The Tagbanua of Malampaya sound : conserving nature as lifeways / Raoul Cola.

The TAGBANUA, the indigenous peoples in Malampaya Sound in Northern Palawan, kept their forests, rivers, and coasts in almost pristine state for thousands of years. Underpinned by the belief that the natural environment is a spiritual world, they evolved ways of life that maintain all its ecological processes and nurture all its life forms. Woven into their endeavors-from routine food production activities to their passage of life cycle stages of birth, marriage, and death-, are strategies that safeguard the productivity and resilience of ecosystems and the population and diversity of species. While struggling to survive in the modern world amid the aduancing forces of short-sighted and short-term economic interests, the Tagbanua showed that we can live on nature without destroying it. The lessons that they teach through their ways of life provide direction to the world gripped in resource scarcity and environmental crisis. These lessons, distilled through generations of living with nature, point out that the solutions to present problems and the key to future survival are with the people who carry with them the strategies of the past. (Source: Provided by the Publisher)