The Easter Island experience is instructive as a microcosm, but most human societies are not that isolated and small.
Furthermore it's not really instructive in the Peak Oil realm because it was a muscle economy, without technology, and as for its politics, it seemed to involve carving giant stone heads and standing them up on hills.
Just because it happened, and the people who did it didn't see what they were doing soon enough to stop it.
As a side note, I suspect Jared's suggestion that the natives might not have even noticed that there were no trees left of reproduction age is pretty naive. Locals tend to have a very good understanding of native ecology in local domains, and I would suspect that the destruction of the last palm of reproduction age would have been a very noteworthy event, particularly among the elders. Think ghawar dying.
Also I believe that the Easter Island population was not "natives" but Polynesian immigrants from elsewhere who found the island. They may not have known the patterns of the vegetation.Locals tend to have a very good understanding of native ecology in local domains, and I would suspect that the destruction of the last palm of reproduction age would have been a very noteworthy event, particularly among the elders.
Just because it happened, and the people who did it didn't see what they were doing soon enough to stop it.
Very true. But I suspect many think that they were just savages, and surely we will be smarter.
Think ghawar dying.
The difference is that Ghawar isn't going to renew, while the Easter Islanders had every reason to believe that the trees would, eventually.
OTOH, it's also a mistake to imbue them with a deeper understanding of ecology than we have. The fact is, humans, from hunter-gatherers to high-tech, have frequently driven other species to extinction, when it would have been in our interest not to. We can't seem to help ourselves.
Also I believe that the Easter Island population was not "natives" but Polynesian immigrants from elsewhere who found the island. They may not have known the patterns of the vegetation.
The traditional migration routes followed by the herds, and the amount of time a herd of given size might spend at a particular well, were governed by rules worked out by tribal chiefs. In this way overpasturage was avoided. The timing of the movement of animals was carefully calculated so as to provide feed and water with the least danger from disease and conflict with other tribal groups.
Soft_Landing wrote:The point is that the Easter Island example is striking because we can see a human extinction event. The evidence for this will always be easier to locate than for a resource crunch that a culture survived. We shouldn't jump to the conclusion that all resource crunches result in mass die-offs. It's just that we wouldn't be able to find evidence of resources crunches that didn't result in extinction events.
Try to really put yourself in the shoes of the residents of Rapa Nui.
After the islanders deforested most of the island’s hilly interior to plant their gardens, rain carried topsoil down the steep slopes, and a savanna of ferns, which were among the few plants able to grow on the now-denuded ground, replaced the forest. Eventually, little land was left for gardening and tree crops. Deforestation indirectly reduced yields from fishing as well, because no trees large enough to build canoes remained: when Europeans came to Mangareva in 1797, the islanders had no canoes, only rafts.
With too many people and too little food, hunger on Mangareva became chronic. Modern islanders tell how, starved for protein, people turned to cannibalism, not only eating freshly dead people but also digging up buried corpses. Chronic warfare broke out over the precious remaining cultivable land; the winning side redistributed the land of the losers. Instead of an orderly political system based on hereditary chiefs, nonhereditary warriors took over. All that political chaos alone would have made it difficult to muster the manpower and supplies necessary to cross the ocean, even if there had been trees left for canoes.
As for the aboringines...in Australia, every animal (mammal, reptile, or bird) that weighed more than 100 kg went extinct shortly after humans arrived. Coincidence? Probably not.
I also hate to say that I find the case for overshoot and crash when a resource limit is breached to be compelling.
Canuck wrote:I don't think the population on Easter Island even realized that the supply of trees was dwindling. The population was probably as large and as rich as it have ever been a generation before the crash.
Leanan wrote:Was it any different on Rapa Nui? I doubt it.
Yes, precisely. I would suggest that this gives up the opportunity to date the resource crunch. Even though, of course, the evidence for it is very much indirect.
I'm also suggesting that, in leiu of physical evidence of the quality of that on Rapa Nui, we might be willing to allow moral codes and native religions that give primacy to the earth/environment to be considered circumstancial evidence that these cultures have experienced serious resource strife in the past.
Much much smaller 'world'. Any person could walk their planet.
Much more dependancy upon single resource.
The scope of the problem is smaller. Rather than dealing with trillions of barrels, the problem may be expressed in thousands of trees.
A Rapa Nuian could more easily conceive the practical significance of 10 trees than your average Australian can conceive the practical significance of a million barrels of oil. The appropriate null hypethosis would be that whatever awareness modern man has of the risk of a crisis related to oil, we must expect that the Rapa Nuians had at the very least that same level of society-wide appreciation, if not much more.
This is why I think that the challenge that peak oil has presented, does present, is very much to do with information and overcoming ignorance.
On the other hand, the positive message that I'm trying to get across is that the Rapa Nuian story suggests an overly pessimistic appraisal of our own future. We may have even less chance at preventing a crisis than did the Rapa Nuians, but neither does the crisis need to be that bad.
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