Attack of the six foot scold

I am now reading Elsa Panciroli's Beasts Before Us. The information is interesting and the history-of-science anecdotes, illuminating. And Panciroli is a better person than I am. As she will never cease telling me, right up to the Acknowledgements at the end, which starts by citing the capital-I "Indigenous" as (in one amorphous mass) the true stewards of their lands.

Her field, palaeontology, is too white and Western. Rich people who are white go into leisure - in Lyell's case, this scientific field - as opposed, one must deduce, to the Sultan of Brunei.

I about lost my patience when she was talking - no, preaching - about Australia's fauna. She nags we are not to consider these marsupials and monotremes as weird outliers on account of them being perfectly natural to Australia. Never mind that the fauna had rafted over from South America in prehistory and fanned out once on that isolated landmass, thus creating a biosphere of their own, with little reference to the vast bulk of the Old and New World landmasses. I don't care if it's politically in/correct; for Earth, Australia is a minority-report, like the continent to its south. Always has been, until the Dutch found it.

Panciroli's condescension leads to some amusement, for instance the footnote on p. 28 that is, new to Europeans, not to the peoples who had lived there for millennia. This was with reference to both the known and the 'newly discovered' world. That whole page had been about the world known to England and Paris - as of 1815ish. In context I had - I swear to you - assumed that this undiscovered country was like Star Trek VI: in this case, the PAST. The New (to Europeans) World wasn't even mentioned in this page up to then.

I sense behind Panciroli's stance of superiority an assumption that whites like her are, in fact, superior. Whites are, at least, moral paragons - at present. Someone like Lyell is able, admittedly, to use their unearned privilege to a better cause. Most of "we" - meaning, whites who aren't her - have a way to go before she may, however grudgingly, allow us into her presence.