Are indigenous people natural conservationists? Is there a
mysterious connection between indigenous people and the natural
world? If you think that people are natural conservationists,
then human prehistory is not encouraging. Expansion of modern
humans into new regions were accompanied by the disappearance
large animals in those regions, megafauna extinctions (see e.g.
Paul Martin‘s Twilight of the Mammoths, and this paper). Large
animals became extinct up to 50,000 years ago in Australia and
New Guinea, around 11,000 years ago in North America, about 1500
years ago in Madagascar, and between 900 and 600 years ago in
New Zealand. This pattern closely follows the current chronology
of human expansion around the world. What about present day
indigenous people? Natalie Smith has written a paper, Are
Indigenous People Conservationists? Preliminary Results from the
Machiguenga of the Peruvian Amazon. She writes, “Contrary to the
widespread belief that indigenous peoples are adept managers of
their natural environ