Posted on 03/09/2006 5:21:22 PM PST by blam
GGG Ping.
25 September 2004
From New Scientist Print Edition.
THE mysterious inhabitants of Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean did not wreck their pristine environment and so ruin their chances of survival. They were the victims of circumstance and were probably doomed to perish.
Easter Island has long been a mystery: a wind-blasted and treeless landscape dominated by giant stone statues set by its long-since-departed Polynesian inhabitants. Because it was once forested, it has become an emblem of environmental and social decline.
But a detailed study of 70 Pacific islands pinpoints nine environmental predictors of Pacific deforestation before the arrival of Europeans, and comes to a different conclusion (Nature, vol 431, p 443). "Easter's collapse was not because its people were especially improvident, but because they faced one of the Pacific's most fragile environments," says geographer Jared Diamond of the University of California, Los Angeles.
The island's remoteness in the eastern Pacific meant it rarely, if ever, benefited from fertile volcanic dust brought on the winds from eruptions in Asia. It is also low-lying, small and dry. And the island is distant from the equator, so the Polynesians' favourite trees, such as breadfruit and Tahitian chestnut, would not grow there. These factors would have made it difficult for the island's inhabitants to grow new trees to replace those they used.
From issue 2466 of New Scientist magazine, 25 September 2004, page 17
George Bush's fault.
Are they making this stuff up as they go along ping???
If Gray Davis or Al Gore had been running things, this never would have happened.
I heard it was immigration from muslim lands and gun control
What I love about the Easter Island story is that is debunks the benign native impact on the environment myth we have been fed by the shovel full for years.
I read years ago that someone calculated it only took 34 generations for the original population to die out. (680 years)
My guess is that it was the first, and maybe only, successful prison colony.
Bush's fault.
I saw an analysis recently that said that the land-ownership system in E.I. was to blame, that had anyone had an incentive to think about the future (as they do in, for example, modern tree farms), the forests would've been more than adequately preserved.
Prof. Diamond is an ecologic determinist who believes that biologists are the primary experts worth listening to, so I suspect he wouldn't have much time for that view.
Like Haiti but with fancier statuary.
Yup. I just completed reading his book, Collapse. He did compare Haiti to Easter Island.
The thought that the people intelligent enough to create and erect the monuments were so stupid as to render their existence obsolete is a real stretch.
It's not hard to conceive at all. Also they were not one happy tribe, there was serious internal strife with vandalism of rival clan statues
I don't think we know how it was done. I saw a documentary where some people erected a rock about 1/20th the size of an actual statue, and proclaimed the mystery solved. I had a good laugh over that one.
Don't you mean, "Ancestors of George Bush's fault"?;)))
Yeah, yeah, we know, humans bad, humans destroy, we should all just die, the world would be better, blah, blah, blah, Zzzzzzz
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