"The overall theme is that Indigenous peoples traditionally lived their lives in harmony with the land and its creatures, and so their land-use demands transcend the realm of politics, and represent quasi-oracular revealed truths. As has been pointed out by others, this mythology now has a severe, and likely negative, distorting effect on public policy, one that hurts Indigenous peoples themselves...And increasingly, they are telling white policy makers to stop listening to those activists who seek to portray them as perpetual children of the forest. It is for their benefit, as much as anyone else's, to explore the truth about the myth of harmonious Indigenous conservationism."
" 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 13th century AD... 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."
"A species undergoing population growth as enormous and rapid as [humans have] must inevitably expand into, and degrade, previously wild and biodiverse areas. By 2014, Homo sapiens had, by the reckoning of the World Wildlife Fund, destroyed an incredible 60 percent of the wild mammal, bird, reptile, and fish populations that were in existence as recently as 1970."
"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."
"we must also reject the equally false, if more kindly-seeming, narratives of progressive fabulists. It is nice to think that humans always lived in "harmony" with the natural world. But had our ancestors all taken on a "harmonious" approach, hominids would have died out long ago"
-Baz Edmeades is the author of Megafauna, First Victims of the Human-Caused Extinction
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