Introduction: On Island Futures - Island Futures: Conservation and Development Across the Asia-Pacific Region - page 7

Islands are helpful in this task; they are, as John Gillis ( 2007 ) reminds us,
echoing Gilles Deleuze ( 2004 : 9), “good to think with”. The island is a master
metaphor capable of representing a multitude of things, processes, emotions:
fragmentation and vulnerability, wholeness and safety, loss and recovery, paradise
and purgatory, quarantine, exile and asylum, separation and continuity, isolation
and connection, past and future, origins and extinctions (Gillis 2004 : 3). We invite
the readers of this volume to judge for themselves and, perhaps, to nourish hope for
what is to come: the future of islands is also our future.
October 2010
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