My Take | A racist gaffe about ‘garden and jungle’ that speaks volumes
- There is no civilisation, only civilisations, and Western civilisation was among the most violent, destructive and savage in history
In the Canadian province of British Columbia, in several sites that were once home to native peoples for thousands of years, there are small fruit and nut trees, clusters of berry bushes and some herbs that can be used for food and medicine, as well as pruned crabapple trees and salmonberry bushes.
These are the remnants of remarkable gardens cultivated by natives more than a century and a half ago, and are ecologically distinct from the rest of the forests in which they are found. They were well-tended until their gardeners were forcefully displaced by white colonial settlers.
A fascinating study published last year by a team of researchers at Simon Fraser University finds that those gardens, long abandoned, are still distinct from the rest of the forest; they are more ecologically diverse and resilient in terms of the numbers and kinds of species compared to their surroundings, and so they survive and preserve themselves even to this day.
“Europe is a garden and everywhere else a jungle” is a racist statement
How apt is the Simon Fraser study, showing how the “gardens” could resist the encroachment of “jungles”! The metaphor of garden and jungle is perhaps one of the oldest used in the contrast between civilisation and barbarism. And scholars have often observed that even collapsed civilisations had long-lasting impacts on the subsequent development of human society; their legacies endure long after death, just like the wild gardens of British Columbia.
So, not including the Canadian case, literally and metaphorically, who were the gardeners and the savage beasts?
Josep Borrell, the European Union foreign policy chief, recently compared the EU to “a garden” and everywhere else “a jungle”. After a media furore, he apologised that some people had been offended, not that he thought the analogy was wrong or racist.
“Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden,” he said. “The gardeners should take care of it, but [they] have to go to the jungle … Otherwise, the rest of the world will invade us.”