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By Root 2088 0

of the rich land eventually multiplied beyond the numbers that even its abundant resources could support. As its forests were felled and its soils eroded, its agricultural productivity was no longer sufficient to generate export surpluses, build ships, or even to nourish its own population. With that decline of trade, shortages of the imported raw materials developed. Civil war spread, as established political institutions were overthrown by a kaleidoscopically changing succession of local military leaders. The starving populace of the rich land survived by turning to cannibalism. Their former overseas trade partners met an even worse fate: deprived of the imports on which they had depended, they in turn ravaged their own environments until no one was left alive.

Does this grim scenario represent the future of the United States and our trade partners? We don’t know yet, but the scenario has already played itself out on three tropical Pacific islands. One of them, Pitcairn Island, is famous as the “uninhabited” island to which the mutineers from the H.M.S. Bounty fled in 1790. They chose Pitcairn because it was indeed uninhabited at that time, remote, and hence offered a hiding place from the vengeful British navy searching for them. But the mutineers did find temple platforms, petroglyphs, and stone tools giving mute evidence that Pitcairn had formerly supported an ancient Polynesian population. East of Pitcairn, an even more remote island named Henderson remains uninhabited to this day. Even now, Pitcairn and Henderson are among the most inaccessible islands in the world, without any air or scheduled sea traffic, and visited only by the occasional yacht or cruise ship. Yet Henderson, too, bears abundant marks of a former Polynesian population. What happened to those original Pitcairn Islanders, and to their vanished cousins on Henderson?

The romance and mystery of the H.M.S. Bounty mutineers on Pitcairn, retold in many books and films, are matched by the mysterious earlier ends of these two populations. Basic information about them has at last emerged from recent excavations by Marshall Weisler, an archaeologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand, who spent eight months on those lonely outposts. The fates of the first Pitcairners and the Henderson Islanders prove to have been linked to a slowly unfolding environmental catastrophe hundreds of miles overseas on their more populous island trading partner, Mangareva, whose population survived at the cost of a drastically lowered standard of living. Thus, just as Easter Island offered us our clearest example of a collapse due to human environmental impacts with a minimum of other complicating factors, Pitcairn and Henderson Islands furnish our clearest examples of collapses triggered by the breakdown of an environmentally damaged trade partner: a preview of risks already developing today in association with modern globalization. Environmental damage on Pitcairn and Henderson themselves also contributed to the collapses there, but there is no evidence for roles of climate change or of enemies.

Mangareva, Pitcairn, and Henderson are the sole habitable islands in the area known as Southeast Polynesia, which otherwise includes just a few low atolls supporting only temporary populations or visitors but no permanent populations. These three habitable islands were settled sometime around A.D. 800, as part of the eastwards Polynesian expansion explained in the preceding chapter. Even Mangareva, the westernmost of the three islands and hence the one closest to previously settled parts of Polynesia, lies about a thousand miles beyond the nearest large high islands, such as the Societies (including Tahiti) to the west and the Marquesas to the northwest. The Societies and Marquesas in turn, which are the largest and most populous islands in East Polynesia, lie more than a thousand miles east of the nearest high islands of West Polynesia and may not have been colonized until perhaps nearly 2,000 years after West Polynesia’s settlement. Thus, Mangareva and its neighbors were