Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

by Michael Shellenberger

Sometime between AD 900 and 950, Maori hunter-gatherers arrived by boat at what is today known as New Zealand, likely from other Pacific islands to the northeast. To their delight they found the island thick with moas, ostrich-like birds that stood an astonishing sixteen feet tall. Moas weren’t able to fly. Nor did they have any other means to protect themselves from the Maori.39 To catch them, the Maori would set forest fires, which would push moas to the edges of the forest where they could be more easily slaughtered. The Maori came to rely so much on moas for food, as well as for tools and jewelry, that they called them their “primary source.” During dry and windy seasons, the fires burned large landscapes, massively altered natural environments, and destroyed the habitats of other species. In New Zealand, the conifer forests burned quickly during the hot and dry summer months and could not regenerate; they were replaced by bracken, fern, and scrub. But this hadn’t put an end to the Maori practice of starting forest fires. “We saw either smoke by day and fires by night,” Captain Cook wrote, “in all parts of it.”40 Within three hundred years, half of New Zealand was deforested, moas teetered on the brink of extinction, and the Maori were facing rapid environmental and social change. By the time Cook arrived in the 1770s, the Maori had completely wiped out the moa, and they had been forced to take up slash-and-burn farming.