Environmental Influences on the Development of Traditional Conservation in the South Pacific Region

Abstract

There is an urgent need for improved understanding of conservation attitudes in the Third World because of the increasing rate of resource depletion that is now occurring in the countries involved. Although conservation practices by traditional societies in the Third World have received much attention from research workers, the fact that some practices are intentional and others inadvertent has been largely ignored. However, it is the motivation for these intentional conservation measures and the environmental influences on the people who apply them, which is crucial to understanding variations in conservation behaviour among traditional societies.Traditional conservation in the South Pacific was based on a complex system of resource-use taboos which prevented overexploitation in the limited island environment. These taboos contributed to the achievement during pre- European times of what appears from historical accounts to have been a state of relative equilibrium between island populations and their resources.Predictability and extremeness are two environmental factors which are thought to affect the development of conservational behaviour. Both these factors were examined in the light of traditional conservation in the South Pacific. Droughts and hurricanes are the two main sources of environmental unpredictability in the South Pacific, although the islands vary considerably in the degree to which they are affected by them. It was concluded that a distinction between real and perceived environmental predictability was necessary before one could fully understand the influence of predictability upon the development of conservational behaviour in the South Pacific.