It’s the heat of the day on the Managalas Plateau in northeastern Papua New Guinea and there are no birds-of-paradise to see. Every morning and evening, Raggiana birds-of-paradise (Paradisaea raggiana) perch in the trees behind a small village next to the plateau’s main road and display for potential mates. They’re big birds—about the size of a crow—and their mating display is an acrobatic flurry of flips and tail-feather flutters. But we have arrived too late in the day to see it. This self-evident fact distresses Raynald Pasip, a slight man wearing a dark blue polo shirt who shows his displeasure in sweeping hand gestures.

Pasip, a board member of the Managalas Conservation Foundation who lives nearby, speaks insistently to the village residents in Tauba, the local language, as I look on. As they discuss the birds’ absence, I stare into the jungle that looms over the village. In the raised clearing where we stand, the heavy, hot air presses down, and an earthy smell drifts over the deep trench that separates us from garden plots and coconuts. Beyond that, a wall of jungle looms, the trees festooned with vines.

Birds-of-paradise and other rare fauna are sometimes hunted for use in ceremonial dress, but the ones here are largely left alone. A bench stands at the center of the grove, for people from the village and the occasional visitor to watch the birds display. But today, the forest creatures we can see play more prosaic roles: food and pets. A young man carrying a cuscus, or natul in Tauba, approaches me and my husband Ethan, who is along as photographer and translator. As Ethan points his camera at the small mammal, it makes a bold leap from its keeper’s arms to Ethan’s leg, attempting to bite his thigh and provoking an eruption of laughter from the people standing in the hot sun. It also distracts Pasip, whose relatives in the village have finally convinced him to accept that the birds won’t be visible for hours.

“We walk around and come back,” Pasip says. As we leave the village, the drooping leaves of shoulder-high pandanus trees (Pandanus amaryllifolius) rustle against each other in the wind, making a sound like rain. This village, and the patch of forest where the birds-of-paradise take up nightly residence, is part of a vast network of protected land on this high plateau. For decades, community leaders like Pasip and others across the plateau led fraught discussions about how to protect the area. Many community members wanted to continue their traditional land-use practices and to protect the birds-of-paradise and other rare species. But they saw an urgent need to earn money for school fees and medical expenses.

For 32 years, community leaders debated whether to lease their lands for logging, gold mining, and oil palm plantations, or to conserve it, restricting many of these destructive uses. Finally in 2017, the community leaders voted in favor of conservation, and the government of Papua New Guinea declared 360,000 hectares of the plateau—nearly its entire reach—as a legally designated Conservation Area. The move blocked mining, large-scale logging, and other activities that threaten its biodiversity, but allows sustainable agriculture and limited construction of roads and other necessary infrastructure. It was a rare conservation success story in a region increasingly shaped by the twin forces of resource extraction and climate change, and it offered a unique model of local, community-driven conservation.

But now, nearly a year after the designation, leaders like Pasip are still grappling with the future of conservation on the plateau. For the decision to last and to mean anything, they will need to find a way to connect their community to a market for their cash crops, and to provide access to medical care, or risk having the residents turn against the conservation area and its inherent restrictions.

In short, they have to figure out how, in Pasip’s words, “conservation can build us a road.”

The jungle then closes its green ranks once again, as the road makes its rough way through a succession of braided rivers that periodically flood and change course, taking the road with them; in this mid-elevation forest, the Queen Alexandra’s birdwing butterfly (Ornithoptera alexandrae), the largest in the world, makes its home. The butterfly, whose wings can span the length of a human’s forearm, has gradually disappeared from other parts of Oro Province, as its habitat makes way for oil palms and logging roads.

Finally, the road reaches Afore, a government station and town on the eastern edge of the plateau. Several dozen houses and gardens sit at the edge of a large grassy opening, an abandoned airstrip cut during the British Empire’s brief occupation of the plateau before independence. Here, the bustle and high rises of Papua New Guinea’s capitol, Port Moresby, and the new towns near Popondetta that vast oil palm development has funded, seem immeasurably far away.

While the swath of forest from Afore to the mountains is overflowing with some of Papua New Guinea’s rarest species, it is far from uninhabited by humans: As in the vast majority of Papua New Guinea, nearly every square foot of the plateau is owned by members of 152 different clans—kinship units that form the plateau’s governance structure. There is nearly no “empty” land in Papua New Guinea, which has been continuously inhabited for some 50,000 years and is one of the oldest agricultural areas anywhere in the world. All land, from the market center in Afore to the “big bush” at the tops of the far peaks, is held in a traditional ownership system that dictates its use and prevents its easy sale.

The conservation area is not intended to bring an end to residents’ longstanding ownership and practices, including farming and hunting. “I don’t like the term protected area,” says Damien Ase, an environmental lawyer born on the plateau who is one of the conservation movement’s primary leaders. “It sounds like you are putting everyone behind a fence.”

