TY - CHAP T1 - Patterns of resource use and human settlement in tropical forests T2 - Tropical rain forest ecosystems: Structure and function Y1 - 1983 A1 - Christine Padoch A1 - Andrew P. Vayda ED - F. B. Golley KW - rainforests AB -

Criticisms of traditional resource use patterns in the tropics as wasteful and inefficient predominated in the literature in the past, but has given way in recent years to praise of the stability and conservativeness of these technologies. Such revised views are not surprising and are at least partially justified. They reflect the realization that traditional resource users usually allowed tropical forests to survive or at least to largely regenerate, whereas modern, fossil fuel-using man is expected to destroy these forests within the next century. However, in stressing the long-term persistence of traditional patterns, the: necessity" and universality of some techniques and the self-sufficience and integrity of pre-modern resource use systems, commentators have done justice neither to the complexity nor the variability -- temporal, spatial, and technological -- of traditional human accommodations to tropical forests.

In this chapter, the authors review some of the conventional ways of viewing and classifying traditional resource use patterns, then point out some of the limitations of these familiar typologies, and finally discuss actual subsistence and settlement patterns in tropical forests, and comment on prospects for development of these areas.

In most broad discussions of indigenous resource use, some typology of food-getting technologies and/or of crops, crop types or crop assemblages, is meant to subsume the basic patterns of livelihood of all traditional groups. The division of technologies into hunting-gathering, shifting, cultivation, and permanent-field cropping is probably most familiar and commonly employed. These three very broad divisions of the spectrum of traditional subsistence, often erroneously assumed to be a necessary evolutionary sequence, are used by anthropologists and geographers to designate different levels of intensity of land resource use, as well as to differentiate levels of control and modification of forest environments. Observers have generally considered the following practices and patterns, technological and social, to be characteristic of these three very general types.

JF - Tropical rain forest ecosystems: Structure and function T3 - Ecosystems of the world no. 14A PB - Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company CY - New York UR - http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/7576493 ER - TY - CHAP T1 - Exploitation in southeast Asia T2 - Tropical rain forest ecosystems: Biogeographical and ecological studies Y1 - 1982 A1 - K. Kartawinata A1 - T. C. Jessup A1 - Andrew P. Vayda ED - H. Leith ED - M. J. A. Werger KW - rainforests KW - southeast Asia AB -

The area we cover is insular Southeast Asia, or Melanesia, comprising the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea. The countries of mainland Southeast Asia are excluded, as they contain little tropical rain forest. Our own research experience leads us to focus mainly on Indonesia.

We consider three categories of exploitation: logging, rattan collection, and shifting cultivation. All are economically important in Southeast Asia and all have had increasingly widespread and deleterious effects in the last few decades. We first describe an example of "traditional" (that is, non-mechanized) logging, from the remote Apo Kayan region of the Indonesian province of East Kalimantan on the island of Borneo. Timber cutting in the Apo Kayan is still largely for local use, and employs means that must have been more widespread in Borneo in pre-industrial times. It is far less environmentally destructive than modern commercial logging in lowland dipterocarp forests, which is a subject we also consider. We then turn to rattan collection, drawing especially on the work of Dransfield, who has considered the relation of rattan biology to methods of management and conservation. The last section is a discussion of some aspects of shifting cultivation. (author)

JF - Tropical rain forest ecosystems: Biogeographical and ecological studies T3 - Ecosystems of the world no. 14B PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam UR - http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/21303776 N1 - Chapter 34 ER -