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« Having It Both Ways? | Main | Heading South? »

Genocide, Not Ecocide

Environmentalists (most notably, recently, Jared Diamond) are fond of using Easter Island as a cautionary tale of what happens when resources are depleted in a non-renewable manner. Well, it's looking a lot like this example is a fairy tale:

By the time the second round of radiocarbon results arrived in the fall of 2005, a complete picture of Rapa Nui's prehistory was falling into place. The first settlers arrived from other Polynesian islands around 1200 A.D. Their numbers grew quickly, perhaps at about three percent annually, which would be similar to the rapid growth shown to have taken place elsewhere in the Pacific. On Pitcairn Island, for example, the population increased by about 3.4 percent per year following the appearance of the Bounty mutineers in 1790. For Rapa Nui, three percent annual growth would mean that a colonizing population of 50 would have grown to more than a thousand in about a century. The rat population would have exploded even more quickly, and the combination of humans cutting down trees and rats eating the seeds would have led to rapid deforestation. Thus, in my view, there was no extended period during which the human population lived in some sort of idyllic balance with the fragile environment.

It also appears that the islanders began building moai and ahu soon after reaching the island. The human population probably reached a maximum of about 3,000, perhaps a bit higher, around 1350 A.D. and remained fairly stable until the arrival of Europeans. The environmental limitations of Rapa Nui would have kept the population from growing much larger. By the time Roggeveen arrived in 1722, most of the island's trees were gone, but deforestation did not trigger societal collapse, as Diamond and others have argued.

I'm sure that the argument now will be that they were about to collapse any year now, but the evil white men killed them before they had a chance to.

Posted by Rand Simberg at August 18, 2006 10:51 AM

Comments

"Collapse" is worth reading, with the following caveats:

• It contains several posthumous swipes at Julian Simon.
  
• It was compiled with advice from Paul Erlich, which probably explains the swipes at Simon.
  
• None of the examples of collapsed societies were money economies, so they had weak or nonexistent price signals to act as feedback loops.
  
• Diamond has either never heard of space industrialization or regards it as impossible, so he invokes the image of Earth as a gigantic version of Easter Island, without hope of resupply in the event of energy or materials shortages.
  
• Nanotech escapes his attention as well; he actually derides the notion of technological fixes.

That said, Diamond is not mindlessly anti-market -- he repeatedly praises the (western, privately-owned) oil industry for its conscientious approach to exploratory drilling, for example. He also quite deliberately makes the point that our unprecedented capabilities of communication and collaboration give us a good chance of working our way out of the difficulties presented in the book. I of course agree that we are unlikely to experience a collapse like that of Greenland, the Maya, etc, but expect that we will avert disaster via mechanisms that the Erlichs of the world either disbelieve or actually oppose.

Posted by Jay Manifold at August 18, 2006 04:04 PM


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