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By Charles Bedford
There are 30-foot snakes here that occasionally eat people, a two-foot ungulate that looks like a newborn bison when it's fully grown, and a chicken-sized bird that lays an egg as big as itself in a sand hole next to hot springs and volcanic fumaroles.
We are in the Central Sulawesi Highlands on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.
This was one of the Conservancy’s first projects in Indonesia, where we helped establish a scientific blueprint for the declaration of Lore Lindu National Park in 1993 and worked to resolve conflicts between the National Park Service and the local subsistence communities.
Our work here has included supporting sustainable livelihoods, like beekeeping and rattan harvesting, acting as a buffer and broker between village leaders and the National Park Service, developing park guides and training guards, and, most recently, creating a local NGO partner to carry on this work.
People: Our Most Valuable Conservation Tool
Our approach here is a prime example of what we do best--identifying places of high biodiversity and the threats to it, helping local communities achieve their visions, working with diverse groups to find common ground, and developing local conservation ethics.
The method we are using is to help define the rights of the indigenous land-users who do not have formal legal title to their lands. The benefit for conservation is the long-term sustainable management of resources.
War and Peace
Fifteen years ago, the communities that border Lore Lindu were in open warfare with park staff over the park border and timber harvesting, hunting and forest product gathering. The park had been expanded without much local input years before creating such resentment among the local people that park staff were not safe in the villages.
We now find ourselves in the peculiar role of broker between the local communities on the one hand, and the national government on the other.
We have completed something we call Community Conservation Agreements with 32 of the 70 villages that ring the park.
These agreements are individually negotiated by our staff, or the staff of a group called the Palm Foundation, typically over several years. They provide an informal land tenure or ownership to members of the village--allowing non-timber forest uses like gathering rattan, herbal medicines, fruits, pandana leaves for weaving, and damar (a resin used for paints and fuel) in a traditional-use zone.
A Win-Win for Everyone
The Park Service gets certainty that the boundaries and zoning of the park will be respected. And the community works with them to restore the forest in a long buffer strip they call the "Living Boundary"--planted with nutmeg trees and other native, high-value plants.
Each community with a conservation agreement participates in park patrols, planning, law enforcement, monitoring, restoration and program implementation. A long queue of villages is now waiting to sign up for a CCA.
The Conservancy’s Great Bear Rainforest project is a similar example of the resolution of competing claims for a forest. Here, native communities received economic assistance, timber companies got clear contracts to cut, and conservationists got areas protected and guarantees of sustainable forestry practices.
Similarly, in northern Kenya, we are working with tribal groups to improve their modern legal rights to traditional pasture in return for agreements to conserve migration corridors for elephants and other large mammals.
And in Mongolia, we are assistng herders with uncertain title around and within the nature reserves to receive assurances that their historic rights will be preserved in return for their agreement to implement sustainable grazing practices and help patrol the national park boundary.
Here in Sulawesi, conservation means participating in the evolution of a civil society. Stable local economic communities are the only hope this great landscape has of maintaining its ecological integrity.
Nature picture credits (top to bottom, left to right): Photo © Charles Bedford/TNC (Charles Explores); Photo © Charles Bedford/TNC (Beekeeping on Sulawesi).
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