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This paper explores the major interactions between the transformation of swidden farming and the pursuit of rural livelihoods in the uplands of Southeast Asia. The paper draws on selected literature, workshop reflections, and six case studies to describe the causal processes and livelihood consequences of swidden change. Household-level livelihood responses have included both the intensification and ‘dis-intensification’ of swidden land-use, the insertion of cash crops, the redeployment of household labour, and the taking on of broader (often non-rural) livelihood aspirations and strategies. At the community level there have been emerging institutional arrangements for management of land and forests, and varying degrees of participation in or resistance to government schemes and programs. Swidden change has led to the loss and also the reassertion, realignment, and redefinition of cultures and identities, with important implications for access to resources. The impacts of these changes have been varied. Cash crops have often improved livelihoods but complete specialisation for the market increases vulnerability. Thus swidden can still provide an important safety net in the face of market fluctuations. Improved access to markets and social provision of education and health care have mostly improved the welfare of previously isolated groups. However, growing differences within and between communities in the course of swidden transformations can leave some groups marginalized and worse off. These processes of differentiation can be accentuated by heavy-handed state interventions based on swidden stereotypes. Nevertheless, communities have not passively accepted these pressures and have mobilized to protect their livelihood assets and strategies. Thus swidden farmers are not resisting appropriate and supportive forms of development. They are adopting new practices and engaging with markets, but in many situations swidden is still important to their livelihood strategies, providing resilience in the face of turbulent change. Active involvement of local people is essential in planning, implementing, monitoring and evaluating development and conservation programs in swidden lands. Positive market incentives and supportive government policies are better than standardised, top-down directives.

The actual evidence observed in studies of LEK (local environmental knowledge) is nearly always talk about the environment, or what we refer to as LET (local environmental talk), with the claim of studying LEK usually being built upon the implicit assumption that talk about the environment is the expression of knowledge about the environment. We suggest that it is critically important for researchers to question this assumption, especially when the distinction between LET and LEK is also emphasized by local people themselves. In the case we present here, residents of small fishing villages on the Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland are routinely skeptical about what other local residents say about the environment; that is, they engage in LES (local environmental skepticism). We suggest that paying explicit attention to LES can help distinguish LEK from LET.

In a number of places, sacred forest sites play an important role in conservation and local livelihoods. Here we examine how Iban hunters and animals alike use sacred forest in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. To determine the relative importance of different sites in hunting, we compare hunting effort, animal species and their numbers encountered by hunters, and encounters and captures in a variety of forest sites including sacred groves. We relate the results to the role of such sites in the overall Iban agroforestry system and in the conservation of forest habitat that professional conservationists deem precious. Such land use practices, while having social and religious origins, may be important for local economic purposes, but they may also be valuable in promoting and enhancing the more global goals of biodiversity conservation.

Hunting by Iban forest farmers in West Kalimantan, Indonesia, is an important part of their subsistence economy, and as such became a focus of study as part of a conservation project in the Danau Sentarum Wildlife Reserve. In this paper, we examine Iban hunting of nonhuman primates with comparison to other large mammals. We analyze rates of encounter and capture, comparing encounters, hunting trips, and animal numbers. Information on habitats hunted shows the importance of secondary and old growth forest. Also examined are Iban attitudes, game preferences, and taboos. The significance of these findings is discussed with regard to the threats to wildlife from increases in the use of shotguns, human population, and habitat destruction, showing that conservation may be aided by promoting or enhancing certain aspects of the traditional Iban agroforestry system.

The broad theme that motivated this collection of case studies is the issue of enhancing conservation outcomes by better incorporating the vast and intimate knowledge and traditions of people closest to and dependent on the area in need of being conserved—conserving natural areas through promoting the cultures of those who have often had a hand in creating or preserving those resources, thus keeping people “in” nature rather than separating them from it (p. 20). Over the course of the last decade or so, this idea has become fairly axiomatic among anthropologists and other social scientists involved in conservation, and the present volume represents a swath of that consensus and is drawn from studies funded in part by a MacArthur Foundation grant to the two lead editors. The fact that I feel like part of the converted being preached to while knowing that there are plenty of others resistant to such ideas means that the conclusions of these studies are very much needed, at once to support those of us who argue for the same things and to challenge those who still regard local people as the fundamental problem. A wide-ranging project produces wide-ranging research, and that is certainly the sense provided by the case studies highlighted here. This diversity, however, is not a bad thing, and the editors make no apologies for it. To introduce the case studies, they provide a conceptual overview outlining the central question: “where, in the interaction between society and environment across space and time, [is] conservation. . .being most successfully and least successfully achieved” (p. 7)? And in answer, they summarize the overall findings: (1) Southeast Asians have long changed their local environments and in doing so have conserved important natural resources; (2) conservation directed and imposed from above generally fails; (3) traditional agricultural landscapes are often important sites for biodiversity; and (4) issues of scale are critical as macro-level events and decisions affect local-level resource use. The case studies begin with Puri’s research on the historical ecology of Penan forest camps in East Kalimantan, Indonesia; the Penan have been one of the traditional foraging groups on Borneo, and Puri shows in his detailed analysis how their activities have affected the composition of the forest—positively from both the Penan and conservationist points of view. In her study of the Batek in Peninsular Malaysia, Lye shows the problematical relationship between professional conservation’s scientific model of the environment and the Batek’s, and Hum Ecol (2006) 34:871–872 DOI 10.1007/s10745-006-9046-9