TRIBAL PEOPLE AND NATURE CONSERVATION IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

By F. Colombijn

To mark the UN year of indigenous peoples, the Centre of
Non-Western Studies of Leiden University organized a seminar on
"The role of tribal people in the exploitation and management of
natural resources in Southeast Asia" on 9 and 10 December, 1993.
The first day was devoted to general aspects on the relation
between tribal people and their environment. On the second day
case studies from Indonesia, New Guinea, India and the
Philippines were presented.
During these two days the picture which emerged was that tribal
peoples in general do not threaten their natural environment.
This is partly because they live in harmony with the surrounding
wilderness, and partly because their population density is too
low and their technology too simple to do much damage. Outside
pressure and growing population can lead to increasing
discrepancy between the ideas and the actual behaviour of tribal
peoples. For example, growing population can force people to cut
down sacred forests. The introduction of new technology can be
disastrous, as when rifles are used to hunt monkeys to the point
of virtual extinction.
The main threat to the natural environment does not come from the
tribal peoples themselves, but from national governments and
Western enterprises which ruthlessly exploit the woods for
logging, agriculture or minerals. Tribal peoples with
long-standing rights to their territories profit the least from
this exploitation and suffer the most. Some participants
suggested that, when the Western world collapses as a result of
enviromentallly unsustainable development, tribal peoples will
manage to sustain themselves in the remaining forests and
survive. The tribal groups may thus be a safety-net for mankind
when the human species is threatened by extinction. But even
given a less gloomy future, tribal peoples are still important
for the rest of the world as a `pool of ideas'.
The participants agreed that tribal people must be helped to find
their own way. The fact that nature must be protected was also
agreed upon. Any aid must be based on a long-term commitment from
Western development partners.
Two controversial standpoints became interesting issues for
discussion. The first issue was whether nature conservation
(defined as bio-diversity) is compatible with the presence of
tribal people. One participant, contradicting the idea that
tribal peoples live in harmony with the environment, argued that,
in order to protect rare flora and fauna, in particular big
mammals (tiger, rhinoceros, orang-utang), certain areas must be
completely closed to human exploitation; if necessary, tribal
peoples must be removed from these nature reserves. Most
participants, claimed that tribal people have a right to their
land and that under `original' conditions they do not harm the
animals.
The second issue was whether co-operation between people (tribal
people just as a as Western or state company) should be achieved
by rules and incentives (a morality of rights), or by conviction
and the intrinsic value of a good relationship (morality of
care).
It is worth noting that some speakers referred to the 1920s and
1930s as a marking the beginning of concern for nature protection
in Indonesia, but they did not attempt a systematic study of the
historical changes during the twentieth century. Whereas one
speaker believed that prior to the twentieth century forests were
virgin, another speaker argued that for thousands of years humans
have played a role in forming ecosystems that are considered
`natural' today. This discrepancy did not lead to any debate.
The list of participants included J. Bakels, G. Persoon, R.
Schefold, H. Rijksen, J. McNeeley, W.T. de Groot, T. van der Zon,
I. Schulte-Tenckhoff, M. Gautam, J. van der Ven, P. Visorro, A.
Mitchell, and V. Kasiepo.