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Introduction: The extent of the environmental and social problems that accompany deforestation in the Tropics has become a major concern all over the world. In discussing causes of deforestation and genetic erosion in countries with tropical rain forests, many planners and decision makers point the finger at upland farmers who practice "shifting cultivation" or "swidden farming." Policy-related descriptions of shifting cultivation often highlight the purported damage brought about by the slashing and burning of vegetation, soil erosion, and downstream siltation and flooding (Bandy, Garrity, and Sanchez 1993). Far less attention had been paid to the positive impacts and/or contributions of swidden farming such as the enhancement of soil fertility and decreases in soil acidity by plan ashes (Lawrence, Peart, and Leighton 1998
Lawrence and Schlesinger 2001), creation of habitat for species adapted for early successional stages (Brosius 1990
Conklin 1959
Wharton 1968), and even the creation and maintenance of floral and faunal diversity. The same is true of the relationship between shifting cultivation and local biological diversity (Conklin 1967a, 1980), the coevolution of swidden farmers and their environment (Collins 1986
Fujisaka 1986), or the ecological advantages of swidden farming in tropical conditions (Fox et al. 2000
Kleinman, Pimentel, adn Bryant 1995
Rambo 1984
Thrupp, Hecht, and Browder 1997). Equally important, the practices subsumed under the term <i>shifting cultivation</i> (e.g., use of fire, minimum tillage, and natural and/or enhanced fallow [see Conklin 1961]) are typically not sufficiently differentiated to make it possible to understand the positive as well as negative impacts of each one. The same holds true for differentiation between shifting cultivation and the other agricultural activities that typically accompany it within a larger, composite agricultural system (shifting cultivation is rarely the only agricultural activity practiced by an upland community [Conklin 1980
Dove 1993a
Mahmud 1992
Padoch, Harwell, and Susanto 1998
Pelzer 1978]). The environmental problems attributed to shifting cultivation can often be traced to the practices of migrant farmers who follow commercial logging operations into the uplands and open swiddens in logged areas but who lack both the proper incentives and the necessary technological knowledge for sustainable swidden cultivation (Brookfield and Bryon 1993
Cleary and Eaton 1992). There is growing evidence that traditional upland peoples, who have acquired extensive knowledge over time about their local environments, possess sound management technologies for sustainable agricultural production ad resource utilization (Conklin 1957, 1980
Olofson 1981
Dove 1985b
Pei 1991). This study builds on these earlier descriptions of indigenous, upland environmental knowledge in two ways. First, I explore the traditional subsistence production system in an ethnic minority upland community in the Philippines that is in transition. My goal is to identify indigenous mechanisms and other factors that enhance biodiversity conservation even under conditions of change. I focus less on the various elements that comprise the swidden system or any other subsystem alone and more on how swidden cultivation along with a number of other land use systems articulate with one another to make up a successful, composite system of upland agriculture. The second objective of this study is to develop methodologies for correlating the productivity and sustainability of different land uses (and at different hierarchical levels—e.g., species, field, and landscape) with variations in biodiversity conservation. Given the rapidity with which the environment is sometimes degraded, biologists’ traditional, multiyear studies of enclaves of natural vegetation seem increasingly inadequate. The value of the rapid methodologies examined here lies in their ability to identify surrogate measures that can help us to assess the state of the environment, and the factors that both threaten and support it, in a much shorter period of time.
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