Introduction: On Island Futures - Island Futures: Conservation and Development Across the Asia-Pacific Region - page 2

to the uncertainties of climate change, their political dependencies, their common
relative economic insignificance as price takers in the global economy, and their
frequent reliance on tourism. Their exchange with the outside world requires that they
adopt standardized legal and economic regimes, yet their internal organization must
also correspond to the cultural needs and social justice claims of aboriginal and local
populations, as well as the ecological needs of native and endemic species. In short,
islands confront the full range of problems found in the larger world, but on reduced
scales and with particular concentration: on islands such problems are amplified by
compression (Percy et al. 2007 : 193).
This volume gathers together a range of papers concerned with island develop-
ment and conservation in the Asia-Pacific region. Individual papers consider the
benefits, barriers, and potential pitfalls in preserving special territories and sites,
managing specific biota, and attracting while controlling tourism; they describe the
cultural artifacts, practices, and mentalities that have created and supported tradi-
tional cultural ecologies and economies, or that may contribute to new ones.
Futurability and RIHN
Most of the papers collected in this volume were first presented as part of an inter-
national symposium sponsored by the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature
(RIHN) located (somewhat suggestively) in Kyoto, Japan. RIHN was established
by the government of Japan in 2001 to conduct interdisciplinary research on, and
suggest solutions to, key environmental problems. The institute is engaged in the
pursuit of various fixed-term research projects, of which there were 15 underway
in 2010, while 11 have been completed and their results disseminated (including as
several chapters in this volume).
As a group, the papers presented here are concerned with island “futurability”, or
future potential. The term is not common in the English language: it emerges from
a particular tradition of environmental thought and deserves some explanation.
Much of the discussion of RIHN's approach to environmental study that follows is
drawn from a working paper drafted by Narifumi Tachimoto, the Director-General
of the institute and a cultural anthropologist by training, and Daniel Niles, a human
geographer (Tachimoto and Niles 2010 ). The paper is one iteration of an ongoing
discussion established at RIHN by Professor Tachimoto and centered around the
seminar 'Environmental Humanics of the Earth System'.
RIHN's research projects are diverse; they take up a range of research problems
and often involve a combination of methods of the natural and social sciences and
humanities ( www.chikyu.ac.jp/index_e.html ). They share a common foundation,
however: all investigate environmental phenomena from the point of view of the
human experience of, and human impacts on, those phenomena. Essentially, RIHN
is concerned with the critical description of “humanity in the midst of a dynamic,
changeable nature” (RIHN 2010 ). This approach to environmental study calls for a
respectful balance between different traditions of knowledge - those stretching
back millennia as well as those of the contemporary sciences - and has little