ABSTRACT
Across Melanesia, people have extracted wealth from their environment for centuries. In the pre-colonial period, the land and sea were the basis of physical and economic livelihood, central to the social worlds and cultural milieux that people inhabited. European contact and colonisation brought new ways of understanding and extracting elements of the environment, radically changing the significance of ‘natural resources’ in Melanesia. Mineral wealth motivated European expansion into the region, from Álvaro de Saavedra’s early and optimistic labelling of north coast New Guinea as Isla del Oro (‘Isle of Gold’) after his expeditions of the late 1520s, to the exploration of Papua New Guinea (PNG) by prospectors during the colonial period (1884–1975). The extension of the Australian alluvial gold mining rushes of the late nineteenth century into PNG occurred around the same time as the discovery and extraction of nickel in New Caledonia (Nelson 1976; Horowitz 2010). Mining and localised timber extraction to support colonial growth and development were common throughout the region. After PNG became independent in 1975, the mining sector was expanded by a succession of large-scale operations from the 1980s. Simultaneously, international capital transformed forestry in the Solomon Islands and PNG from the early 1980s onwards. Inshore fisheries were largely a local, subsistence industry up until the 1970s, when offshore fishing fleets started to exploit the oceanic resources of the region, especially in the Solomon Islands. Today, the extractive industries are a central component of most national economies in Melanesia. Their impacts, however, go much deeper (literally and figuratively): they disrupt and destroy ecosystems, fuel conflict and provide support for questionable political and governance regimes. As a result, they penetrate and transform national ideologies and local life-worlds to a profound degree.
