A farming lesson from the Mexican rainforest offers hope for humanity

ONE of the great myths of the more romantic wing of environmental movement has been that indigenous peoples always treat the environment better than we do. White man bad, red man “green”, as you might say.

Back in the ‘60s, there was a rash of books with titles like Touch the Earth, which portrayed the native American First Nations as wise stewards of the planet. The brutal massacre of the Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee, which ended their last resistance to European occupation, became a metaphor for the white man’s rape of the entire continent, from sea to bloody sea.

Buffy Sainte-Marie, the native American activist and singer, made the connection explicit in her powerful and angry song, Now that the Buffalo’s Gone. White American greed for land shattered not just her people, so this story goes, but the beautiful and pristine ecosystems that stretched from the Adironacks to Yosemite.