I'm no expert so I probably have details wrong, but basically for decades the scientific consensus was that for some mysterious "penis size contest" type of reason, competing tribes of the Rapa Nui kept building more and more moais, and they needed wood to move them because the moais were heavy. So they had to roll them on tree trunks to their preferred location. They cut down all the trees on the island to move the moais, and when the trees were gone the ecology went to shit (no roots to hold the sand together, etc, lots of trouble).
If the moais weren't moved using enormous amounts of trees, then:
* It's not a given anymore that human activity ruined the ecology.
* This is a bad analogy for how humans are currently ruining the planet.
I am no specialist myself, but I remember reading a long article about Easter Island, signed by several archaeologists. They were really annoyed by the charismatic people that propagated their romantic views on Easter Island and ignored everything the archaeology proved. IIRC they especially blamed the popular book "Collapses", though others non-historians neither archaeologists, like the Kon-Tiki leader, had propagated other fantasies.
Studies proved the Rapa Nui inhabitants were better fed than inhabitants of other Pacific islands, though the women were below the average and the men above. They had developed technologies that palliated the lack of trees, notably an atypical irrigation system: they scattered black stones in their fields where water condensated at night. There are no remains of wars: no heaps of bodies and no weapons. The moais were not brought down by conflicts, they were laid down delicately when the funeral practices changed. At the same time, the inhabitants stopped producing moais, but it was not abrupt, and no statue was left unfinished because of this. No trace of a collapse until the Europeans arrived.
I thought the rise of the birdman cult had something to do with giving up on creating new moai. That would have been a fun contest: annual swim out to a sharp rock where you have to steal a bird egg and bring it back to shore. But the water was shark infested and your fellow competitors would try to stab you to get the sharks riled up.
In any case, Rapa Nui/Easter Island is an amazing place with a fascinating history.
It certainly seems that part of the issue is that "scientific consensus" is frequently wrongly claimed even though there may be a consensus among many mainstream academics in a network.
I appreciate the correction. Thanks.
The loudest proponent of this theory is Jared Diamond, whose credibility among anthropologists is somewhere between non-existent and negative. Given the popularity of his books Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse (the latter of which is particularly egregious in cherry-picking evidence and making stuff up to support his hypothesis), I suspect that's where your evidence came from. The centerpieces of ecological self-destruction--Maya, Rapa Nui, and Norse Greenland--are all not supported by the available evidence. (The cause of Mayan collapse is not agreed-upon, but the climate thesis is problematic since the more marginal sites lasted far longer than the less marginal; Rapa Nui, as noted above, didn't collapse in the suggested timeframe; and Norse Greenland died out when it was dropped from trade routes, not when the environment changed).
The particularity of the (most likely false) Easter Island story is that they ruined their own civilization in the process. I can't think of any other example like that. In all other cases I can think of, technological progress managed to offset whatever damage human activity did, and when it didn't, people simply moved away.
> in a world where conquistadors bested Aztecs with with guns and Spanish friars set up missions in communities devastated by plague, Diamond’s arguments would matter. But this is a world Tlaxcalans bested Aztecs, and Spanish friars set up many failed missions before gaining a foothold and witnessing entirely disrupted populations fall to disease afterwards.
> Mass resettlement into compact and unsanitary reduccion towns, disruption and destruction of traditional foodways, abusive forced labor in mines and hacienda plantations, and other factors all enabled diseases to assault an already weakened populace. [Germ] Resistance had little to do with.
> On a similar note, the most deadly diseases did not originate from domesticated mammals
This last one is repeated in another post:
> when I dived into the genetic and historic data, only two pathogens (maybe influenza and most likely measles) on his hand-picked All Star team could possibly have jumped to humans through domestication. The majority were already a part of the human disease load before the origin of agriculture, domestication, and sedentary population centers. Diamond ignored the evidence that didn't support his theory to explain conquest via disease spread to immunologically naive Native Americas.
I found Collapse fascinating. At first it was very persuasive, then I got to the chapter about Greenland, which posits that Norwegians at the time would rather starve than eat fish. At that point the book became fascinating for a different reason: The rhetoric and narrative are good enough to make it seem reasonable that people living on a coast rich in fish would develop advanced boats and boating technique, yet absolutely would not eat fish.
It's all done with smooth prose: The book is smoothly easy to read and your attention is kept where you won't wonder why those boats were developed in the first place.
(Life of Brian.)
How does an entire civilization achieve a dramatic course correction without one group of people forcing others to do their will?
Even if it may seem undeniably necessary, who decides what the course correction should be and how it will be implemented?
Or can a course correction be made without somebody deciding for others?
I mean these as honest questions, not just adversarial arguing points. Would very much welcome any insights, thanks!
Stuff like class hierarchies, zoning policies, corporatism, segregation... All these little quirks and nudges from the past that may or may not be relevant anymore.
This is why some of the founding fathers did not believe in legislation that was considered binding in perpetuity. With a once and done mindset combined with a psychological reluctance to undo what those before us have done, we lay the foundation through which attitudes hundreds of years old still affect us in our day to day for good or ill without OUR generation having consciously discussed and new a positive decision that a law is worth keeping.
A Government that operates without sunset dates on its laws resembles more a Tyranny of the Dead than a Government of the Living if you will as time goes on.
It doesn't HAVE to happen with violence. However, there has to be some very frank, realistic, high integrity people combing through a lot of detritus for a long time. Making conscious decisions others are willing to back up.
It's not an easy thing. The Framers really never set out for easy in their defense.
It looks like the arrival of Europeans had a lot to do with the quick demise of the Easter Island, by introducing diseases, rats and by enslaving the local population.
This would match what happened on a much larger scale elsewhere, for example in both South and North America.
[This explains explains it from an academic standpoint.](https://www.amazon.com/Questioning-Collapse-Resilience-Ecolo...)
Saying that they killed all the trees to help the moai get into place (or similar) is ridiculous.
In addition, the first reports from the 1720+ timeframe (first contact and there abouts) estimated the population at a few hundred iirc, no trees, toppled moai.