A significant contribution to political ecology, Conservation Is Our Government Now is an ethnographic examination of the history and social effects of conservation and development efforts in Papua New Guinea. Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted over a period of seven years, Paige West focuses on the Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area, the site of a biodiversity conservation project implemented between 1994 and 1999. She describes the interactions between those who ran the program—mostly ngo workers—and the Gimi people who live in the forests surrounding Crater Mountain. West shows that throughout the project there was a profound disconnect between the goals of the two groups. The ngo workers thought that they would encourage conservation and cultivate development by teaching Gimi to value biodiversity as an economic resource. The villagers expected that in exchange for the land, labor, food, and friendship they offered the conservation workers, they would receive benefits, such as medicine and technology. In the end, the divergent nature of each group’s expectations led to disappointment for both. West reveals how every aspect of the Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area—including ideas of space, place, environment, and society—was socially produced, created by changing configurations of ideas, actions, and material relations not only in Papua New Guinea but also in other locations around the world. Complicating many of the assumptions about nature, culture, and development underlying contemporary conservation efforts, Conservation Is Our Government Now demonstrates the unique capacity of ethnography to illuminate the relationship between the global and the local, between transnational processes and individual lives.

J. L. Gressitt New Guinea is a fantastic island, unique and fascinating. It is an area of incredible variety of geomorphology, biota, peoples, languages, history, tradi tions and cultures. Diversity is its prime characteristic, whatever the subject of interest. To a biogeographer it is tantalizing, as well as confusing or frustrating when trying to determine the history of its biota. To an ecologist, and to all biologists, it is a happy hunting ground of endless surprises and unanswered questions. To a conservationist it is like a dream come true, a "flash-back" of a few centuries, as well as a challenge for the future. New Guinea is so special that it is hard to compare it with other islands or tropical areas. It is something apart, with its very complicated history (chapters I: 2-4, II: 1-4, III: I, VI: I, 2). It is partly old but to a great extent very young, yet extremely rich and complex. It has biota of different sources - to such a degree that it is still disputed in this volume as to what Realm it belongs to: the Paleotropical or Notogaean (Australian); or what Region: Oriental, "Oceanic," Papuan or Australian. The terms Papuasian, Indo-Australian and Australasian also have been applied to the area.

Andrew Mack immersed himself in a vast expanse of roadless, old growth rainforest of Papua New Guinea in 1987. He and his co-investigator Debra Wright, built a research station by hand and lived there for years. Their mission was to study the secretive and perhaps most dinosaur-like creature still roaming the planet: the cassowary. The ensuing adventures of this unorthodox biologistOCostudying seeds found in cassowary droppings (pekpek), learning to live among the indigenous PawaiOCOia, traversing jungles, fighting pests and loneliness, struggling against unscrupulous oil speculators, and moreOCoare woven into a compelling tale that spans two decades.a Mack shares the insights he garnered about rainforest ecology while studying something as seemingly mundane as cassowary pekpek. He ultimately gained profound insight into why conservation is failing in places like Papua New Guinea and struggled to create a more viable strategy for conserving some of EarthOCOs last wild rainforests."

Stepping into the New Guinea rainforest is like entering a time machine, according to Tim Flannery. There, animals unknown anywhere else except as fossils continue to flourish within scarcely disturbed ecological communities. In this beautifully illustrated guide, Flannery presents the most complete information available about the natural history and systematics of New Guinea's unique mammals. For this revised edition, the author has expanded and completely revised his acclaimed handbook on the natural history and systematics of New Guinea's unique mammals.