Introduction
The environment is one of the defining issues of our times, and it is closely linked to questions and dilemmas surrounding economic development. It is at once a global issue, sometimes understood in terms of the very future of the planet, and a local one, involving peopleâs intimate interaction with their immediate surroundings. In this book, we choose to explore the environment at an intermediate scale, that of a world region â specifically, Southeast Asia.
Southeast Asia is one of the worldâs most economically, demographically and ecologically dynamic regions. It is also one in which a host of environmental issues raise themselves at a societal and political level in response to the largely human-induced biophysical changes besetting the region. Many of these changes are a direct response to developmental pressures and population growth and movement. In turn, the environment is embroiled in key socio-political shifts that accompany the regionâs rapid pace of development. In other words, the environment is firmly embedded in the wider social, economic and political dynamics of the region as a whole and of its constituent countries.
Southeast Asia conjures up many environmental images. Aesthetically, and mirrored in tourist brochures, Southeast Asia is often imagined and presented from elsewhere as a region of verdant forests, pristine coastlines, terraced hillsides and exotic riverscapes. The region is also one whose rapid economic growth is associated in documentaries, newspaper reports, academic studies and travellersâ experiences of it with congestion, pollution, resource depletion and conflict. For increasing numbers of the 600 million people living in Southeast Asia, the environment has, since the 1970s, emerged as a thing to be enjoyed, protected, concerned about, managed and weighed up against material progress. Meanwhile, the majority continue to depend on the environment for their subsistence, livelihoods and well-being. These contrasting imaginaries present us with a stark reminder that âenvironmentâ evokes very different things to different observers from without and within.
The environment both unites and divides. As a unifying force in Southeast Asia, environmental concern has brought together disparate groups and interests in a number of high-profile campaigns, for example around opposing dams, protecting forests and wildlife, and improving urban quality of life. Concern over environmental degradation as a threat facing humanity in an era of climate change can give a sense of common purpose. Shared rivers, oceans, atmosphere and natural heritage have catalyzed agreements and institutional responses among countries in different political camps and with histories of conflict. They have also brought together diverse social forces and interest groups in defence of treasured environmental assets deemed to be under threat. These galvanizing aspects of the environment are as evident in our region of focus as they are in the rest of the world.
But the environment has also been a flashpoint for conflict. Debates over sustainable development have often pitted those arguing for measures to accelerate rise in incomes as a priority in low- and middle-income countries â and indeed in many high-income countries â against those concerned about the effects of rapid economic growth on our resources and our surroundings. Competition over natural resources potentially sets one country against another when such resources straddle national boundaries, and more generally underlies a great deal of conflict at a societal level within countries. Thus, we find conflict over water resources in international river basins such as the Mekong, or transboundary haze impacts from Indonesia affecting Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. We also see differences over appropriate uses of the environment engendering conflict in diverse livelihood and economic activities. Shifting cultivation is at once represented as a sophisticated use of challenging environments based on accumulated ecological knowledge enshrined in cultural practices, and as a primitive and destructive threat to the regionâs forests (Forsyth and Walker, 2008). Economic planners promote dam construction as the cornerstone of some countriesâ economic and energy futures and even put it forward as the regionâs solution to climate change through fossil fuel substitution (Hirsch and Sciortino, 2011). Others have long opposed dams as destructive of the regionâs rivers and disruptive to the hundreds of thousands of people whose livelihoods depend on the resources and ecological functions provided by rivers and whose homes are under threat of inundation by large reservoirs (for example, Lohmann, 1997). Urban residential and industrial expansion is part and parcel of the regionâs success story in moving millions out of poverty and uplifting economies to middle-income status, while pollution, congestion and ecological footprints of urban areas and industrial zones generate myriad environmental problems with direct threats to human health and other aspects of well-being. Fencing off forests in national parks where people have been living for many generations creates heated discussion in the conservation world (for example, Bryant, 2000). Southeast Asia is at the centre of many such conflicts and debates.
