Mick Hartley

Baz Edmeades on The Myth of Harmonious Indigenous Conservationism – the idea that before a uniquely evil and rapacious western civilisation came along, everyone lived in happy harmony with nature:

When the ancestors of North America’s Indigenous peoples entered the New World some 16,000 years ago via Siberia, they hunted many of the mammals, reptiles, and birds, from the Arctic down to Tierra del Fuego. Mammoths, mastodons, and enormous ground-dwelling sloths, as well as giant bears, giant tortoises, and enormous teratorn birds with 16-foot wingspans—animals that had never had a chance to evolve in the presence of humans—were among the many species that disappeared from the Americas. Some medium-sized animals—such as horse, peccary, and antelope species—were also wiped out. But others survived: Bison and deer species, tree sloths, tapirs, jaguars, bear species, alligators, and big birds such as rheas and condors are, at least for the time being, still with us. The existence of these survivors, along with the relatively unspoiled forests, grasslands, and rivers seen by the first Europeans to enter the Americas, served to support the illusion that America’s first peoples had been maintaining what popular environmentalist David Suzuki calls a “sacred balance” with the natural world. Throughout history, however, humans killed animals that were tasty, numerous, and huntable. For kin-groups, staying alive meant making life-and-death cost-benefit calculations about where to send your berry-pickers and hunters. “Sacredness” had nothing to do with it.

This is not to say that the Indigenous peoples who migrated from Asia to the Americas were especially bloodthirsty (though Europeans typically reported that their hunting and fishing skills were excellent). In every known case where humans entered continents formerly uninhabited by our species, the bigger animals tended to disappear, since they provided the most sustenance per kill. The first humans to enter Australia some 70,000 years ago wiped out giant kangaroo species, rhino-sized marsupial herbivores, jaguar-sized marsupial carnivores, big flightless birds, and many other megafauna. The same thing would happen in Europe: After sapiens completed its occupation of that sub-continent some 30,000 years ago, the mammoths, woolly rhinos, giant deer, and lions they recorded in their cave paintings and carvings also disappeared.

After our species completed its settlement of Australia, Eurasia, and the Americas, further human-caused extinctions took place as we discovered and settled islands in the world’s seas and oceans. The last big die-off started as recently as the 13th century AD, when Polynesian seafarers started settling one of the Earth’s most isolated land masses, New Zealand. Within little more than a century of their arrival, over 60 bird species, including 500-pound, 12-foot-tall, flightless moas, and the world’s largest eagle, had disappeared.

Little of this is controversial among mainstream scientists. Yet it is now considered taboo to discuss it, and fashionable to replace these historical facts with what are, in effect, modern fairy tales. A common meme, which now has found its way into newspaper articles, is that “worldwide, there is no evidence of Indigenous peoples systematically hunting nor over-killing megafauna.” The Australian Museum’s website informs us that “for social, spiritual and economic reasons, First Nations peoples harvested game in a sustainable manner.” Wade Davis, a professor of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, presents the killing of animals by Indigenous peoples as a gentle, almost consensual act: The Indigenous bushmen of Africa “do not simply kill game. They engage in a dance with the prey, a ritual exchange that ends with the creature literally making of itself an offering, a sacrifice.”

Such depictions of the benign and gentle ways of Indigenous peoples are perhaps well-intentioned, an antidote to the racist depictions of so-called “savages” that have been common currency in the West for generations. But they have been cynically leveraged by activists and politicians acting on their own principles and parochial concerns. In many cases, the above-described mythology has become a subset of a larger anti-capitalist discourse that presents Indigenous lands as a secular Eden, and greed as a form of original sin. This worldview, in turn, leads to false hopes that we may return our lands and society to some fictional state of grace.

Looking back in the Hartley archives, I see I anticipated this line of thought a while ago. Fourteen years ago, in fact:

Our ancestors "wondered at and feared" nature because they had no bloody choice. It wasn't out of a respect for nature so much as a respect for their skins, in a world where they were soft and defenceless and toothsome and there were lots of nasty big animals out there with sharp teeth and claws. Exploit nature? They'd have loved to. That's what all the magic and religion and shamans and all the rest was about – trying to gain some power – any power – over a harsh hostile world. Go back in time and and hand some stone-age hunter a rifle. Would he have sneered at the sudden advantage he'd been given? – launch into some proto-green mystical crap about respecting the spirit of the antelope and not wishing to spoil the bond of respect between hunter and hunted? No chance. He'd have grabbed it, shouted "yeah, who's the boss man now?" and started blasting away at anything that moved. Whenever these one-with-the-earth primitives found themselves in a new continent where the animals hadn't learned to be scared of humans – America, Australia – there was a sudden surge in the number of species that went extinct. When the Maoris reached New Zealand and found all these huge moas wandering around unfazed by their presence, they didn't worry about disrupting the careful balance of the eco-system: they went up to the dozy birds, clubbed them, and gorged themselves on easy meals until there weren't any more of the buggers left. That's how much they respected the glories of nature.

In fact if anything it's surely the other way round. No doubt it's something of an over-simplification to say that before the Romantics people used to shun mountains and wild nature as ugly and frightening, but there's surely some truth in it. Only we moderns go off in search of the world's most desolate places, and only we moderns spend vast amounts of time and effort setting up national parks, trying to preserve endangered species, making films about the beauty of our world – and then build up decadent romantic fantasies about how nasty modern life is, and how our noble ancestors used to live in harmony with nature.

Baz Edmeades has a book, Megafauna, First Victims of the Human-Caused Extinction, out next year.