Introduction: On Island Futures - Island Futures: Conservation and Development Across the Asia-Pacific Region - page 1

Chapter 1
Introduction: On Island Futures
Daniel Niles and Godfrey Baldacchino
If the world is composed of seamless flows of matter and energy, of messy bundles
and movements, of unceasing change and expansive diversity, islands can help us
to perceive how this flux is resolved in particular places. Since the revealing field-
work of Charles Darwin (1859) and Alfred Wallace (1880) , islands have allowed
and encouraged the astute observer to conceive of and describe “biogeography”:
how land, climate, weather, flora and fauna exist in concert and co-partake in the
struggle for life, and how the human mind has envisaged, and the human hand has
affected, these features through time (e.g. Grove 1995 ). In this light, islands are
hardly insular and ought not be studied in isolation. Rather, they exist in the open,
as iterations, and offer privileged glimpses of quintessentially fluid “entanglements
of life” (Ingold 2008 ). They invite comparative study and offer lessons of particular
experience and of natural and cultural history more generally (Baldacchino 2004 ).
If much description has been largely concerned with how islands have come to be
as they are - consequences of erosion, coralline growth or volcanic eruption; objects
of colonial discovery; playful yet suggestive figments of the human imagination - this
volume is primarily concerned with how islands might be in the future.
Islands and their biota - human and otherwise - face and represent one of the most
pressing issues of our time: how to balance ecological integrity with economic devel-
opment and collective quality of life, including the need for social and conservation
space. In the contemporary world, islands are recognized as sites of rich and varied
human and ecological diversity, but they are also characterized by narrow resource
bases and dependency on links to the outside world, and by their limited ability to
determine the actual character of those links. Island societies must recognize their
perennial openness to invasion, and have no choice but to address their vulnerability