ABSTRACT
Since the mid nineteen-eighties Nuaulu living on the edge of lowland rainforest 1 in central Seram, Maluku, have become increasingly active in countering threats to their traditional resource base. This latter has been dramatically eroded, mainly through government-sponsored settlement and logging. Nuaulu have successfully defended land claims in the courts, there have been violent incidents at a nearby transmigration area leading to their imprisonment, and in their representations to outsiders they have become articulate about the damage done to their environment. However, Nuaulu have a long history of interaction with ‘the outside world’, of forest modification and participation in the market. They were politically engaged as early as the Dutch wars of the late seventeenth century and have been indirectly, and, more recently, directly subject to the oscillations and economic fall-out of the spice trade ever since. The seventies and eighties of the present century have seen the expansion of cash-cropping, together with accelerated rates of land sale and forest extraction.
