I have always had a hard time believing this story. It assumes these Easter Island people were really dumb and irrational. It might be that this story is not what really happened.
> It is a compelling tale, but may be completely false, according to research published yesterday. The Easter Island population did collapse, not due to this “ecocide”, but instead something less remarkable: the arrival of Europeans, bringing syphilis, smallpox and slavery.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/european-disease-led-to-d...
No it doesn't. It assumes a tragedy of the commons. Everybody who cut down trees did so out of rational self-interest. The same kind of thing happens even in supposedly advanced civilizations, e.g. with the Atlantic cod fishery. Coordination problems are hard to solve.
Man-made deforestation of islands is fairly well documented. Iceland was largely deforested by early settlers as well.
Deforestation alone may not be what killed the settlers of Easter island, but it sure as hell didn't do them any favors to not have access to wood.
Yet we do know with certainty that hundreds, if not thousands, of inhabitants were taken as slaves and the remaining suffered from rampant diseases that were introduced to that island.
So what killed them might not have been lack of resources but rather the same old story of more powerful nations exploiting them.
But it was a small island and they couldn't even read/write.
So do we have, today, enough resources on earth extract resources away from the island called earth? What if we run out of petroleum before we built enough rockets and launch systems and fuel?
