Rosemary McLeod: Places to stuff up

It's an awful shame about the dead young Etonian in the Arctic but my sympathies also lie with the shot polar bear.
It was only doing what comes naturally to a half-starved creature in search of tucker.
It's time we woke up to the fact that the wilderness is wild, and what's more, real.
Years of watching TV wildlife documentaries from the sofa may have given a different impression, but nothing has changed on that score, apart from there being less and less wilderness, fewer and fewer wild animals, and more and more human beings keen to rush into it, flush a dunny, and leave a condom or two behind.
Not content with stuffing up the majority of the planet that we humans live on, soiling its waterways, poisoning its earth, and multiplying at an unsustainable rate, we're hell-bent on ruining what miraculously managed to stay almost pristine in spite of us. This we call tourism.
We charge up the Amazon, the planet's glorious lungs, to adore forests and creatures that won't be there tomorrow because we ruin such spaces as fast as we trample over them. This time next year surveyors will probably stake it out and the year after that Holiday Inn and McDonald's will greet intrepid travellers arriving by jumbo jet.
Sloths will become fashionable household pets, ensuring their rapid extinction - but all will be well, because market forces will have driven the devastation of their habitat, and jobs - short-order cooks, cleaners - will be there for any locals who can be talked into wearing clothes. You can't say fairer than that.
You'd have thought the Arctic and the Antarctic would stand a good chance of repelling us with their inhospitable cold, but you'd be wrong. Cruise liners take tourists to the Antarctic to bother the penguins, amble about, and take photographs to record what was pristine before they arrived.
What is this about? Are we gloating that we've found another place to stuff up before we colonise Mars, with its newly discovered possible water supplies?
The same happens in Alaska, and as we learned this week, English schoolkids are regularly taken to the Arctic for a character-building experience far from civilisation before they head off to university.
Only they're not really far from civilisation. Unlike the Inuit, the hapless original human inhabitants of the Arctic wastes, they have all the equipment they need to keep warm, plenty of food they don't even have to hunt for, and cellphones in case something bad happens. It's a pretend survival experience they're given - or was, until now, when it's become an object lesson in hubris.
Wonderful we may be, and full of finer feelings, but to a bear losing its habitat and facing extinction - because of global warming caused by humans - we're sushi.
Mind you, we look like that to each other at times, at least if we have a media profile like feisty broadcaster Michael Laws, or even Fair Go's mild Gordon Harcourt.
Harcourt riled a used car salesman by approaching his stretch of metal wilderness with a film crew, and got a bloodied nose and "munted" glasses for his trouble. A 47-year-old company director has appeared in Tauranga District Court on charges of assault and intentional damage relating to that fracas.
Not to be outdone, possibly even inspired, an unidentified man in a hoodie king-hit Laws in a Wanganui bar last Friday night, leaving him with a black eye and damaged dentistry before darting off into the night.
Laws is a former mayor of the town, where his anti-gang stance gave him a high national profile, but did not make him universally adored.
In a below-the-belt counter-attack, Laws downplayed the incident, claiming that his attacker "hit like a girl". That was strong stuff, possibly more wounding than being cuffed by a polar bear. No man wants to be accused of possibly having breasts, still less sporting a hoodie that reeks of Chanel No 5. Not in his hour of triumph.