What's New:
IPCA's Brochure on Preserving Living Landscapes in Asmat
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Take a virtual flyover of New Guinea and Asmat...
Watch video of IPCA presentations at the 2004 MountainFilm symposium on New Guinea
Forest Stewards
Forest Stewards is a new initiative carried out in partnership with Conservation International and the New Jersey School of Conservation to work with traditional communities in the rainforests of New Guinea to document and help conserve their cultural and natural resources. Forest Stewards (FS) will help communities document their language and traditional knowledge, which in turn, will be used to establish knowledge-based enterprises and generate local employment. The project aims to establish an alternative to extractive and destructive means of generating income, such as mining and logging, and to generate local prosperity while conserving the cultural and biological resources of the society.
Forest Stewards will assist each interested community in forming a partnership with an institution, such as a museum or university, which will provide funding in exchange for the right to study and preserve the knowledge, art and other material culture of the society. The community’s relationship to their environment and the value they place on their culture will be reinforced by the documentation of their language and traditional knowledge. They will become stewards of their environment, their culture and their language.The program will result in a community able to host cultural and scientific tourism with local guides knowledgeable of cultural traditions and the rainforests they inhabit.
Forest Stewards is currently working
in its pilot phase with the Hewa people in the heart
of Papua New Guinea’s rainforests. After this initial
phase, FS plans to replicate the project in traditional
forest societies throughout Melanesia.