Easter Island Palm Trees

Easter Island Ecozid Legend

Only a few historic stories about the environmental breakdown have reached the Easter Island's culturally resonant level. Jared Diamond's best known portrayal of the island's inhabitants in his 2005 publication "Collapse" was a traditional one that caused them to attack their confined surroundings, thus creating a convincing analogue for the present day. Diamond's theory is that the island's pristine luxuriant treetop was demolished by the Polish colonialists, whose worship of making solid sculptures (for which the island is today famous) needed vast quantities of timber to carry these vast crags.

As the environmental crises were exacerbated by logging, the island' s inhabitants tried to soothe their seemingly furious deities by making and carrying even more sculptures, thus building a cycle of devilish silliness. So that we do not discover the parallels, he writes: "I have often asked myself: "What did the Easter Island dweller say who fell the last palm while he was doing it?

" He shouted like woodcutters, "Jobs, not trees! It was not Diamond's first to make this particular analogy: over a century ago, Paul Bahn and John Flenley (both palaeoecologists) had written a 1992 volume entitled'Easter Island, Earth Island': To show how evil things can happen in a failing world, Diamond ensures that there are temptingly disagreeable claims that the people of the island have actually eaten each other on a large scale:

Diamant completes the section with a call to weapons that every environmental activist knows: Recent archeological work has now questioned almost every facet of this traditional "ecozid" story, most thoroughly and destructively in a new volume by archeologists Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo titled "The Statues That Walked".

However, Hunt and Lipo did not want to question traditional history: their first research was simply to corroborate it with larger archeological details. Instead of proof of his foolishness and environmental destruction, Hunt and Lipo suggest that he has indeed made an important contribution to the Easter Island community - which (again contrary to Diamond's claims) has remained relatively tranquil for many hundreds of years.

Thus, at the beginning of Polynesia's colonization, the new residents of Easter Island began to deforest, and then develop sophisticated ways to build a lasting livelihood in their barren and climate-damaging new homeland. This is a completely different image from the traditional one of ecozide and cannibalism. 3. With regard to the latter, according to Hunt and Lipo, the first reference to it is a sensational con story reported in a 1845 edition of a popular daily in France, claiming that indigenous gunners tried to feed a France ship's command.

Kannibalism was also an old trick of Christians and was used on many other Isles both to persuade Polynesians that their own civilization is revolting and to persuade the outside world that the locals urgently need to convert to Christianity. His and Lipo are not the first to point out the shortcomings of Diamond's fellowship - and that of his spiritual ancestors.

In this 2005 document, Benny Peiser points out that there were plenty of stocks of fish, and early Egyptian researchers' accounts that the island' s inhabitants were thin and miserably looking are extremely conflicting (others say they were living in comparable luxury). Surely Diamond seems to read that very biased. I have not yet discovered where Diamonds'garbage heaps' of broken man's bone lie, for there does not seem to be any proof of them found in any of the scholarly books I have found.

Hunt and Lipo report: Wrongly blaming the people of the island for destroying and feeding each other is already terrible enough. Whereas the traditional story is blaming the inhabitants of the island for a kind of collectively environmental and societal self-inflicted death (hence the word "ecocide"), this historical readings almost certainly perpetuate a monuments inequity.

The Easter Islanders were subjected to an act of holocaust - but it did not come from within. It' s grim irony that Jared Diamond of all minds has either failed or read this more realist account of the story, as it is the key hypothesis for his former and much more compelling work " Gruns, Keime und Stahl ".

This work provides convincing proof of how illnesses unheard of in the New World depleted entire peoples, facilitated the Europeans' invasions and set the stage for horrific crime against indigenous peoples from the Potosi to Tenochtitlan Mine. So, why couldn't he have understood that the same thing was happening on Easter Island?

This is Hunt and Lipo again: During the 19th and early 20th century, the island was transformed into a huge breed of shepherds, whose survival humans were kept in absolute cages. Ewes turned it into a real environmental waste ground, removed the smaller trees and caused extensive ground erosion for which the early Easter Islanders were later again accused by today's conservationists.

His and Lipo finish their books by making a much more affirmative analogy between Easter Island and the like. As we all are, Easter Islanders are addicted to the outside World. Maybe recent historical research will help to question the Hobbesque and gloomy idea that mankind necessarily tends to destroy and overpower.

I believe this is the real teaching of Easter Island. I give the last words to Benny Peiser, whose document on the topic should be read by anyone who believes in the history of collapses in Jared Diamond's work. Joard Damond sent a sturdy answer to the above play (and the resources on which I base it), which I have completely released.