Mammoths and moa and adapting to our places

All through history humans have had to learn how to adapt to their environment, their place. Learning takes time and we’ve made mistakes.

Take ancient megafauna, for example. Whenever our human ancestors arrived in a region, the megafauna disappeared. Giant animals reproduced slowly, so one paltry spear hunt a year could wipe out a species. Australia was home to megafauna—an abundance of protein for Aboriginal people—but it’s long gone. Aotearoa boasted the giant moa. Māori remembered its extinction through oral tradition: “Kua ngaro i te ngaro o te moa - Lost as the moa was lost”.[1] Early humans adapted to live sustainably; lessons learnt through mistakes not forgotten.

It’s no wonder indigenous ways are more sustainable; indigenous people have lived in place for thousands of years. Early populations were small and wielded only hand tools. Compare today: billions of people apply advanced, automated technology over the whole Earth. We cause vastly more damage, yet we’ve been slow to adapt because we’re insulated against our impact: the Ōpāwaho-Heathcote river is no longer a food source, but our local supermarket still stocks fish; we buy jeans at the mall, but it’s a stream in Bangladesh that runs the colour of denim; in Ōtautahi-Christchurch, 100-year rains flood roads every few years, but surely not because we drive our kids to school?

Colonial settlers of Aotearoa didn’t know this place, so they ran roughshod over it; they devastated indigenous people and disregarded their adapted ways. If sustainability is like a river, it’s easy for the descendants of settlers, like me, or even Māori now disconnected from their culture, to look upstream and wonder about our inheritance. Wendell Berry, an American writer and environmentalist, grapples with knowing his immigrant forebears caused the scars on his farm.[2] He writes,

“In what came to me from them there was both wealth and poverty, and I have been a long time discovering which was which.”

So, after 30 years of farming in one place Berry still writes,

“I…stand on this part of the earth that is so full of my own history and so much damaged by it, and ask: What is this place? What is in it? What is its nature? How should men live in it? What must I do?”

The answers to Berry's questions nurture a relationship with our environment of mutuality and justice. The knowledge our forebears—indigenous and not—have sent downstream to us, including their mistakes, can help us adapt.

Credit: Vivienne, 24 April 2024, 7:43pm - A full moon over the Port Hills in Ōtautahi-Christchurch.

[1] The Climate Book by Greta Thunberg, Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe , and Science Learning Hub.

[2] The World-Ending Fire by Wendell Berry. Berry is a small farmer from Kentucky, USA. He’s published more than eighty books of diverse literature, including  “The Unsettling of America,” in which he argues that responsible, small-scale agriculture is essential for preserving land and culture.