TROPICAL FORESTS OF OCEANIA Anthropological Perspectives TROPICAL FORESTS OF OCEANIA Anthropological Perspectives EDITED BY JOSHUA A. BELL, PAIGE WEST AND COLIN FILER ASIA-PACIFIC ENVIRONMENT MONOGRAPH 10 Published by ANU Press The Australian National University Acton ACT 2601, Australia Email: [email protected] This title is also available online at http://press.anu.edu.au National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Title: Tropical forests of Oceania : anthropological perspectives / editors: Joshua A. Bell, Paige West, Colin Filer. ISBN: 9781925022728 (paperback) 9781925022735 (ebook) Series: Asia-Pacific environment monograph ; 10 Subjects: Rain forests--Oceania. Forest conservation--Oceania. Forests and forestry--Oceania. Human ecology--Oceania. Other Creators/Contributors: Bell, Joshua A., editor. West, Paige, 1969- editor. Filer, Colin, editor. Dewey Number: 577.34 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Cover design and layout by ANU Press. Cover photograph, courtesy of Simon Foale, shows an oil palm estate in the making in East New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea. Printed by Griffin Press This edition © 2015 ANU Press Contents Tables ........................................................................ vii Figures .......................................................................ix Contributors ...................................................................xi 1. Introduction ..............................................................1 JOSHUA A. BELL, PAIGE WEST AND COLIN FILER 2. Wildlands, Deserted Bays and Other Bushy Metaphors of Pacific Place .....23 ALEXANDER MAWYER 3. Non-Pristine Forests: A Long-Term History of Land Transformation in the Western Solomons ................................................51 EDVARD HVIDING 4. Forests of Gold: From Mining to Logging (and Back Again) .................75 JAMON ALEX HALVAKSZ 5. The Impact of Mining Development on Settlement Patterns, Firewood Availability and Forest Structure in Porgera ......................95 JERRY K. JACKA 6. The Structural Violence of Resource Extraction in the Purari Delta ........127 JOSHUA A. BELL 7. The Fate of Crater Mountain: Forest Conservation in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea .......................................155 PAIGE WEST AND ENOCK KALE 8. How April Salumei Became the REDD Queen ............................179 COLIN FILER 9. Representational Excess in Recent Attempts to Acquire Forest Carbon in the Kamula Doso Area, Western Province, Papua New Guinea .........211 MICHAEL WOOD 10. ‘Evergreen’ and REDD+ in the Forests of Oceania .......................237 JENNIFER GABRIEL Tables Table 2.1 Buck’s categorisation of the Gambier Islands’ vegetables. ..............31 Table 5.1 Summary of FIMS, RSLUP and FAO studies of deforestation in Papua New Guinea. ...................................................99 Table 5.2 Trees in each elevation zone and forest type with an importance value > 20. ............................................................113 Table 5.3 Basal area (m2/ha) per forest type and elevation zone.. 114 Table 5.4 Focus group ranking of economically important trees. ................116 Table 5.5 Number of individual trees per species and importance value forest-wide, based on 1.1 ha plots. ......................................116 Table 8.1 Populations of council wards containing customary owners of the April Salumei forest area in 2000. ................................188 Table 10.1 Rimbunan Hijau’s matrix of benefits from plantation forestry. ........250 vii Figures Figure 2.1 The Gambier Islands. .25 Figure 2.2 Scene of near-shore cultivated bay lands on Mangareva at the time of d’Urville’s visit to the Gambier, by Louis Le Breton, 1842 ...................40 Figure 2.3 Mount Duff, Mangareva Island, early twentieth century ................41 Figure 2.4 Mount Duff with Rikitea village and bay in foreground .................41 Figure 2.5 While near-shore cultivated gardens and bays retain a traditional verdure, Mount Duff and downslope plateaus are now heavily forested, largely as a result of the regional agricultural forestry service’s efforts. ......42 Figure 2.6 The island’s spine and downslope ridgeline from Mount Duff’s peak, running north-east, are now remarkably forested and the change is striking relative to any point earlier in the twentieth century ...............42 Figure 3.1 The New Georgia Islands, Solomon Islands. 