Ignorance Killed Easter Island- Are We Next?

Jared Diamond, author of Collapse, writes of Easter Island. Once, it was home to a thriving culture that produced the enormous stone statues that continue to inspire awe. It was home to dozens of species of trees, which created and protected an ecosystem fertile enough to support as many as thirty thousand people. Today, it's a barren and largely empty outcropping of volcanic rock. What happened? Did a rare plant virus wipe out the island's forest cover? Not at all. The Easter Islanders chopped their trees down, one by one, until they were all gone. Once the trees were gone, the civilization collapsed and spiraled into cannibalism. Trees were the only means to make the canoes used to fish for food. "I have often asked myself, 'What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?'" Diamond writes, and that, of course, is what is so troubling about the conclusions of "Collapse." Those trees were felled by rational actors-who must have suspected that the destruction of this resource would result in the destruction of their civilization. The lesson of "Collapse" is that societies, as often as not, aren't murdered. They commit suicide: they slit their wrists and then, in the course of many decades, stand by passively and watch themselves bleed to death.

Diamond continues. "The values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs over adversity."

Actually, the inhabitants of Easter Island were doubly unfortunate – when their
environment collapsed they had nowhere else to go. The example of Easter Island should be chillingly obvious; thanks to globalization, we on planet earth are as interconnected and isolated as the clans of Easter Island. Their fate may serve as a metaphor for a potential worst-case scenario awaiting us.

Hey but its only our children and their children who will suffer for our actions today. One has to wonder what will the children say of us and our edifices to excessiveness

Save the embryo, kill the planet.
Drainability not Sustainability.



ISBN 0670033375