There are many different ways of thinking about and writing about the environment. Some of these are descriptive, either in the positive sense of the beauty, abundance and fecundity of nature or in the negative sense of documenting environmental degradation. Others are explanatory, identifying causes and culprits of environmental change and seeking to explain the impacts of such change on human well-being. Yet others are more analytical, relating the environment to aspects of history, geography, culture, politics and economy. In the voluminous work on the environment in Southeast Asia, we see a diversity of both environmental scholarship and more popular writing on the environment that is reflective of all these modes of imagination and expression.
The environment as a window onto Southeast Asiaâs past and future
While the Southeast Asian region provides a geographical scope for exploration of the environment as a multifaceted and contested entity, the environment in turn sets the region within a temporal frame of reference. In other words, the environment reflects ways of thinking about Southeast Asiaâs past, present and future. Before exploring the embedding of the environment in the contemporary contexts revealed by chapters in this book, lets us reflect briefly on what a focus on the environment also tells us about ways in which we re-create the past and imagine the future of the region.
The Southeast Asian past is constructed imaginatively, scientifically and through documentary evidence. There is a strong sense of the past as more ânaturalâ than the present, raising questions of what we understand by the term ânatureâ in relation to human presence. In Southeast Asia, the conversion of nature for human ends is particularly poignant in the history of the regionâs forests, as detailed in Seymour and Kanowskiâs chapter 11 in this volume. The rapid conversion of forested lands to cultivated and urbanized landscapes gives a popular sense of human occupation as destructive of a pristine past, and there is a normative assessment of human impact in terms such as âdegradationâ to describe loss of tree density, biodiversity, carbon storage and other forest values. European encounters with the regionâs fecundity â as described, for example, by Neilson in chapter 22 through the writings of the nineteenth-century natural scientist Alfred Russel Wallace â and concern with subsequent deforestation lead to an understanding of loss of pristine habitat. This sense is strengthened by wilderness notions that come with protected area management influenced by the North American approach to national parks as places free of human habitation and other forms of impact, an approach within which many park managers and other conservation officials have been trained and which is further reinforced by the legal assumption of forests as state domain in the region (Vandergeest, 1996). Ironically, such understandings were, as Neilson goes on to show, matched by the exploitation of resources by colonial powers, often legitimized on the basis of rational scientific management.
These ways of imagining Southeast Asiaâs forest past and protecting its present sit uneasily with practices of shifting cultivation, as Cramb explains in chapter 12. Those who have been living in or near, or managing, forests for the longest period of time are often unfairly marked as culprits in forest destruction. In part, this is based on very selective or misinformed readings of the history of forestâhuman interactions in the region, but it is also based on dominant discourses on modernity and primitivism. As Lagerqvist shows in chapter 23, shifting cultivators in Laos are subject to programmes of control and resettlement, based on modernist ideologies of rational resource use and the stateâs desire to sedentarize populations and agricultural practices. Here, as elsewhere in Southeast Asia, such programmes often occur under the guise of area-based conservation. These are ideologies that others trace back to colonial interventions (Bryant, 1996). Yet early colonial encounters were not all negative in their portrayal of local cultural interactions with natural landscapes. Zerner (2003) suggests that the notion of markets and cultural interaction with nature as inimical to one another is ahistorical, as much a product of late twentieth-century conservation thinking as it is a response to an assumed threat to the environment from increasing marketization, and he shows that Wallace and others âpossessed a vision in which markets, natural landscapes and species, and human cultures intersect and interactâ (p. 47).
Environmental history is dealt with in this book most directly in the two chapters that follow this introduction. Gupta, in chapter 2, presents the environment as a physical system subject to human impact. As such, he emphasizes the need for a good understanding of the geological, geomorphological and ecosystem histories of the region as a basis for its proper management â in other words, he makes a strong case for physical geography as a product of natural historical process. Boomgaard, in chapter 3, takes us into the field of recorded environmental history, and provides us with an approach to the present through an understanding of past encounters between external actors and pre-existing economic systems during pre-colonial and colonial times. In chapter 26, meanwhile, Zoleta-Nantes explores the environmental condition of the Philippines as an outcome of such encounters as well as more recent politicalâeconomic configurations, matching Neilsonâs approach to the environment as a product of politicalâeconomic configurations at key periods in Indonesiaâs recent history (chapter 22).
