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By Root 1913 0

It is perfectly possible that there were indeed one or more such unrecorded visits: many Spanish galleons were sailing across the Pacific in the 1500s and 1600s, and the islanders’ nonchalant, unafraid, curious reaction to Roggeveen does suggest prior experience of Europeans, rather than the shocked reaction expected for people who had been living in total isolation and had assumed themselves to be the only humans in the world. However, we have no specific knowledge of any pre-1722 visit, nor is it obvious how it would have triggered deforestation. Even before Magellan became the first European to cross the Pacific in 1521, abundant evidence attests to massive human impacts on Easter: extinctions of all the land bird species, disappearance of porpoises and tuna from the diet, declines of forest tree pollen in Flenley’s sediment cores before 1300, deforestation of the Poike Peninsula by around 1400, lack of radiocarbon-dated palm nuts after 1500, and so on.

A second objection is that deforestation might instead have been due to natural climate changes, such as droughts or El Niño episodes. It would not surprise me at all if a contributing role of climate change does eventually emerge for Easter, because we shall see that climatic downturns did exacerbate human environmental impacts by the Anasazi (Chapter 4), Maya (Chapter 5), Greenland Norse (Chapters 7 and 8), and probably many other societies. At present, we lack information about climate changes on Easter in the relevant period of A.D. 900-1700: we don’t know whether the climate got drier and stormier and less favorable to forest survival (as postulated by critics), or wetter and less stormy and more favorable to forest survival. But there seems to me to be compelling evidence against climate change by itself having caused the deforestation and bird extinctions: the palm trunk casts in Mt. Terevaka’s lava flows prove that the giant palm had already survived on Easter for several hundred thousand years; and Flenley’s sediment cores demonstrate pollen of the palm, tree daisies, toromiro, and half-a-dozen other tree species on Easter between 38,000 and 21,000 years ago. Hence Easter’s plants had already survived innumerable droughts and El Niño events, making it unlikely that all those native tree species finally chose a time coincidentally just after the arrival of those innocent humans to drop dead simultaneously in response to yet another drought or El Niño event. In fact, Flenley’s records show that a cool dry period on Easter between 26,000 and 12,000 years ago, more severe than any worldwide cool dry period in the last thousand years, merely caused Easter’s trees at higher elevation to undergo a retreat to the lowlands, from which they subsequently recovered.

A third objection is that Easter Islanders surely wouldn’t have been so foolish as to cut down all their trees, when the consequences would have been so obvious to them. As Catherine Orliac expressed it, “ Why destroy a forest that one needs for his [i.e., the Easter Islanders’] material and spiritual survival?” This is indeed a key question, one that has nagged not only Catherine Orliac but also my University of California students, me, and everyone else who has wondered about self-inflicted environmental damage. I have often asked myself, “What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?” Like modern loggers, did he shout “Jobs, not trees!”? Or: “Technology will solve our problems, never fear, we’ll find a substitute for wood”? Or: “We don’t have proof that there aren’t palms somewhere else on Easter, we need more research, your proposed ban on logging is premature and driven by fear-mongering”? Similar questions arise for every society that has inadvertently damaged its environment. When we return to this question in Chapter 14, we shall see that there is a whole series of reasons why societies nevertheless do make such mistakes.

We still have not faced the question why Easter Island ranks as such an extreme example of deforestation. After all, the Pacific encompasses