> 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.
I have always had a hard time believing this story. It assumes these Easter Island people were really dumb and irrational. It might be that this story is not what really happened.
> 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.
>It assumes these Easter Island people were really dumb and irrational.
No it doesn't. It assumes a tragedy of the commons. Everybody who cut down trees did so out of rational self-interest. The same kind of thing happens even in supposedly advanced civilizations, e.g. with the Atlantic cod fishery. Coordination problems are hard to solve.
The thing is trees take a long-ass time to grow, and if you need wood now to make tools to produce food, what are you gonna do, starve to death so someone else can make tools in 50 years?
Man-made deforestation of islands is fairly well documented. Iceland was largely deforested by early settlers as well.
Deforestation alone may not be what killed the settlers of Easter island, but it sure as hell didn't do them any favors to not have access to wood.
One needs to be very careful when making statements like that because early accounts of Easter Island are varied and subjective. However what is known with greater certainty is that they saw lots of visitors who brought diseases like smallpox and who took substantial numbers of Easter Island natives into slavery.
My point is that some of the accounts do report trees. While the stories of deforestation are true it’s a far cry from the island being baron and inhabitants turning into savage cannibals. That’s the subjective part.
Yet we do know with certainty that hundreds, if not thousands, of inhabitants were taken as slaves and the remaining suffered from rampant diseases that were introduced to that island.
So what killed them might not have been lack of resources but rather the same old story of more powerful nations exploiting them.
Well this is a discussion about trees. The post I replied to suggested we start chopping down trees when we run out of other resources. Hence my suggestion that this may not be a good idea.
I don't understand where you're getting the cannibalism from.
but if the island originally had enough resources to produce a seafaring vessel, but due to the mismanagement, they failed to save and invest enough, and finally squandered so much that there's not enough left to build one, then they're stuck on the island until everything runs out.
So do we have, today, enough resources on earth extract resources away from the island called earth? What if we run out of petroleum before we built enough rockets and launch systems and fuel?
I have always had a hard time believing this story. It assumes these Easter Island people were really dumb and irrational. It might be that this story is not what really happened.
> 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.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/european-disease-led-to-d...