Southeast Asia—Sacred Forests and Human-Environment Relations

Abstract

The tropical moist broadleaf forests of Southeast Asia account for about 15% of the world’s tropical forests and contain the highest biological diversity of any biome in Asia. Southeast Asia’s forests were long regarded as pristine, essentially undisturbed by humans before an ecological holocaust of commercial logging was unleashed in the 1970s, but this is not the case. Human niche construction has shaped the realm’s forest ecosystems throughout the 12,000 years of the Holocene, and recent evidence suggests that Pleistocene cave dwellers in northern Borneo used fire to modify forest ecosystems as far back as 50,000 years ago. European colonization of Southeast Asia began with the Portuguese conquest of the Sultanate of Malacca and spread to include the Spanish Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, British Burma, British Malaya, and the colonies making up French Indochina. Colonial forestry in Southeast Asia achieved its highest levels of systematic exploitation in the teak plantations of British Burma.