Those practices have loosened over the past several decades. The plateau’s population is growing rapidly, doubling in the decades since Papua New Guinea’s 1977 independence to roughly 22,000—many of whom are under the age of 30. As the youth population grows and traditional beliefs change, prohibitions on how to use tambu lands, which are the highest priority to conserve, weaken, too. Increasingly younger plateau residents see them as part of their gardening and hunting areas, as well potential sources of tourism dollars.

“They are making gardens in places they were not making gardens before, because of the population,” says Ase. In response, the Managalas Conservation Foundation plans to build a traditional learning center, where senior members of the community will teach younger ones about traditional cultural and land-use practices, reinforcing the need to protect tambu lands. Surveyors employed by the Managalas Conservation Foundation are beginning to map current land use patterns, with the intention of formalizing them and limiting expansion. And the foundation has begun difficult conversations about family planning to slow the plateau’s rapid population growth and reduce the need to continue creating new gardens.

If the conservation area can’t meet the needs of that growing population, it risks falling apart. The process to designate the conservation area splintered the plateau. The more remote western reaches, where Ase and many of the effort’s leaders come from, were overwhelmingly in support of the effort. But in the east, which has a larger and rapidly increasing population, the idea of locking up more land wasn’t widely embraced. In 2016, government representatives in one of the plateau’s eastern districts filed a petition with the federal government to halt any consideration of a conservation area on the plateau. Today, threats of a lawsuit still linger.

“The designation of the Managalas is the first step,” says Rune Paulsen, the Papua New Guinea coordinator for the Rainforest Foundation Norway, which helped fund the push for the conservation area beginning in 1996.

The conservation area is governed by a group of community leaders selected from the clan groups and the different regions of the plateau. “We have been entrusted to manage the forest,” says Malchus Kajia, the chairman of the Managalas Conservation Foundation. He is trained as a pastor and sees caring for the plateau as a religious duty. “People see the forest as being the life.” These leaders are tasked with addressing their regions’ concerns, which have centered on the precarious condition of the road that leads onto the plateau, and the lack of a cash economy without palm oil or another major industry. If those concerns aren’t addressed, people may choose to ignore restrictions on garden-building, logging, or other uses; the designation could even be revoked if the situation significantly worsens. A year into the project, Kajia says, “I am anxious.”

Community leaders have turned to unusual tactics to maintain people’s faith. A theater troupe, led by a local performer, travels the plateau and puts on plays about conservation, the environment, and biodiversity. And youth leaders host World Environment Days, where they teach community members about environmental concerns and write poems about the plateau’s non-human inhabitants, including the Queen Alexandra’s birdwing butterfly and the Raggiana bird-of-paradise.

In Managalas, the primary threat is oil palm, which multinational corporations cultivate in enormous plantations that replace tropical forest and displace Papua New Guineans from their land. Western energy policies that pushed the use of palm oil for bio fuels, as a way to lower carbon emissions, have caused a massive boom in its cultivation. Once heralded as a potential tool for fighting climate change, oil palm is now one of the primary driving forces in deforestation worldwide, along with beef, soy, and timber; globally, more than 16 million hectares (60,000 square miles) are now being used for palm oil production. A New York Times investigation found that clearcutting for oil palm cultivation made Indonesia the fourth-largest emitter of carbon worldwide. In nearby Popondetta, oil palm plantations have swept over much of the landscape. “(People) no longer follow their traditional practices,” says Ase. “Most of the arable land is now covered by oil palm and they can’t grow their traditional food. They mostly rely on the store food.”

In Managalas, local leaders have fought for decades to avert a similar outcome and to maintain their sovereignty, either by negotiating fair compensation for logging and oil palm leases or by shutting out development. In villages here, Partners with Melanesians facilitated forest assessments, sending residents into the forest to gather samples of every plant, animal, and natural object they made use of. In the village center, the communities would lay these out and calculate what it would cost to instead buy each thing in the store, to assess what a reasonable cash compensation would be and to put a dollar value on conserving lands; if they had instead chosen to lease their lands for palm oil cultivation, these calculations would have informed the price of a lease. And with money from the Rainforest Foundation Norway, Partners with Melanesians flew community leaders to Sarawak, Borneo, where clearcutting for oil palm and wood products has left just 5 percent of the original forest standing and facilitated widespread corruption and human-rights abuses.

In the still-harsh early evening light, we return to the village where the Raggiana birds-of-paradise display. Pasip stands at the edge of a grove of coconut trees and stares intently into the jungle beyond. Villagers cluster around us, all of us quietly waiting. After a few minutes, a male flies in, its rusty red feathers mostly hidden in the deep green of the tree tops, followed by another male and then, a few minutes later, a female. Birds-of-paradise are closely related to crows, and the slightly hooked beak and long face of one male is visible in a gap between branches, silhouetted against the pale, dusk sky.