Collapse

I have been reading a book called "Collapse" by Jared Diamond. I have only read about a quarter of the book, however it has been really interesting so far. It discusses reasons why different societies have failed or succeeded. (Well, so far it has only given examples of societies that have failed, but the book cover promises successful societies as well.)

I expected the most important factors to be over-extension, greed, complacency or wars. The book suggests that the most common and important cause is abuse of the environment! I had always thought that abuse of the environment was a relatively recent event. I would never have guessed that societies in the 1500's would abuse thier environment so badly that they could no longer support themselves. Often, the societies did not understand the ramifications of their actions, however sometimes they did.


The first example is Easter Island. When Easter Island was "discovered" by the Dutch, there were only a few thousand people on the island. The barren island was 1300 miles from its nearest neighbor. There were no trees or even large bushes, no native birds and very little seafood available. Yet there were almost 900 giant stone statues, up to 70 feet high (taller than a 5 story building), weighing from 10 tons to 270 tons! The prehistoric population had no wheels, no machines, no metal tools and no draft animals to move these statues. When the island was "discovered", there was no vegation available to even make ropes from. How did the society transport these huge statues as far as 14 miles to their final resting sites?


One Swiss writer, Erich von Daniken, claimed that extraterrestrial astronauts landed on Easter Island. They were stranded on Earth, but had brought ultra-modern tools to build and transport the statues. Finally, the space aliens were rescued and left the Polynesian society behind.

No one really knows for sure, however recent research suggests that Easter Island had a thriving civilization at one time. It is believed that the island was colonized around 900 AD by a Polynesian Chief, his wife, 6 sons and extended family in one or two large canoes. The population grew to maybe 15000 people by the 1500's. At one point, the island had healthy forests. In fact, they have found that the largest palm trees in the world grew on Easter Island.


A researcher suggests that the statues can be moved on large logs. She ran an experiment with 50-70 natives. They were able to move a 10 ton statue 9 miles in one week. The experiment was filmed by PBS for the Nova program. Details on the Nova program can be found here.


Alas, the population ended up growing too large, they cut down every last tree, over-farmed the land and over-fished the surrounding seas. By the time that the Dutch "discovered" the island, it was completely barren and all of the native birds were gone. The civilization had turned to cannabalism to "survive". The population dropped from 15000 to a few thousand.

The author has an amusing passage, describing what the person who cut down the last tree, might have been thinking. The person must have known that they were cutting down the last tree on the island, yet they did it anyway. In fact, the island was so isolated, they probably thought that they were cutting down the last tree in the whole world!

The book is facinating. I have only scratched the surface of one chapter in this post. The book can be found here. More information on Easter Island can be found here, here and here.