Western Pacific

Abstract

The forests of the Western Pacific range from tropical in Oceania tocool temperate in the Australian state of Tasmania, and all have beenmanipulated by humans for thousands of years. Indigenous communitiesacross the Western Pacific used forest resources for food, medicine, andraw materials, based on an intimate knowledge of local ecologies,understood though a cosmological lens. Differing colonial histories haveinfluenced the degree to which traditional knowledge has been retainedand valued. New Zealand Maori and Aboriginal Australians lost their landand much associated knowledge, whereas customary forms of land tenureare largely intact across the oceanic Pacific, where traditionalknowledge continues to underpin integrated systems of subsistenceagriculture and forest use. Traditional forest-related knowledge isthreatened by modernity across the Western Pacific, and its diminutionhas been linked with deforestation in the Pacific Islands, with calls bynon-governmental organisations (NGOs) and local people to replacelarge-scale commercial logging with more sustainable systems that givemore credence to traditional knowledge. In Australia and New Zealand,indigenous people are partnering with government agencies to ensuretheir cultural values are adequately recognised and protected inpublicly owned forests.