomas, 1989a). Our perspective integrates the general with the particular, for example general archaeological inferences about land-people interactions in prehistoric Melanesia with highly specific information – obtained first-hand through recent fieldwork – on Marovo people’s perceptions of the forest and their utilisation of its potentials.

In this respect we recognise the magnificent recent contribution on Hawaiian “historical ethnography” and “archaeology of history” by the two distinguished scholars Patrick Kirch and Marshall Sahlins (1992). Yet, for our analysis of long-term developments in Marovo we need to add further dimensions to the ethnography-history-archaeology axis. Those additional dimensions are not limi ted to the views of conventional political economy on colonial subjugation of the peripheral, nor to the more recent ones of globalisation theory. The multiple discourses that shape today’s uses of the Marovo rainforest – the “ethnographic present” employed in parts of this book – are not to be defined only, not even mainly, from a basis of local knowledge and practice, but from dialogues between micro- and macro-levels, wherein “micro” (for which read: the “local”) as often as not appears to modify incursions by “macro” (for which read: the “global”). In analysing these dialogues we wish to emphasise the cultural and historical specificities of events – as well as similarities and convergences in encounters between Marovo people and other people from elsewhere. These others include such disparate actors as British colonial officers pursuing land alienation, representatives of European and Asian logging companies, and conservationists from Australia, New Zealand and the USA, as well as any number and variety of past and present visitors – friends and foes – from other islands in the Solomons.

Although the second half of the book to a large degree deals with events of today that may well be seen to form a core of an emerging “Melanesian modernity”, we wish to avoid an overly great insistence – in search of “radical alterity” (Keesing, 1994) – on deep and fundamental cultural differences between Melanesian and Western approaches. In that sense this book does not rest easily within the anthropological genre called by some recent commentators “New Melanesian Ethnography” (Foster, 1995; after Josephides, 1991). In this genre, disparities between Melanesian and Western views of social reality are highlighted, and the diversity of the “Melanesian Other” is explored, by means of a consistent methodological reliance on an Us/ Them divide (exemplified most brilliantly by Strathern, 1988). While we recognise, and highlight where needed, significant differences between past and present New Georgian and European approaches to New Georgian people, lands, forests and lagoons, we build the analysis from a general premise that involvement between – and entanglements of – people of disparate backgrounds and agendas, yet still somehow oftentimes with shared projects, are a rule rather than an exception in world history. The approach followed in this book is to be seen as “ethnography with time and transformation built into it” (Sahlins, 1993:1), and the colonial and post-colonial trajectories we address through an ethnographically founded view in many ways become the shared histories of Solomon Islanders and Europeans and Asians; the two latter categories having various old and new colonial agendas with respect to the resources of the former.

Ultimately, Marovo “tradition” (or, in Melanesian terms, kastom) and ways of life are to be seen as influenced and transformed by circumstances over which the villagers around the lagoon appear to have little control, yet in their own way – quite consistent with widespread Melanesian approaches to the unexpected (cf. Strathern, 1992) – the Marovo people transform and partly subvert these challenges by subjecting issues and protagonists to Marovo agendas of social and political process. Ecologically oriented adventure tourists, timber-hungry logging companies and other arrivals of recent years are not altogether new for the villagers of Marovo.

From pre-colonial to post-colonial: the longue durée in New Georgia

With the above in mind, a general lesson may be learnt from analysing the past 150 years of Marovo people’s involvement with their rainforest. We propose that, in the time frame and fields of practice analysed here, the firmly “colonial” condition (comprising the period 1893-1978, during which the Solomon Islands was a British colony) has been rather more stable, even tranquil, than both “pre-” and “post-colonial” stages. We do not thereby intend to minimise the suffering the centuries of imperialism and colonialism imposed on other colonised peoples all over the world, nor to undercommunicate the ways in which colonialism in the Solomons paved the way for certain new uses, and abuses, of power. And granted, the imposition of Pax Britannica in New Georgia around the turn of the century did coincide with the cessation of headhunting and warfare and the breakdown of the material and spiritual bases of regional polities, including the irrigated cultivation of large surpluses of taro. But long before that, the people of Marovo and the wider New Georgia Group had been operating their own exchange and trade enterprises in regular contact with representatives of global systems, as often as not in ways that forced the European traders to conform to New Georgia standards of exchange and general conduct. By 1840 New Georgians had acquired a reputation for sharp trade practices and exclusive tastes concerning the European objects bartered for their turtle shell and bêche-de-mer (see Hviding, 1996a; Somerville, 1897; Jackson, 1978; McKinnon, 1975; as well as Thomas, 1991 for general perspectives on this era in the Pacific).

In this light the established colonial age (from around 1900) was in many respects a rather quiet interlude for Marovo people, characterised by firm, identifiable principles and procedures, not least concerning land use which was gradually geared towards “rural development” and the ultimate colonial project of land alienation. That period’s steady expansion of a mono-crop copra economy with its associated “overlay” of coconut groves on prime agricultural land had an aura, also to Marovo people themselves, of predictable, unidirectional change. The establishment of colonial moral certainties (cf. Thomas, 1997:23) in this period was facilitated initially by the intense activities of Christian missions in the sudden void left by the breakdown of religion and regional systems – and colonial “stability”, most notably characterised by supreme powers wielded by expatriate agents of colonial administration and churches, was interrupted only by the sudden, brief cataclysm of World War II. This long period of calm and of little contact with overseas worlds (enhanced by British restrictions on interisland travel and inter-village migration) was truly different from the dizzying and unpredictable blend of logging, mining, conservation, tourism, agricultural diversification and general instability of more recent years – as well as from the perhaps no less lively and complicated mix of large-scale taro irrigation, migrations, trading-and-warfare-based regional politics and interisland travel of past centuries, connecting back to (and beyond) the distant past of Austronesian migrations and expansions. With this in mind we give less emphasis in this book to colonial times proper and instead devote considerably more pages to “old” and “present” Marovo, respectively. It is an emphasis consistent with our proposal that the pre-colonial past and immediate present deserve more attention in studies of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Conventions
• 1 Conceptualising the Rainforest
• 2 Conceptualising Melanesian Agroforestry
• 3 Life on the Lands of Marovo
• 4 Above the Seashore: Land Use in Marovo
• 5 The Wet and the Dry: Marovo Agroforestry at European Contact
• 6 The Great Transformations, 1880-1910
• 7 Colonialism, Coconut Overlay and the “Age of Development”
• 8 Towards the Twenty-first Century: Adapting the Indigenous System
• 9 The Forest as Commodity: Selling Logs to Asia
• 10 After Logging: Reforestation – or What?
• 11 Small is Beautiful? Steps Towards Sustainable Forestry
• 12 Rumours of Utopia: Conservation and Eco-tourism
• 13 Epilogue: Rainforest Narratives
• Notes to Chapters
• Glossary of Marovo Words
• Bibliography
• Index