Collapse and Easter Island

As this is my second post I’ll still keep things a little more laid back. This week I’d like to share with you an extremely good lecture of Jared Diamond’s on Societal Collapse via Youtube. The video is only about 20 minutes long but provides a great overview for the things I’m going to be talking about in this blog:

Although I could probably write a gigantic review of this lecture as it was packed with interesting stuff, I will only touch on a few things Diamond talked about. In my blog I’m going to largely be focusing on Easter Island as I personally find it a fascinating case study. There are a couple of questions Diamond asked in his lecture that I hope to expand on in future blog posts but for now I will just provide an overview of the Easter Island Tragedy. 

Easter is a very remote island lying far out in the South Eastern Pacific Ocean, over 2300 miles from the west coast of Chile and 1300 miles east of Pitcairn Island. At one point in time the Island was relatively rich in resources, supporting a subtropical tall forest with plenty food sources (Diamond 2004). The island was first settled by Polynesians who migrated there from other Pacific Islands between the years 700 to 1100 AD (although this itself is an on-going debate).

Somehow, between this date of settlement and the arrival of Europeans in the 1700s the island had become severely deforested, with every single tree cut down and all species of tree extinct (Diamond 2004). Furthermore, all land birds native to Easter had become totally extinct as well as other food resources collapsing, and as some have argued, pushing the Easter Islander society into collapse resulting in war, starvation and cannibalism as they battled “it out over whatever resources remained,” (Barbour 2008:132). For the Easter Islanders to watch their environment degrade over such a long space of time and mostly as a result of their own actions, as I will discuss in later posts, I find almost baffling.

As Diamond asks in the above lecture, how did the societies not see what they were doing? What did the Easter Islanders say when they cut down the last tree? How could they not see the impacts they were having on their environments and react in time? And I think these are very telling questions for human society today as it is arguable with Global Climate Change we are heading in the same direction, what will we say when we are about to use up our very last natural resources? Will we continue our current course into likely environmental degradation despite the cause and effect of this issue being fairly clear to us?

To make up for this being a fairly long post I’ll leave you with a happy birthday e-card from the Easter Island stone statues that I was shown on my birthday a few days ago:

So if you know anyone who is both interested in Societal Collapse/Easter Island and has a birthday soon, show them this blog and the e-card!

Societal Collapse: An Introduction

One of the greatest issues facing current and future human generations is that of Climate Change. Living and growing sustainably while adapting to future changes in the environment is a serious concern for people worldwide. It is therefore important to understand how societies have reacted to environmental change in the past and the role, if any, played by the environment in their downfall.

The collapse of societies is obviously brought about by a huge range of causes. In Jared Diamond’s book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), five major factors that contribute to societal collapse are identified:

• Climate change
• Hostile neighbors
• Collapse of essential trading partners
• Environmental problems and 
• Failure to adapt to environmental issues.

It is therefore clear that the environment can play numerous roles in the breakdown of societies, with the root issue often (but not always) lying in the relationship between overpopulation and environmental carrying capacity.  

I personally find the collapse of past societies particularly interesting because the problems those ancient peoples faced are in many ways analogous to the challenges we face today and this is something I will explore through this blog amongst other issues.

As Flenley and Bahn point out (1992), past societies have carried out for us “the experiment of…unrestricted population growth, profligate use of resources [and] destruction of the environment,” allowing us the ability to learn from past failures and possibly overcome future challenges.