Financial Times

Lessons from the Easter Island’s end
“The New Yorker –The Critics” in a book review of “Collapse” by Pulitzer Prize Winning Professor of Cambridge, Jared Diamond, titled “The Vanishing” quotes “But look, Diamond says, at 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. “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.”
Jared Diamond in the Discover Magazine in 1995 in an article titled “Easter Island’s End” wrote “Eventually Easter's growing population was cutting the forest more rapidly than the forest was regenerating.

The people used the land for gardens and the wood for fuel, canoes, and houses-and, of course, for lugging statues. As forests disappeared, the islanders ran out of timber and rope to transport and erect their statues. Life became more uncomfortable-springs and streams dried up, and wood was no longer available for fires. People also found it harder to fill their stomachs, as land birds, large sea snails, and many seabirds disappeared.

Because timber for building seagoing canoes vanished, fish catches declined and porpoises disappeared from the table. Crop yields also declined, since deforestation allowed the soil to be eroded by rain and wind, dried by the sun, and its nutrients to be leeched from it. Intensified chicken production and cannibalism replaced only part of all those lost foods. Preserved statuettes with sunken cheeks and visible ribs suggest that people were starving. With the disappearance of food surpluses, Easter Island could no longer feed the chiefs, bureaucrats, and priests who had kept a complex society running. Surviving islanders described to early European visitors how local chaos replaced centralized government and a warrior class took over from the hereditary chiefs.

The stone points of spears and daggers, made by the warriors during their heyday in the 1600s and 1700s, still litter the ground of Easter today. By around 1700, the population began to crash toward between one-quarter and one-tenth of its former number. People took to living in caves for protection against their enemies.

Around 1770 rival clans started to topple each other's statues, breaking the heads off. By 1864 the last statue had been thrown down and desecrated. As we try to imagine the decline of Easter's civilization, we ask ourselves, "Why didn't they look around, realize what they were doing, and stop before it was too late? What were they thinking when they cut down the last palm tree?"

A United Nations study is estimating that by 2010 the world may need to cope with as many as 50 million people who have fled their homeland as a result of the environmental catastrophes. A new category called environmental refugees the victims of deteriorating environments will then arise.

The Gobi desert in China is expanding by more than 3900 square miles a year, mountain glaciers are shrinking faster each succeeding year, the ten warmest years is after 1990, average atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration up 35% since the industrial era and 160,000 die due to climatic changes and US energy related emissions rose almost 16% and China 47% since 1990.

The UN Under-Secretary General says in the report “we should prepare now, however, to define, accept and accommodate the new breed of refugees”.
Even with this scenario around us why are “Environmental Issues” not a part of election platforms, Chamber position papers, religious leader’s sermons and MOU’s, and civil society leader’s public agitations? Tuvalu Island has asked for accommodation against rising sea levels from New Zealand and are we waiting to beg India for accommodation?

The World Bank, Colombo Chief, Peter Harold recently showed the way ‘It is time to bring back the Confucius system of values that places more importance on the next generation.” And Chamber leaders please take a lesson from Wanagari Mathai and campaign for the private sector to reduce, repair, and recycle.

(The writer could be reached at - wo_owl@yahoo.co.uk).

Back to Business