Environmental primitivism and the noble savage. (Environment).

I HAVE JUST RECEIVED a greeting card from a good friend of mine in New Zealand. In place of the usual little quote from Ruskin, Omar Khayyam or Helen Steiner Rice is a short paragraph on environmental awareness. It is written in the Maori language, but fortunately an English translation is provided. It tells me that the earth and the sky, the animals and the birds are all my brothers and sisters.

Now, of course, the use of such metaphors is highly commendable, but I am curious to know just why I need to be told how I should relate to nature by the Maoris rather than by people who share my own cultural heritage. Why is it that, in matters of environmental awareness, we need to be instructed, via suitable quotations, by American Indians, Maoris, Australian Aborigines, Kalahari Bushmen, and so on? For, in nearly all the messages concerning our need to improve environmental awareness, we are urged to follow the example of "indigenous peoples".

I have yet to see an environmental policy statement from a government agency, one or other of the Christian churches, or one or other of the environmental action groups, which quotes, say, Banjo Paterson ("And the bush has friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him ..."). In fact, the Banjo is something of an anti-hero in certain quarters. David Tacey (in his book Edge of the Sacred) describes him as "the great master of the art of cultural appropriation and psychological imperialism". True enough, the Romantic poets are dragged in from time to time and St Francis of Assisi occasionally gets a guernsey. Mostly though, it's tribal wisdom.

The truth of the matter is that Europeans are not to be trusted in nature because they rape and pillage the earth, whereas your indigenous peoples regard the earth as their mother and treat her with the greatest respect. That, at any rate, is the theory held by many of the ecologically sensitive people of my acquaintance. Never mind the fact that, for instance, the Maoris almost certainly wiped out the moas in New Zealand (see Prodigious Birds by Atholl Anderson, 1989), introduced the Pacific rat, and converted a large part of the South Island from forest to tussock grassland. Likewise, it is a fair bet that the Australian Aborigines, over the course of thousands of years, drastically altered parts of the Australian environment by deliberate firing of the landscape.

We should not suppose that such a view of Europeans as the sole destroyers of nature is limited to the more lunatic fringe of the environmental movement. In my experience, it is widely held. For some years, I taught a small group of students studying some aspects of environmental science. I dealt only with plant and animal pests. At the first lesson each year, it was my habit to set the following question for the students: "Humans are the greatest pest species on the planet! Do you agree or disagree?" Please give your reasons." The average class size each year was fifteen. Only in the cases of two or three students did anyone disagree, in principle, with the assertion made in my question. When I subsequently discussed this whole issue with the students, it usually transpired that "indigenous peoples" were exempted from the general rule about humans.

I suspect the situation is not all that different in the universities. Some offer a course called "Outdoor Education" (it is not peripatetic philosophy!) in which a certain amount of environmental history is taught. For one such course, the recommended text was Nature's Web, by Peter Marshall. It is probably the most vehemently anti-Western and anti-Christian book I have read since my young student days when, as a payback for a hoax I had perpetrated on a friend, he signed me up for a swag of printed propaganda from a certain communist country. The whole history of the West, for Marshall, is simply a protracted account of the rape of Mother Nature by European Christianity. "During the Christian centuries in Europe," Marshall says, "nature became consigned to the Satanic order, and the Satanic forces working within nature became almost as real as the divine." One wonders, idly, how bread and wine, the products of Satanic nature, could be transubstantiated into the Body and Blood of Christ by some medieval priest!

At this point, I can picture my incensed ...