Rhetoric, Practice and Incentive in The Face Of the Changing Times - A Case-Study in Nuaulu Attitudes to Conservation and Deforestation

"In this paper I examine Nuaulu attitudes to a rainforest environment as these are reflected in their use of it over a 25 year period, and especially in their reactions to commercial logging and changes wrought by Indonesian government transmigration policy in the nineteen-eighties. My main focus is on how the Nuaulu reconcile a new ecological and political order which happens to work for the present to their advantage, or at least to the advantage of some of them, with a 'traditional' set of beliefs which are underpinned by an entirely different set of cultural assumptions. Existing shared knowledge of how nature works, of how in different contexts it interacts with and contrasts with that shared abstraction which we call 'culture,' presently co-exist with views which challenge this consensus, views brought about and sustained by wholesale transformation of the rainforest and the apparent possibility that humans can extract from the environment at levels previously non-comprehendable. The rhetoric of which I speak in the title is in the form of public and semi-public utterances and pronouncements which address directly or indirectly the changes, adjustments and values implicit in Nuaulu representations and utilisation of nature. The practices refer to both the routine daily patterns of subsistence and social interaction, and the incentive to those changes in their environment which they perceive - or are persuaded to believe - offer new opportunities.

"I begin by stating briefly the history of Nuaulu settlement between 1850 and 1970, and summarising the position on land tenure as it existed between 1970 and 1980. I go on to examine the consequences of logging, local spontaneous immigration, government-controlled transmigration and new patterns of Nuaulu extraction in the Ruatan valley to which these led. I conclude by noting the effects of recent changes on forest extraction, in the light of Nuaulu conceptualisation of forest and in relation to theories of the degradation of the commons."