Coastal marine resource management in the Pacific region

Abstract

The inaugural issue of Pacific Conservation Biology - A journal devoted to conservation and land management in the Pacific region contained some discussion of conflict between indigenous and Eurocentric attitudes to conservation. Ironically, a major conflict between indigenous and Eurocentric attitudes is illustrated by the secondary title of the journal itself. This conflict is not so much in the concept of conservation which, to the subsistence-level human components of the species-poor ecosystems of the insular Pacific, is a matter of pragmatic commonsense, but in the concept of "land" management. For most small-island peoples, there is no sharp dividing line between the land and the sea and "land" management is but a facet of "marine" management, and vice-versa. On the borderline between Melanesia and Polynesia, they have an appropriate word for this concept, the vanua, which labels the totality of terrestrial/marine space and resources available to a given sub-unit of the human population.