Conservation and Corruption: Toward Environmentally Sustainable Development

 

Background: Today's Papua New Guineans are striving to engage in global commerce and assert themselves as a sovereign equal on the world stage at the same time they struggle to hold onto traditional values, languages, and life-ways. Papua New Guinea is internationally recognized and has historically been exploited for its vast natural resources, including gold, copper, nickel, and natural gas. Unfortunately, such industry has laid waste to the pristine environment in some areas of the country, and the continued threat of new industry is increasingly leading to native land rights disputes.

Key Issues: Biodiversity conservation
Growing ecotourism economy
Climate change
Traditional land and resource extraction

Panelists

 

Mary Theresa Boni

Ms.Boni, Senior Lawyer at the Environmental Law Center in Port Moresby, was educated at the University of PNG and now works to uncover evidence that widespread corruption and complicity in the Papua New Guinea government has allowed rampant, illegal logging, which is destroying the largest remaining intact block of tropical forest in the Asia Pacific region.

Dr. Stuart Kirsch

Dr. Kirsch is associate professor in the department of anthropology at the University of Michigan. He has carried out long-term fieldwork with the Yonggom or Muyu people, who are divided by the border between Papua New Guinea and West Papua, Indonesia. His research interests include ritual and myth, indigenous movements, political ecology, mining, lost tribes, political violence, and property. He is most recently the author of Reverse anthropology: Indigenous analysis of social and environmental relations in New Guinea (Stanford University Press, 2006). From 2007-2008, Kirsch was a postdoctoral fellow in the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University, where he began work on a new project on corporate responses to critique. Kirsch previously collaborated with a research group on cultural property rights at the University of Cambridge and recently received funding from ESRC-SSRC to collaborate with colleagues at the University of Manchester on mining conflicts in Latin America. He has consulted widely on indigenous rights and environmental issues, including work on mining and property rights in the Solomon Islands, compensation for damages caused by nuclear weapons testing in the Marshall Islands, conservation and development in the Lakekamu River Basin of Papua New Guinea, and the impacts of bauxite mining on Amerindian communities in Suriname.

Professor Kirsch received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1991 and taught for several years at Mount Holyoke College before coming to the University of Michigan in 1995. He has received grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright-Hays, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Economic and Social Research Council, the Social Science Research Council, and the Royal Anthropological Institute. He has held visiting appointments at the University of Cambridge and Goldsmiths’ College in London. At the University of Michigan he teaches undergraduate courses and graduate seminars on anthropology and history, environmental anthropology, indigenous movements, Melanesia, mining, and property.

Dr. Jerry Jacka

Dr. Jacka is a professor of environmental anthropology at the University of Texas at San Antonio. His fieldwork in the Porgera valley of the PNG Highlands focuses on international development, globalization, and natural resource management. Particularly, he has studied Porgeran people’s engagements with large-scale gold mining and the ensuing social and ecological changes stemming from resource extraction and economic development. He is also pursuing a long term project in this area on indigenous environmental knowledge and resource management and how religious conversion to Christianity influences ecological ideas and practices.

Panel Time and Location

Saturday, February 27, 3:15-4:45 bldg 320-105 (Geology Corner Lecture Hall)