Search Results

Hunter-gatherer land-use in the Congo Basin leaves few traces. One consequence is that their presence is invisible on maps and ignored in land-use planning decisions over the areas they inhabit. Governments do not recognise their rights to land, conservationists exclude them from rich forest areas, logging roads open up remaining areas to extractive outsiders, and global warming changes rainfall patterns and the seasonal events that normally guide people to wild foods. A forestry company in Congo-Brazzaville seeking a ‘green’ label for its timber sought anthropological advice on how to respect the rights of forest people. This chapter describes the challenges and participatory design process that developed in creating icon-driven software on converted military palmpilots. Maps produced using this technology have become a new way for non-literate communities to be heard by powerful outsiders. A community radio station broadcasting uniquely in local languages will facilitate forest people to develop their own understanding of the situations facing them, share insights, observations and analyses in order to better secure their long-term interests. The creative interaction of non-literate users and ICT is spawning new developments, from new software builds to monitor illegal logging or wildlife, to geographic information systems for non-literate users.

The impact of ancient Maya agroforestry activities on modern tropical forest biodiversity is poorly understood. This chapter presents botanical and archaeological data from the Petén region in support of the hypothesis contemporary forests in northwestern Belize show the influences of interactions with the ancient Maya. Phytosociological data reveal that regional forests have been shaped both by ancient and modern practices. Although there is evidence of conservative agroforestry and stable resource extraction among the Maya well into the Late Classic period, ultimately management strategies contributed to land degradation and significant long-term influences on composition and biodiversity of the Neotropical forests in the northern Petén region. Many species traditionally harvested in Belize, as well as a number of commercial timber species, have declined as a result of recent logging practices, whereas tree species considered valuable by the ancient Maya have increased in number during this period.

The management of tropical forests has evolved considerably during recent decades. In the 1970s, the colonial and postindependence emphasis on maintaining large plantations and maximizing timber production gave way to a dual emphasis on revenue generation and social forestry. More recently, the international community, including developing countries themselves, has begun to recognize the important environmental services provided by tropical forest resources, including water quality, soil retention, biodiversity, and microclimate and macroclimate regulation. Just as the prevailing view of appropriate objectives for tropical forest management has changed, so has support for the devolution, or transfer, of rights to local people. Under the previous forest-management paradigm, which stressed revenue generation and social forestry, governments and international aid agencies encouraged nationalization of forests and the gazetting of land into systems of state forest preserves. This served, perhaps unintentionally but nevertheless forcefully, to restrict the rights of locals. But as the relationship between the landless poor, indigenous groups, and the forest resource came to be better understood, more consideration was given to allowing communities to retain or gain customary and/or legal rights to the forest resource. Now, however, by adding the protection of environmental services to the management paradigm, the effects on the devolution of rights to local people are much less clear. On the one hand, some would argue that the only way to vest locals in the maintenance of the forest resource is to give them specific, income-enhancing rights to its use. On the other hand, examples abound of local populations who have exploited the forest resource in ways that are not sustainable, destroying fragile ecological relationships and degrading the biodiversity of the area in the process. The support for devolution of rights has waxed and waned over the years, with its popularity dependent on both international politics and the world economy. The question of whether to devolve rights becomes especially complicated when considering the fate of protected areas in the tropical developing world. Within the protected areas themselves, user rights exercised by local people either can be relatively benign or can have devastating effects on the local ecosystem.

This study moves to the local level to offer a close investigation of just how the national nature protection policy, examined in Chapter 2, was implemented on the ground. The Wanglang Reserve, in Pingwu county of northern Sichuan province, became the first space demarcated as a panda reserve and thus the first experiment in engaging local people in the national cause of panda protection. Local bureaucrats, villagers of the Baima ethnic group, and scientists grappled over their individual interpretations of the panda’s elevated status as a protected species. By studying the actions of these groups, I demonstrate the interactive nature of their efforts to define China’s natural environment and the panda’s role in society during the 1960s.

Continued international integration of the post-Deng era (1990s on) transformed panda country. The specific site of the Wanglang reserve became a juncture where the local Baima villagers, international scientists, NGOs, and tourists (both foreign and domestic) competed to define the giant panda’s place in the environment and in China. Persistently pursuing its charter purposes as a scientific research base, the Wanglang reserve becomes a model and training station for wildlife monitoring and experimental conservation. One experiment, ecotourism has a dramatic impact on the area. The colorful ethnic character of the Baima people initially proved to be an asset to World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) efforts to instigate tourism. The industry took on an identity independent of panda preservation, leading reserve staff to reemphasize Wanglang’s ties to science.