Maybe you've heard this story before, a cautionary environmental tale for the modern world: Easter Island, also known as Rapa Nui, is located in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, some 1,400 miles west of Chile. Polynesians settled there around 900 AD. They developed a complex society, building the now-famous massive stone statues. Back then, the island was covered in subtropical forest, including the world's largest palm species. Yet the island was completely deforested by 1722 when Europeans arrived.
What happened? Islanders cut trees for firewood, agriculture, canoes, houses, and statue transport. Deforestation then led to soil erosion, crop failures, loss of birds, and eventual inability to build ocean-going canoes. As resources dwindled, the population, once perhaps 15,000 strong, crashed. Society collapsed into warfare, starvation, and cannibalism. The old religion was abandoned, and rival clans toppled each other's statues.
The story of the Rapa Nui people and Easter Island consumes an entire chapter, “Twilight at Easter,” in the well-reviewed 2005 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive by scientist and historian Jared Diamond, perhaps best-known for his 1997 book Guns, Germs, and Steel. Easter Island's collapse is meant to serve as a stark warning to readers about the consequences of unsustainable resource exploitation. As Diamond writes (bold by me):
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 statutes 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.
“Chilling.” “Haunting.” Oh, and wrong, it seems.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Faster, Please! to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.