Environment
Saving Island Ecosystems
Bureaucrats And Traditional Leaders Debate The Issues At Palau’s
Nearly 300 delegates from across the Pacific region gathered in Palau from June 24 to June 28 for the 21st Annual Pacific Islands Environment Conference sponsored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Pacific Islands Office. The PIEC typically focuses on technical and regulatory aspects of environmental protection, and this year’s conference was no exception, with panels on waste management, safe drinking water, invasive species, coral reef protection and climate change.
However, the theme this year, "Merging Tradition with Modern Technology," recognized that traditional island communities often have their own unique solutions for managing the environment. As Pearl Marumoto of the Palau Environmental Quality Protection Board explained, "We need to look to our own cultures, our own ways of doing things, our own conservation technologies."
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Conference attendees emphasized that the best-laid Pacific Island conservation measures will founder without the support of traditional leadership and the broader community.
At a conference session on Coral Reef and Marine Protected Areas, Alan Friedlander, a fisheries ecologist at the Oceanic Institute of Hawai‘i, explained that Hawai‘i has had much greater success protecting coral reefs in areas where traditional culture has survived.
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Similarly, in a panel on watershed management and implementation, Simpson Abraham, the director of the Kosrae Resource Management Program in the Federated States of Micronesia, related that "the people of Kosrae outright rejected a land-use plan because they had no say in it."
During the coral reef panel, Noah Idechong, a Palauan legislator and internationally renowned environmentalist, agreed that Pacific Islanders do not take kindly to outsiders dictating what should be done to their lands and reefs. While government-created conservation areas like Ngardok Lake on Palau’s big island of Babeldaob are not always respected, a customary enforcement mechanism called a bul, a monetary fine imposed by traditional chiefs, has led to much greater compliance at Babeldaob’s Ngeremlengui conservation area. Idechong also explained that he had turned to village chiefs—not to American bureaucrats or even the Palau national government—for help when Palauan fish stocks plummeted because of over-fishing in the 1980s.
The chiefs implemented a widely respected temporary ban on fishing in certain areas, which led to the recovery of the fish population.
Honolulu Mayor Jeremy Harris made a similar point in his keynote address concerning the conservation system of traditional Hawaiians. Indigenous Hawaiians, he noted, had konohiki, people whose job it was to manage and control resource use. Moreover, Hawaiians traditionally used sustainable methods, Harris said, referring to ahupua‘a, a land-use system that took into account watershed management, forest areas and marine environments. "There were 800,000 people living sustainably in traditional Hawaiian culture," he said. "Then the West came with a new paradigm, and we are still feeling that paradigm shift."
Conference participants spent some time addressing this collision of cultures, with particular concern about the fate of island communities if Western-ization and development eradicate traditional culture. These worries were perhaps most eloquently voiced by young people, who posed questions to the "leadership panel" on the conference’s final day. "It seems greed is so much more important to us than our lives, our heritage and our dreams," said 15-year-old Obichang Ongklungel. "But what good is that money if the wallets of men continue to grow, but the land that we stand on continues to sink?"
However, the general tone of the conference was hopeful. Harris epitomized this spirit in his keynote address. Every island must decide for itself what it wants to look like, he said. "Island nations face tremendous challenges, but we also have a unique opportunity. We can be the model ecosystem. We have a unique responsibility to lead our communities through their challenges."
