The Epistemology of Sustainable Resource Use: Managing Forest Products, Swiddens, and High- Yielding Variety Crops

Abstract

This study examines the moral ecology of resource use through a comparison of the ideological bases of three systems of resource use in Southeast Asia: gathering forest products (viz., forest fruit), swidden agriculture, and the cultivation of high-yielding variety, green revolution crops. A trade-off between the magnitude of return and the frequency of return is accepted in the first two systems, but this is denied in the third system in which there is, instead, insistence on continuous, high-magnitude returns. In the fruit- gathering and swidden cultivation systems there is recognition of linkages to the wider temporal and spatial processes in which they are embedded, but in the green revolution system there is only a very narrow view of these linkages. Whereas the necessity of reciprocal exchange with their wider social and natural environments is accepted in the first two systems, such exchanges are minimized in the green revolution system. This study contributes to current debates about sustainable resource use, the conception of nature and culture, and the epistemology of science and the contemporary role of anthropology.