Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [72]
In short, the reason for Easter’s unusually severe degree of deforestation isn’t that those seemingly nice people really were unusually bad or improvident. Instead, they had the misfortune to be living in one of the most fragile environments, at the highest risk for deforestation, of any Pacific people. For Easter Island, more than for any other society discussed in this book, we can specify in detail the factors underlying environmental fragility.
Easter’s isolation makes it the clearest example of a society that destroyed itself by overexploiting its own resources. If we return to our five-point checklist of factors to be considered in connection with environmental collapses, two of those factors—attacks by neighboring enemy societies, and loss of support from neighboring friendly societies—played no role in Easter’s collapse, because there is no evidence that there were any enemies or friends in contact with Easter Island society after its founding. Even if it turns out that some canoes did arrive subsequently, such contacts could not have been on a large enough scale to constitute either dangerous attacks or important support. For a role of a third factor, climate change, we also have no evidence at present, though it may emerge in the future. That leaves us with just two main sets of factors behind Easter’s collapse: human environmental impacts, especially deforestation and destruction of bird populations; and the political, social, and religious factors behind the impacts, such as the impossibility of emigration as an escape valve because of Easter’s isolation, a focus on statue construction for reasons already discussed, and competition between clans and chiefs driving the erection of bigger statues requiring more wood, rope, and food.
The Easter Islanders’ isolation probably also explains why I have found that their collapse, more than the collapse of any other pre-industrial society, haunts my readers and students. The parallels between Easter Island and the whole modern world are chillingly obvious. Thanks to globalization, international trade, jet planes, and the Internet, all countries on Earth today share resources and affect each other, just as did Easter’s dozen clans. Polynesian Easter Island was as isolated in the Pacific Ocean as the Earth is today in space. When the Easter Islanders got into difficulties, there was nowhere to which they could flee, nor to which they could turn for help; nor shall we modern Earthlings have recourse elsewhere if our troubles increase. Those are the reasons why people see the collapse of Easter Island society as a metaphor, a worst-case scenario, for what may lie ahead of us in our own future.
Of course, the metaphor is imperfect. Our situation today differs in important respects from that of Easter Islanders in the 17th century. Some of those differences increase the danger for us: for instance, if mere thousands of Easter Islanders with just stone tools and their own muscle power sufficed to destroy their environment and thereby destroyed their society, how can billions of people with metal tools and machine power now fail to do worse? But there are also differences in our favor, differences to which we shall return in the last chapter of this book.
CHAPTER 3
The Last People Alive: Pitcairn and Henderson Islands
Pitcairn before the Bounty ■ Three dissimilar islands ■ Trade ■ The movie’s ending ■
Many centuries ago, immigrants came to a fertile land blessed with apparently inexhaustible natural resources. While the land lacked a few raw materials useful for industry, those materials were readily obtained by overseas trade with poorer lands that happened to have deposits of them. For a time, all the lands prospered, and their populations multiplied.
But the population