The Myth of Easter Island’s Eco-Collapse
August 28, 2005
Best-selling authors Jared Diamond (Collapse) and Thor Heyerdahl (Kon-Tiki) have given us a compelling legend of environmental collapse on Easter Island, the remote Pacific isle famous for its huge carved stone heads.
Diamond and Heyerdahl tell us that the Easter Islanders overpopulated their land area, and over-cut the palm trees—destroying their means of building fishing canoes. The resulting famine collapsed their society into civil war and cannibalism.
It sounds like an eco-parable for our own high-consumption societies. However, Diamond and Heyerdahl have left out a few bits of documented information. The gaps have now been helpfully filled in by British anthropologist Benny Pieser, in the journal Energy & Environment.
After Europeans discovered the island in 1722, whaling ships commonly stopped by to get fresh water and food, shanghai replacements for lost crewmen, and forcibly enjoy the local women. Sexually-transmitted diseases became an Easter Island death factor.
In 1805, the American schooner Nancy made the first slave-raid on the island, abducting 12 men and 10 women. In 1862, Peru began major slave raids that captured more than 1,000 Easter Islanders.
After international protests against the slaving, Peru repatriated around 100 of the surviving slaves. Unfortunately, they brought smallpox home, and most of the remaining islanders died.
In the 1870s, two European traders undertook to deport the last few Easter Islanders to Tahiti. They burned the natives’ huts and destroyed the sweet potato crops three different times to persuade the natives to board their vessels.
Chile formally annexed Easter Island in 1888, and put the few remaining native Polynesians into a barbed-wire detention camp-where they remained under guard until 1964!
Did the Easter Islanders destroy all their forests? The native huts were thatched with palm fronds when the Dutch landed in 1722. Numerous researchers suggest the palms were later lost to the cold of the Little Ice Age, but the pollen data is inconclusive.
Diamond claims the forests were all gone in the 15th century, but for another 400 years the islanders still had the trimora trees (20 inches thick) for small canoes, house pilings, and statue rollers. Statues were still being transported in the late 1800s.
Was there famine? Yes, after the smallpox epidemic weakened the population in the late 19th century. However, the islanders had always grown ample crops of bananas, potatoes, and sugar cane. Some of the island’s richest soils—with nearby fresh water lakes for irrigation—have never been farmed.
Were the natives unable to fish? U.S. Naval officer W. S. Thomson lived on the island in the 1890s. He reported the lagoons teeming with lobsters and crayfish that the natives caught by hand. Stone watchtowers helped them spot the many sea turtles bringing ashore both eggs and meat. The islanders made fish hooks from stone and bone, and fishing nets from the mulberry tree. They even had fishing seasons, to prevent over-fishing.
No evidence exists that there were ever more than the 3,000 or so Easter Islanders the whalers found in the 1700s. Warfare was common the Polynesians, with or without hunger.
Pieser finds no historic or archeological evidence of cannibalism. The cannibalism was reported by late-coming European missionaries, who claimed to have rescued the natives from such degradation.
The tale of eco-collapse is too pat, too perfect, and too far into an un-provable past. On the other hand, what part of the documented slave raids, syphilis, smallpox, and concentration camps provide Easter Island’s environmental lesson for the high-tech First World of today?
Is Jared Diamond part of the Green chorus urging us to return to a primitivism that cannot defend itself from either disease epidemics or slave raiders?
Posted in Commentary |