REFLECTIVE INSIGHTS #042 - KAITIAKITANGA IS NOT HISTORICAL PERFECTION: LESSONS FROM THE SOIL

A Honest Look Back

A fair question often gets raised whenever we talk about environmental stewardship in Aotearoa: how can Māori claim to value kaitiakitanga when early ancestors burned off vast tracts of native forest upon arriving here? It is a question we should answer with total honesty rather than defensiveness. Without getting caught up in exact numbers, our ancestors here and in other countries did clear forests, and that is undeniable.

One Era's Hero

When I was a teenager I read 'Mover of Men and Mountains', the autobiography of Robert LeTourneau, which was my Grandpa's book. Aside from pioneering many great engineering marvels, founding a technical college and successful businesses, he developed giant machines for clearing South American rainforests efficiently, and was considered a hero in his day, even when that book was published in the 1960s. As an environmentally aware teenager in the 1990s I was just flabbergasted. With the passage of time and new understanding of the importance of rainforests to the health of our planet and the indigenous people who lived there, one century's hero is another century's villain.