53 Figure 3.2 Tree plantations at Paradise village: Gmelina, Eucalyptus and teak in distinct blocks. ...................................................67 Figure 3.3 ‘The Time of Development’: Duvaha, North New Georgia. ..............68 Figure 5.1 Environmental zones recognised by Ipili speakers, Porgera Valley. ....103 Figure 5.2 A wokabout sawmill in operation in 1999 in high-elevation primary forest, Porgera Valley. ..........................................115 Figure 5.3 The Enga Highway in the Porgera Valley. ...........................118 Figure 5.4 Population increase in Porgera census district, 1980–2000. ........119 Figure 6.1 Empty container enveloped by the forest on the banks of the Aivei distributary of the Purari River. ..........................................128 Figure 6.2 Container turned into a jail, now disused. ...........................129 Figure 6.3 Containers on the bank of the Pie River used to form a security tower outside a Chinese-run trade store in Baimuru. .....................130 ix Tropical Forests of Oceania Figure 8.1 The spaces at stake in the April Salumei area. ......................186 Figure 9.1 Nupan’s version of the Kamula Doso concession. ...................215 Figure 9.2 Carbon credits from Kamula Doso issued by the Office of Climate Change for the benefit of Nupan Pty Ltd. ...............................216 x Contributors Joshua A. Bell is Curator of Globalization at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. Colin Filer is an Associate Professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy at The Australian National University. Jennifer Gabriel is a Senior Research Officer in the Department of Anthropology, Archaeology and Sociology at James Cook University. Jamon Alex Halvaksz is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Edvard Hviding is a Professor of Anthropology and Founding Director of the Pacific Studies Research group at the University of Bergen. Jerry K. Jacka is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Enock Kale is a Senior Scientist at the Papua New Guinea Institute of Biological Research. Alexander Mawyer is an Assistant Professor in the Centre for Pacific Islands Studies at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. Paige West is a Professor of Anthropology in Barnard College and Columbia University. Michael Wood is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology, Archaeology and Sociology at James Cook University. xi 1. Introduction JOSHUA A. BELL, PAIGE WEST AND COLIN FILER Across the world indigenous rights activists argue that ‘Land is Life!’ This slogan appears on bumper stickers, T-shirts and posters at demonstrations against large-scale, capital-intensive forms of industrial development that result in indigenous peoples being dispossessed of their customary land-related rights and sovereignty. It indexes the fact that the systematic dispossession of such peoples from their lands has led to the current situation in which they are often living at the very margins of all international indicators of health and welfare. It also means much more than simply that land is important to life. For most indigenous groups globally, their lands and territories are inextricably tied to their ontological propositions about the world and their epistemic practices with regard to the world. Land is interwoven with history, memory, belief, practice and subjectivity. In this volume, we expand the discussion around indigenous peoples and land and argue that in many places in the larger forested nation- states of Oceania, forests are also life. Native forests and their health are an enduring source of concern for the indigenous communities who have lived with them ‘since time immemorial’. They are also a source of concern to many other actors or ‘stakeholders’ interested in their conservation or exploitation. Today, much of the news that we hear about forests is not good. There is an ongoing global debate about the pace of what is nowadays called deforestation and forest degradation, but there is widespread agreement that tropical forests are especially vulnerable (FAO 2010; FAO and ECJRC 2012; Hansen et al. 2013; Stibig et al. 2014; Kim et al. 2015). There is a parallel debate about the factors or drivers responsible for this loss in different parts of the world, and about the effects of this loss on local people’s livelihoods. Yet there is general agreement that the loss of tropical forests is inextricably tied to a corresponding loss of biodiversity values, and this in turn 1 Tropical Forests of Oceania has been linked to a decline in the health and welfare of the people living in and around these forests (Geist and Lambin 2002; Boucher et al. 2011). There is also a strong connection between the loss of biological diversity and the loss of social or cultural diversity, especially