Modern Crises and Traditional Strategies—Local Ecological Knowledge in Island Southeast Asia

As our understanding of its significant role in economic development grew in the 1990s, many countries created plans and programs intended to support environmental sustainability. How well those plans and programs worked was put to the test in island southeast Asia from 1996 to 2003 as people of that region responded to political, economic and environmental instability. The contributors of these nine case studies explain how climate changes affected foragers in farmers in Borneo, how agricultural modernization affected the Kasepuhan rice industry, and how systems responded to environmental stress in Java. They describe the conservation of the remaining rain forest in upland Banten, traditional and innovative subsistence strategies in Buano during socio-environmental stress, changes in Minahasan agricultural strategies in north Sulawest, responses to permanent political and environmental crisis in Palawan, forest regulation in East Timor, and transmission of knowledge about environmental forces in central Java. Annotation c2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Roy Ellen was educated at the London School of Economics and is Professor of Anthropology and Human Ecology at the University of Kent at Canterbury, where he has taught since 1973. His numerous and varied publications include Environment, Subsistence and System (Cambridge University Press, 1982), The Cultural Relations of Classification (Cambridge University Press, 1993), and most recently, The Categorical Impulse (Berghahn Books, 2005). He convenes the Kent Programme in Ethnobotany and has published widely on indigenous knowledge. In 2003 he was elected to a fellowship of the British Academy.