Panel H: Southeast Asian environmentalism: frameworks, discourses and networks

Panel H: Southeast Asian environmentalism: frameworks, discourses and networks
Convenor: Dr Liana Chua, (Brunel University)

This panel sought to interrogate different forms and meanings of environmentalism in the context of Southeast Asia. Approaching the topic from different disciplinary angles and over different time-scales, the papers pushed beyond a conventional definition of ‘environmentalism’ as a predominantly Western, urban/middle-class movement, showing how analogous modes of relating to the environment (broadly defined) could be identified in Southeast Asia – sometimes to surprising effect.

Historian Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells (Cambridge) opened the proceedings with a paper on the genealogy of Euro-American environmentalism and its dissemination – but also transformation – across Southeast Asia in recent decades. Linking 18th–19th century European understandings of the stewardship of nature with contemporary debates about sustainable development, she depicted environmentalism in Southeast Asia today as a multiplicitous, potentially empowering, phenomenon that transcends national, ethnic, class and other boundaries.

Palaeoecologist Chris Hunt (Queen’s University Belfast) took the panel into the realm of prehistory, with a discussion of three Sarawak-based projects on which he has worked: excavations at Niah, Loagan Bunut, and the Kelabit Highlands. Drawing on his analysis of pollen and other vegetation samples, he showed how, far from being pristine and untouched, the forests in these areas were in fact artefacts bearing a long history of human use and management. In conclusion, he discussed how archaeological findings from the Kelabit Highlands were being used as legal evidence in Kelabit land claims, particularly in response to the recent encroachment of logging companies.

If Hunt sought to insert humans back into nature, historian Greg Bankoff (Hull University) revealed the impossibility of extracting nature from human society. Expounding on the notion of ‘deep forestry’, Bankoff argued that scholars might ‘think more like a forest’ by acknowledging the agentive role of the climate, soil and different animal species (among other things) in shaping the Philippine forests over an extended time period, from prehistory up to the present. Like Hunt, then, Bankoff made a strong case for recognising the confluence – and mutual dependence – of humans and forests across history and social formations.

Liana Chua’s paper brought the panel back to the 2000s through a study of the complex and shifting manifestations of ‘environmentalism’ in a dam-construction project in Sarawak. Based on recent social anthropological fieldwork, it revealed how the Bidayuh inhabitants of four villages around the dam have become entangled in various environmentalist and indigenous rights campaigns. Despite seeming to be in natural sympathy with the environmentalist cause, however, these people also have their own concerns, hopes, agendas and means of apprehending the situation. Drawing on their stories, Chua suggested that environmentalism could be fruitfully studied in terms of processes and effects rather than in terms of shared origins and intentions.

Jonathan Rigg (Durham University) drew together the themes and debates of the four papers in his discussion. This led into an intense and productive question and answer session, during which participants grappled with several related issues, including the potentials (and pitfalls) of multi-disciplinarity, the politics of environmentalism and academic research, the delicate balance between socio-economic survival and sustainability, and the differences between past and present modes of environmentalist thought.