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!