West reveals how every aspect of the Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area-including ideas of space, place, environment, and society-was socially produced, created by changing configurations of ideas, actions, and material relations not only in Papua New Guinea but also in other locations around the world. Complicating many of the assumptions about nature, culture, and development underlying contemporary conservation efforts, demonstrates the unique capacity of ethnography to illuminate the relationship between the global and the local, between transnational processes and individual lives.