Muddied Waters: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Management of Forests and Fisheries in Island Southeast Asia

Environmental History, Apr 2007 by Tamir, Dan

Muddied Waters: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Management of Forests and Fisheries in Island Southeast Asia. Edited by Peter Boomgaard, David Henley, and Manon Osseweijer. Leiden, The Netherlands: KITLV Press, 2005. via 418 pp. Illustrations, bibliographies, indexes. Paper euro35.00.

As implied by its name, Muddied Waters is a collection of articles about the past and the present condition of forests and fisheries in Southeast Asia, with some predictions about their future. While the articles refer largely to Indonesia, some deal with issues from the Philippines and Malaysia. Each of the two parts of the volume-one about fisheries and one about forests-brings examples of histories of sustainability as well as processes of depletion, analyzing the connections between development, trade, technology, and exploitation from different points of view while using a wide set of case studies. Although most of the articles concentrate on the last two centuries, some go back further in their attempts to analyze either past events or long biological and social processes.

This collection of articles is the outcome of a conference held at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) in Leiden. It can be considered as part of a series of publications investigating the environmental history of Southeast Asia, together with Smallholders and Stockbreeders, a previous collection by the same editors that examines histories of food crops and livestock in that region (see review by Michael Lewis in the July 2006 issue of this journal).

It seems that the editors felt there was a bit of a problem with bringing the two themes of the collection together. In the introduction, David Henley writes that "in retrospect, the attempt to draw parallels between fishing and forest exploitation was perhaps far-fetched" (p. 16). This judgment is too harsh in my opinion; for even today, fishing and wood gathering still make up the two primary consumer activities most directly based on common resources. However, because today's commons are measured on a global scale, more attention to the global economic factors accelerating the depletion of those resources could have been useful (in addition to James Fox's thrilling "Lament for the Seas and Forests of Indonesia"). Although the book misses the chance of making a global point out of the Southeast Asian example, one can hope that in the future the editors of this series will connect those local phenomena by putting them in a wider context.

Comprising more than a dozen articles, each dealing with an aspect of fisheries or forests and the people who live with them, this collection would be of interest to scholars and students who are interested either in fishery or forestry, or in the history of the region. It should interest environmental historians, economists, and sociologists, as well as scholars of development and-maybe to a lesser extent-conservationists.

Altogether, Muddied Waters provides a thorough account of two fragile ecosystems in one of our planet's most intriguing environmental hotspots. In illuminating the past human influence on these ecosystems, it can make a significant contribution to the efforts of managing them sustainably in the future.

Dan Tamir is a graduate student at the Institute of Environmental Sciences at the University of Zurich. His current research deals with alien species introduction in Israel.