So you thought the British colonisers were an environmentally rapacious pack of bastards who came here in the 1800s and chopped down all the trees to grow grass for dairying and sheep farming?
Whereas the Maori are spiritually at one with nature, environmentallty protective and conservationally savvy?
This and that mysterious mauri thing make them special?
That’s what they would like us to believe.
They will tell us about their world view in which they see the environment as deriving from a spiritual connection, where everything is tied together as one, through the cosmological ordering of whakapapa.
But nah, it’s bollocks.
Sure, we chopped down more than a few trees but we put them to good use as building materials, fence posts, ship masts, and what have you, whereas it seems our indigenous brothers and sisters simply burned down forests.
Not to run sheep and cattle or to grow apples, kiwifruit and grapes.
Nope.
Their curious idea of a good tuck-in was to eat fern roots.