Organizer: Robert Cribb, Nordic Institute of Asian Studies
Discussant: Mohd Nasir Hassan, Universiti Putra Malaysia
Historians have become increasingly aware that the ancestry of modern nature conservationism lies not only in the populist national park movements of nineteenth-century Britain, New Zealand and the United States but also in the culture of scientific managerialism which first emerged in European colonies in Asia and Africa as early as the eighteenth century. The emergence of conservation as a public policy in British colonies has now been relatively well documented, but the conservation experience in other colonies has not been well investigated. The purpose of this panel is to examine the reasons, local and external, why conservation came onto the colonial administrative agenda in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to evaluate the performance of conservation policies, both by the criteria of the time and by modern criteria, and to consider the relationship between conservation policies and colonial power. Specifically, the papers will examine the interaction between traditional hunting practices and new measures to protect endangered species, and between traditional or indigenous relations to the land and the setting aside of nature reserves and other conservation areas.
Nature Conservation in Taiwan under Japanese Colonial Rule
Ts’ui-jung Liu and Shi-yung Liu, Academia Sinica
Taiwan was ceded to Japan by the Ch’ing government in 1895 as a result of China’s defeat in the first Sino-Japanese War. Shortly after taking over this new territory, the Japanese colonial government in Taiwan initiated a series of investigations on the island’s endemic diseases, agriculture, industry, mining, aborigines, culture, and natural resources. These investigations were conducted by experts and scientists from Japan and laid the foundation for carrying out colonial policies in Taiwan. This paper will focus on aspects related to forest reservation and management in Taiwan during Japanese colonial period (1895–1945). Under the Board of Production of the Taiwan government-general, there were five divisions respectively in charge of agriculture, commerce, colonization, forest, and mining. Matters related to forest reservation and management were undertaken by divisions of colonization and forest. The former looked after forests in lower hilly areas while the latter those in the deep mountains. For archiving territory security, the colonial government had set up various forest reserves at different areas for different purposes, such as river source fostering, windbreak, earth, sand and stone restraint, prevention of inundation, as well as conservation of natural landscape. This paper will try to provide some details about the extent and effect of these policies.
Nature Conservation in Colonial Philippines
Lou R. de Leon-Bolinao and Arthur M. Navarro, University of the Philippines
Spain ceded the Philippines to the United States on December 10, 1898 after signing the Treaty of Paris and getting paid $20,000,000 for its former colony. After an exhaustive pacification campaign, the American government conducted a national census in 1903, and again in 1918, under the direction of the Philippine Commission. These detailed surveys included, among others, an intensive mapping of the country’s physical geography, an inventory of its natural resources, and a listing of the various produce of every Philippine province and island. This listing was compiled by the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey Office.
This paper will focus on the conservation policies promulgated and implemented by the American colonial government from 1898 to 1935, or up until the Philippine Commonwealth government was set in place. Such conservation efforts resulted, in a period less than four decades, in eleven national parks, two game refuge and bird sanctuaries, five forest reserves, one falls reserve, one provincial park, one hot spring park, one reservation for two ethnolinguistic groups, and eleven protected watersheds in various regions throughout the Philippines.
Interestingly, there is more than meets the eye in the creation of these reserves. Questions and speculations of personal motives, political maneuverings, and conflict of economic and social interests of the American colonizers were raised by the Philippine local elite. This paper will try to provide details about the extent and effect of these policies on both Philippine society and environment.
Nature Conservation in French Indochina
Micheline Lessard, Carthage College
Conservation in French Indochina developed along two channels: the protection of big game for hunting and the development of sustainable forestry. In contrast with the British, American and Dutch colonies, however, these two strands never united in the establishment of a system of nature reserves and measures for the protection of endangered species.
The protection of wild animals was geared mainly to the pastime of hunting: hunting reserves were established in regions not too remote from the main European population centres, and hunting licenses were sold for a fee. The hunting reserves were managed with a complicated system of closed seasons and protected zones, which were intended to ensure a sustainable supply of game for the hunters, but there was no attempt at systematic nature preservation. Similarly, forest reserves were created primarily to ensure the survival of a stock of valuable timber species, rather than to promote sustainable use.
France’s relatively undeveloped policies in Indochina can be attributed to several factors, including the absence of a significant forest plantation sector or a major trade in forest products (either of which might have focussed attention on issues of long-term stability), the weakness of French natural history research in Indochina (in comparison with cultural research) and the chaotic system of land tenure, which militated against any colony-wide policy on conservation.
Nature Conservation in Colonial Indonesia
Robert Cribb, Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Copenhagen
Nature conservation entered the administrative agenda in Indonesia in the late 19th century as part of a general movement in the Dutch colonial government towards a more scientific system of administration. Measures focused initially on identifying and protecting endangered species, mainly from commercial hunters and city-based sportsmen rather than from traditional hunting communities, with the controversy over bird-of-paradise hunting working to crystalize many of the issues involved. The debate was a strikingly modern one in which questions of sustainability, long-term and short-term economic benefit and the rights of indigenous peoples were all discussed extensively. Colonial policies eventually sought to make a sharp distinction between (tolerated) traditional practices conducted by local people and (highly regulated) modern hunting by outsiders, though devising the means to define this difference and then working out how to police it took many years. The establishment of nature reserves developed more slowly, partly because the idea of ecosystem protection was relatively new. The creation of reserves, however, was less easy to reconcile with indigenous rights and colonial Indonesia was given a conservation regime involving strict exclusion of all human activity from protected areas. Partly for this reason, nature conservation became closely associated with colonial power and privilege and received little sympathy from the Indonesian nationalist movement.