I’ve been puzzling for a long time over something I read in Jared Diamond’s book Collapse. He tells the story of Easter Island, in the centuries before Europeans’ occasional visits, and of an ecological disaster caused by deforestation. If that is correct it represents a very interesting, and very poignant, problem.
Here’s my picture of what happened. The island was heavily forested around 1000AD when settlers arrived in ocean-going outrigger canoes. The few tens or hundreds of colonists built farms and fishing boats. The island was isolated but had fertile volcanic soils and was home to flocks of nesting birds. The humans flourished. By the sixteenth century the remaining forest was at high altitude, the remaining birds nested on inaccessible offshore rocks, and there were between ten and twenty thousand people living well on intensive farming and fishing.
This the tipping point. I saw an illuminating nature documentary about a wolf-pack which lived on a remote peninsula in Canada which described the same thing. The wolves grew fat and numerous hunting plentiful deer and moose. When their numbers were large enough they caused a crash in the population of prey animals, and the result was starvation. After a few bad winters the wolves were nearly (but not quite) wiped out and the deer and moose recovered to once again be numerous. The cruel exigency of selection leaves only the physically and mentally most capable wolves alive. Their progeny begin the cycle again.
Humans cannot escape this fate by intelligence. That quality by itself only makes for a better wolf. When the resources were exhausted and the population crashed it was the smartest, most resilient, and strongest islanders who lived. The ones who found ways to live on limited food. The ones who formed and maintained co-operative war bands were able to exploit the only remaining food source – other humans. Wisdom, on the other hand, redefines the problem. It may take intelligence to survive a collapse but it takes wisdom, on a community-wide level, to avoid one.
I don’t think the Easter Islanders were unaware of what was coming. People who can navigate over thousands of miles of uncharted ocean by stars and currents and wind are going to know how to see long term changes in the ecosystem. I think the old people saw that the trees were running out and knew that the landslips and erosion was due to deforestation. But a person’s first loyalty is to their own tribe or clan, so you have a tragedy of the commons.
Take the village green. All the villagers have a right to run sheep on it, but if it is overgrazed then the land will become useless. Farmer Fred can run 5 sheep there or 10, let’s say. If he chooses the higher number he gets a short term advantage, which goes directly to him. If he runs less sheep the green will be in better condition next year, so the whole village will benefit, but Fred has meanwhile forgone his own profit. What’s more someone else may run five extra sheep and Fred will gain nothing while the village will still lose. The intelligent thing to do is to run as many sheep as you can before someone else lets theirs eat the grass. It’s not, however, wise.
The Easter Islanders cut down every tree which could be used to build a boat. Huge expenditures of manpower built stone faces to proclaim the power of the chiefs when the society could least afford it. A warrior cult competed (by swimming the shark infested waters to retrieve bird eggs from the outlying rocky spires) for yearly control of the resources. Whichever clan won this contest used their power to pillaged what they could. Starvation, cannibalism, and warfare reduced the population to a few thousand by the time European explorers visited the Island towards the end of the Eighteenth century.
This is why, when I hear people say that the Kyoto Accord is flawed because it gives China the right to pollute it makes me want to scream. (The United States will currently not agree to binding carbon limits because it wants to retain the right to produce six times as much carbon per capita than an inhabitant of China.) It means if I don’t run my sheep on this commons someone else will. It means that the smartest creatures on the planet have still not learnt wisdom.
The Easter Islanders cut down their last tree knowing doing so condemned every islander and every one of their descendants to isolation on the island. It meant they would never again catch ocean fish. It meant landslips and denuded soil on which their children would be condemned to scratch a mean living. The islander who cut it down did so because it gained himself and his clan a short term benefit, and because not doing so would leave that benefit for whichever other islander and clan was sufficiently intemperate and greedy to sacrifice the whole island’s future. When there were 5000 trees long term cost of this tree seemed small. By the time there was a single tree the situation seemed so desperate that hope was gone.
The Islanders apparently believed that their gods would save them – the bird-man cult was in the end a propitiatory rite. The expenditure of precious wood to transport statues was an attempt to use extravagant effort within the context of the existing power structures to bring about a coup-de-main solution, whether by political or divine fiat. Twenty first century analogies abound. We believe that science will save us if we keep the economy (and levels of resource exploitation) running faster and faster. We are beginning to fight more and more expensive wars for political control and control of the remaining energy resources. The space program is our bird-man cult: sending a single human on a mission hopelessly reminiscent, only, of the full scale space colonisation which might in fact save us but which is yet far beyond our reach.
What the people of Easter Island could not do is what we, somehow, must. We must learn the wisdom to co-operate. Those who have the largest stake in the existing power structures must choose the good of us all over hanging on to wealth and power. We must all, in the west, accept a lower standard of living in exchange for a sustainable lifestyle and we must do this in a way which is fair to everyone. We must do it before we stand in front of that final tree.