Some myths never die. Let's consider that of the "Noble Savage."

If it started with Columbus trying to put forth the best face on his expensive voyages, it didn't take long for all of Europe to be abuzz with tales of a distant promised land, free from all contemporary problems.

In 1580, Michel de Montaigne's essay On The Cannibals was published, that contained the blueprint for all successive works praising this Noble Savage.

In 1750, Jean-Jacques Rousseau won a prize with his essay Discourse On The Origin Of Inequality in which the savage was lionized, indeed redundantly so. No matter that the adulation poured over this essay was condemned at the time as "One of the strongest proofs ever provided of human stupidity." And, no matter that essentially all of its content had been stolen from Montaigne's piece.

Fast forward to the late 1970's. Who living during that era doesn't remember the famous "environmental" public service ad that ended with Amerindian Iron Eyes Cody shedding a tear in reaction to America's despoiling of its environment. The message, of course, was that native Americans had a deep appreciation for the environment, and we naughty "Euro-Americans" came in and destroyed it.

Sorry to burst another bubble, but this version of history has been overwhelmingly rejected, thanks to the scholarship of Robert Whelan, Alston Chase, Roger Schultz, and many others.

True, the Indians were dependent on their environment, as many tribes lived a subsistence, nomadic lifestyle. But, that's where reality ends, and myth takes over.

What could be worse to a modern eco-freak than a deliberately set forest fire? One must conclude that our present-day greens would have had cataleptic fits, watching the Indians burn down forests. After all, to hunter-gatherers, trees had no particular value. They made hunting more difficult, and mammals such as bison, moose, elk, and deer, all highly prized in their culture, are most easily found in areas of recently burnt forests. Thus, they burned the forests again and again.

How about burning forests just for ENTERTAINMENT? Lewis and Clark recorded that Indians in the Rocky Mountains would set trees alight "as after-dinner entertainment; the huge trees would explode like Roman candles in the night."

Another plank in the noble eco-savage platform is the notion that in harmony with the ecosystem, they only kill for their immediate needs, and never could threaten any species with extinction. As the recent Hertz commercial stated, "not exactly."

Indians practiced the "jump" technique whereby entire herds of buffalo would stampede over a cliff, being killed by the fall. This method was surely effective--so effective that large amounts of meat was left to rot, and herds were decimated to at least local extinction.

Sadly, the extinction was not always "local." Until about 10,000 years ago, so-called mega-fauna flourished in North America. This group included such exotics as the woolly mammoth, saber-toothed tiger, giant sloth, giant beaver, camel, horse, and dire wolf. These were important and dominant species for millions of years, and then they suddenly disappeared.

No theories of climate change, or survival of the fittest would adequately explain this, especially since these species were all mammals--normally quite resilient. Try as you might, you can find no better explanation than this one: The Indians hunted them to extinction.

You can find the remains of many of Hawaii's extinct birds in feather capes, some of which used feathers from 80,000 birds. Certain women of the Crow tribe wore dresses that required the death of 350 elk to provide 700 (very specific) teeth each.

In our over-eagerness to impose a naive good guy/bad guy dichotomy on virtually every issue, the consequences are profound: Misinformation, self-hatred, and glorification of pagan ideals. But wait, isn't that what current politics is all about?