Three and a half years ago I wrote a story about Easter Island….the land of the Moai statues. In the face of our current global climate change, Easter Island is often held up as a model of ecological disaster…..what might happen to us if we continue to use the environment faster than it can regenerate.
The common line went that the Easter Islanders had deforested their small island making canoes and those large statues, and eventually left themselves without resources. Their society whithered and died and the island was annexed by Chile and is now a romantic tourist destination for its Moai and the fact that it is one of the most isolated spots on the planet.
My comment was this: “How the @#$&! could a society make such a horrendously bad decision as to cut down all the trees on which they depend? I mean, what did they say as they were cutting down the last palm tree? “Gee…..” Actually, I can’t even make anything up. No one could be that stupid.
Surely the Easter Islanders, capable of making those amazing statues, must have realized the consequences of destroying their own forest. It wasn’t a subtle error. Easter Island is very small. No one could have made the mistake of cutting down the last lonely tree in front of them while thinking there were others elsewhere. It would have been obvious.”
Obviously something about that story never jived with me. I really didn’t/don’t understand. It turns out my skepticism was warranted.
Easter Island’s history has been revised, and there are two new culprits.
1) The environmental degradation was caused by the polynesian rat…brought by the settlers. The rats ate the native tree species’ seeds and the trees thus reproduced less and less. Remember rats breed like rats. Without any predators and lots of food/seeds….their population exploded and they simply ate too many seeds for the trees to sustain themselves. Botanists have seen this pattern with rats and forests in other small islands in the South Pacific, so it is not a far fetched idea. The people surely contributed too….but archaeological evidence suggest there simply weren’t enough people to wipe the island clean of its large forests.
That isn’t a very glamorous explanation, but it makes way more sense to me than people cutting down ALL the forests and thus killing their livelihood.
2) What about the fall of the Rapa Nui civilization? They may have had the rats to blame for the ecocide….however, even with severly diminished resources, the Rapa Nui still did not disappear. They were alive and well when the first Europeans reached the island.
That’s when the problems started. They were enslaved by Europeans and killed by our diseases. That was the end of the Rapa Nui. There were fewer than 100 left when Chile annexed the island in 1888. Again, not a particularly glamorous story…but certainly one that jives well with the rest of history.
I think the idea of people committing ecological suicide is a tough one to swallow. Even tougher than that though is the idea that Europeans swallowed the globe searching for gold to keep up their wars….enslaving and spreading disease every step of the way.
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