It is perhaps the world’s most famous environmental parable. A settler on Easter Island stood beside the island’s last tree. He or she looked around the treeless horizon, every one of those trees removed by man, and chopped it down anyway. Afterwards, the island died — the nutrients washed away, the landscape stripped. The population collapsed into warfare and cannibalism. It is a compelling tale, but may be completely false, according to research published yesterday. The Easter Island population did collapse, not due to this “ecocide”, but instead something less remarkable: the arrival of Europeans, bringing syphilis, smallpox and slavery. --Tom Whipple, The Times, 7 January 2014
The paper by Benny Peiser tackles head on the evidence Jared Diamond uses to assert that the residents of Easter Island (aka Rapa Nui) committed ecological suicide, or ecocide. According to Peiser, the primary evidence Diamond relies upon are oral traditions from the residents of Rapa Nui and from historical sources, not from the archaeological record. But what is most disturbing is the extent to which Diamond seems determined to avoid looking at the actual genocidal violence of the colonial encounter. --Kerim Friedman, Savage Minds, 11 September 2005
Russil Wvong said: “The journal in which Peiser’s paper was published, Energy & Environment, appears to be a forum for global warming denial; In short, it seems that the global-warming-denial folks have decided to launch an attack on Diamond.” Well, that’s it then. If the people who raise doubts about global warming are also raising doubts about Diamond’s scholarship, we can safely assume that Diamond is correct. No need for evidence at all. –-Savage Minds, 14 September 2005
It might well have been environmental folly to remove the trees, but, the scientists write in the paper, “the concept of ‘collapse’ is misleading”. “Starvation is not an automatic result of tree removal, and neither is warfare,” said Professor Hamilton. Past research found what appeared to be layers of obsidian spearheads — implying brutal conflict, but further analysis showed they had been used for peeling vegetables. Similarly, while islanders might have lost the ability to go out on the sea to fish, there is evidence that they kept more chickens. It appears that civilisation survived long after the last tree — and collapsed only when the first ship appeared. “Their story is one of ingenuity, resilience, and resourcefulness,” said Professor Hamilton. -- Tom Whipple,The Times, 7 January 2014
The ‘decline and fall’ of Easter Island and its alleged self-destruction has become the poster child of a new environmentalist historiography, a school of thought that goes hand-in-hand with predictions of environmental disaster. Why did this exceptional civilisation crumble? What drove its population to extinction? These are some of the key questions Jared Diamond endeavours to answer in his new book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive. According to Diamond, the people of Easter Island destroyed their forest, degraded the island’s topsoil, wiped out their plants and drove their animals to extinction. As a result of this self-inflicted environmental devastation, its complex society collapsed, descending into civil war, cannibalism and self-destruction. While his theory of ecocide has become almost paradigmatic in environmental circles, a dark and gory secret hangs over the premise of Easter Island’s self-destruction: an actual genocide terminated Rapa Nui’s indigenous populace and its culture. --Benny Peiser, Energy & Environment, September 2005
The real mystery of Easter Island is not its collapse. It is why distinguished scientists feel compelled to concoct a story of ecological suicide when the actual perpetrators of the civilisation’s deliberate destruction are well known and were identified long ago. Easter Island is a poor example for a morality tale about environmental degradation. Easter Island’s tragic experience is not a metaphor for the entire Earth. The extreme isolation of Rapa Nui is an exception even among islands, and does not constitute the ordinary problems of the human environment interface. Yet in spite of exceptionally challenging conditions, the indigenous population chose to survive – and they did. What they could not endure, however, and what most of them did not survive, was something altogether different: the systematic destruction of their society, their people and their culture. --Benny Peiser, Energy & Environment, September 2005
Hunt and Lipo, relying partly on a paper by Peiser (written apparently without first-hand experience of Easter Island), claimed that Easter’s collapse was due to European impact, and that the islanders were coping successfully before European arrival. No one disputes that European impact did devastate what was left of indigenous Easter society, especially by introduced diseases and by a slave raid. However, to blame it all on Europeans dismisses all the convincing evidence that Easter society had been collapsing well before European arrival: evidence such as the near-completion of deforestation (attested by the disappearance of forest pollen and of forest plant remains), the evidence of widespread warfare (from detailed oral accounts and preserved weapons and skeletal injuries), the cessation of carving statues, the disappearance of oceanic fish and mammals from the diet (because of no trees to build canoes to harpoon them), and the desperate resort to sugarcane scraps for fuel (because of disappearance of native plant fuel). These and other types of evidence that have built up our current understanding of Easter Island history are denied. –-Jared Diamond, 22 September 2011
