The tropical rainforests of Indonesia are threatened with deforestation caused by rapid economic development. Because this development hastens global warming and reduces biodiversity, it violates the doctrine of sustainable development. The Brundtland report, Our Common Future (Brundtland, 1987), defined sustainable development as -˜development that meets the needs of the present, without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’s. Sustainable development was adopted as the overarching world development policy of the 21st century at the Earth Summit in 1992, which introduced international accords to integrate economic development and environmental protection, manage and conserve the world’s forests, stabilize production of the gases that cause global warming, and conserve the variety of living species. Indonesia views sustainable development with suspicion and is committed to economic development on the Western model. Sustainable development advocates, however, seek to save the Indonesian rainforests because they amount to 10% of those remaining in the world. They fear that the destruction of Indonesia’s rainforests will, by hastening global warming, burden future generations with such problems as coastal flooding, migration of agricultural regions and habitat loss and, by reducing biodiversity, deprive them of the opportunity to study species and use them to improve the human condition. The conservation of the tropical rainforests of Indonesia may depend on the rediscovery of its indigenous natural resource systems, which are tantamount to a regime of environmental law and policy. These systems include the water temple system of Bali, the home-garden system of Java, the adat and sasi systems of Nusa Tenggara and Maluku, the land-tenure system of West Kalimantan, the shifting cultivation system of East Kalimantan, and the traditional non-timber production systems of forest dwellers. These systems, which are characterized by permaculture, biodiversity conservation, property rights, and sustained yields, prevent Hardin’s -˜tragedy of the commons’s (Hardin, 1968), and foster Leopold’s -˜biotic integrity’s (Leopold, 1968). As a paradigm of land use governance, such systems have sustained the economy and environment of Indonesia on behalf of its people for millennia. It is concluded that the indigenous natural resource systems of Indonesia have a vital role to play in its sustainable development.