Others in this book also employ historical understandings to explain environmentâhuman interactions in support of particular assertions. De Koninck and Pham Thanh Hai show in chapter 4 that agricultural expansion throughout the region has been rapid. They take issue with the common understanding that such expansion has mainly been a result of endogenous pressures such as population growth, showing that it has been based more on engagement of the regionâs agricultural economy with global commodity demand. With specific country reference, Simpson reminds us in chapter 25 that Myanmarâs post-independence history has resulted in an almost total absence of environmental governance until very recently. Palmerâs chapter 29 on Timor Leste shows how historical practices embedded in culture provide openings for environmental management with reference to traditional practices whose historico-cultural resonance holds more potential for buy-in than do dis-embedded managerial approaches. Meanwhile, in chapter 24, Majid Cooke and Hezri use a temporal account of Malaysiaâs environmental movement to show how it has brought together different class and regional interests over recent decades whose common concern over environmental justice unites at least some of them, thereby making environmentalism less of a middle-class preoccupation than it was originally considered to be.
If imaginings, memories and documentation of the past help us to understand the environment and its representations in Southeast Asia, and to see the region imagined as one whose tropical fecundity has given way to the ravages of economic development and other dimensions of human impact, the environment is also a part of desires and trepidations over the regionâs future. The trope of sustainable development, which governs at least the lip-service paid to a more measured and rounded approach to national development strategies than economic growth at all costs, is predicated on recognition that âbusiness as usualâ threatens many aspects of the quality of life that are valued by people and governments in the region.
Climate change is the issue that now most occupies time, thought, budgets and policy deliberations about the future. Ironically, climate change has perhaps the longest time horizon of any big environmental issue, yet it has generated a discourse that has found its way into everyday perceptions of current conditions. Popular explanations for the floods of Bangkok and subsequent drought in Thailand, for the movement of people away from areas of the Mekong Delta in Vietnam subject to saltwater intrusion, or for forest fires in Indonesia blamed in part on drier than usual conditions all invoke climate change. I have regularly been amused by the catch-all nature of the climate change box into which issues and development budgets are relegated. Whether it is the sellers at local markets in Thailand who smile when I decline a plastic bag for my fruit and vegetables and say, âKlua look rawn, reu? [Afraid of global warming, eh?]â, or whether it is the Lao minister who suggested to me that I study the safe issue of climate change instead of the sensitive one of links between dams and resource pressures in her country, climate change often provides a remote and depoliticized surrogate to much more immediate and specific issues â and culprits â of anthropogenic environmental impact.
More than any other environmental issue, climate change is perceived as global in scale and scope, as a problem facing humanity as a whole. Yet it is also a regionally specific issue. Most work done on climate change at the regional level has modelled global circulation data in order to predict the regionally specific manifestations of climate change, often in combination with other anthropogenic impacts such as irrigation and hydropower development (Johnston et al., 2010). In the case of Southeast Asia, the main message is that temperatures will rise and that the monsoon will intensify, meaning wetter wet seasons and drier dry seasons, with implications for agriculture, water availability, disease vectors and so on. However, there are also less obvious regionally specific considerations relevant to climate change, particularly in a region where adaptation rather than mitigation is the dominant issue. In chapter 17, Salamanca and Rigg suggest that climate change in Southeast Asia needs to be understood in relation to the wider risk milieu in which people live and work, in cognition of historical processes and with reference to structures of society and economy that shape and constrain adaptation possibilities. Where mitigation in Southeast Asia is discussed, it is usually with respect to reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation and enhanced carbon stock (REDD+), as detailed in Seymour and Kanowskiâs chapter 11.
Other future concerns that attract increasing environmental attention include phenomena associated with urban growth. Some of these are about liveability. In chapter 15, Marcotullio shows that a close look at urban environmental issues in large Southeast Asian cities gives the lie to the idea, commonly associated with the concept of ecological modernization, that the environment becomes a concern at certain stages of development, and that modernization within a linear pattern of development leads to the adoption of technologies and the social concern that are necessary to ameliorate environmental problems. He suggests that, unlike the sequential unfolding and replacing of environmental burdens in Europe and North America, many of the health-related, pollution and environmental footprint aspects of Southeast Asian cities are synchronous, with far from predictable or predetermined linear patterns...
