Introduction: On Island Futures - Island Futures: Conservation and Development Across the Asia-Pacific Region - page 6

likely than not vote with their feet and migrate. On the other hand, of course, there
are far too many examples of glaringly misguided economic development on islands
leading to a deterioration of both cultural wealth and ecological integrity.
Islands are often sought out as temporary places of escape and recreation and
tourism offers many island communities a clear opportunity to gain valuable
foreign exchange. Yet, tourism places additional burdens on the local resource base
and can lead to increased economic disparity between island inhabitants. Nature
parks and reserves are intended to reduce the exposure of certain places to the full
force of economic development that results from mass tourism. In some cases,
protected status may, however, even magnify those effects: tourism often depends
on the construction and maintenance of the allure of paradise, of 'pristine' or ideal
island environments, and on providing special access to these resources. Yet, such
protective measures are predicated on a Eurocentric classification which, in its
modern project, delimits the world artificially between natural and social spheres
(e.g. Latour 1999 ). In so doing, 'conservation management' can run afoul not just
of the tourism industry's demands for access to what is socially constructed as
exotic, but also of the livelihood needs or traditional practices of local residents.
Only Connect
We therefore return to the essential question of linkages. On one hand, each island
society faces the practical problem of negotiating the kind and quality of its
exchange with the wider world. Islands provide hard evidence that, as Doreen
Massey ( 2005 : 6) reminds us, even in the age of rampant globalization, human
social life occurs in local places of astonishing variety, the nexus of “home-grown,
rooted authenticity of local specificity”. Contemporary societies live in the space of
global flows and yet places still matter, perhaps more than ever: the proclaimed
'end' or 'death' of geography, and the birth of the 'flat world', we contend, is mistaken.
Such naïve proclamations devalue “tacit knowledge” and trust building, which are
both person-embodied and context-dependent, and so need to be local, “nested-in-
place,” or spatially “sticky” (Morgan 2004 ; Baldacchino 2010 : 23).
But there is also a conceptual problem: as we discuss 'islands and mainlands',
'core and periphery', 'rural and urban', 'conservation and development', and even
'humanity and nature', too frequently our key descriptive categories appear as
antinomies, opposites, or at least as thoroughly separate entities (Niles 2009 ). In many
cases, these dichotomies are naïve, or derived from disciplinary or ideological
schisms. Places, contexts, and ideas are often actually co-constitutive : they create
and describe one another, which is not to claim that they are one and the same.
Our task is therefore to think as carefully as we can of and about the real social
and material flows that constitute 'places', and the real demands that these flows
bring to bear on particular peoples, on other life forms, and on the environments
which situate, sustain, and are defined by them.