Before European Settlement of New Zealand, the country was known to the locals as “Land of the Long White Cloud”. When James Cook and his cronies arrived, it was changed to “Land of the Wrong White Crowd”.
I was watching Animal Planet this morning, a documentary about how human beings have single-handedly destroyed thousands of different animal species for good over the centuries. When the Maori first arrived in New Zealand, they hunted a bird called the Moa to extinction within a hundred years. In Hawaii, 60% of the bird species have vanished, and the majority of the vegetation there is not native to Hawaii – they are introduced species which have choked the life out of the native trees and plants.
However, going back to the Maori – after they hunted the Moa to extinction (and the Haast Eagle, indirectly, as the Moa was its main food source), they re-evaluated their tactics, and realised that hunting their food source in an unsustainable manner was counter-intuitive to their own survival. They created nature reserves, and made the rainforest and the animals which lived there, sacred. They used different food sources, and in turn, the birds and animals in the rainforests began to repopulate and recover.
The Maori had the knowledge – they recognised that they needed to cooperate with the land and animals in order to survive into the future. They needed to be a part of the ecosystem – not destroy it.
Human beings nowadays have even more knowledge than the Maori did. We can use substitutes for things that can’t afford for us to hunt them further. But we don’t… I think that perhaps it is our lack of connection with the land that we live off. The Maori made their connection with the earth and other animals spiritual. It was a mutual respect that allowed the most skilled predator to live side-by-side with animals that would seem not to have a chance against the all-mighty, top-of-the-food-chain human being.