Just over 150 years ago Alfred Russel Wallace began his peregrinations as a naturalist across the vast extent of islands stretching from the Malay Peninsula in the west to New Guinea in the east, a region he labelled the Malay Archipelago. In justifying his delay in publishing The Malay Archipelago, he noted that the region's ‘social and physical conditions are not liable to rapid change’ (Wallace 2000:ix). That characterization could not be less apt for the region's contemporary situation, especially in regard to the condition of the environment whose nineteenth-century richness he so scrupulously documented. Today that natural richness, which we now label biodiversity, is under increasing threat. Most of the area traversed by Wallace is now covered by two hotspots, ‘earth's biologically richest and most endangered terrestrial ecoregions’ (Mittermeier et al. 2004). It is a continuing tribute to Wallace that the border between this region's hotspots, Sundaland in the west and the eponymous Wallacea in the east, remains that remarkable line he delineated as dividing the two great natural regions of the archipelago (Wallace 2000:10–11).

Worldwide, 34 biodiversity hotspots, defined as ‘regions that harbour a great diversity of endemic species and, at the same time, have been significantly impacted and altered by human activities’, have been identified as areas in critical need of conservation (http://www.biodiversityhotspots.org/xp/Hotspots). But these hotspots also tend to be the locales with high numbers of indigenous peoples whose land and resources have often been the targets of expropriation by their governments, previously in the name of ‘national development’, but increasingly now justified as well by conservation imperatives of national as well as global import.