Here’s an interesting story. John Neidel from Yale went to Kerinci Seblat National Park on Sumatra, a supposedly pristine wilderness. There are two villages inside the park, accessible only by foot, which, according to Neidel, are generally seen by conservationists as encroachments. Neidel did a bit of poking around, and found something like 40 former village sites, some with evidence of moats around them, some with large stones. Some of the villagers have documents supporting their residency that go back to the seventeenth century.

Neidel’s take seemed to me to be that there is an underlying bias in conservation circles towards this “pristine wilderness” idea. It seems that evidence of long-term habitation by villagers was overlooked or ignored in the efforts to save the forest there. “instead of the people encroaching on the national park, one could say that the national park is encroaching on them,” he said.