Earth and Easter: The Lessons We Can Learn From Rapa Nui [2]

So, we know the parallels between our society and Easter Island’s. So what? Its easy enough to state the similarities, but what we need to do now is take the lessons we’ve learnt from Easter and put them into practice for today’s society.

Diamond summarises this point with his likening of history to experiments:

‘History consists of lots of natural experiments, some of which ended badly and some of which ended well. Today we are running a big natural experiment, but it’s a worldwide natural experiment’

So how can we use Easter’s experiment to make ours work? Well it essentially boils down to politics and decision-making. We had the technology to make the damage, therefore we must have the technology to undo it…but it’s about whether or not we want to. Diamond outlines a decision-making process for solving a problem, and Easter provides us with the perfect example of an unfortunate society who, from the decision-making process, made bad decisions:

1. Whether a society anticipates a problem or not: The Easter Islanders were not able to anticipate the problems of dry, low, high-latitude islands because they came from wet, high equatorial islands.
2. Failure to perceive a problem when the problem has arrived: Population growth couple with deforestation would have been slow during early settlement, thus the islanders may not have realised the extent of their problem until it was too late. This teaches us that we must think through our actions and anticipate the consequences as fully as possible, however it seems we have ignored Easter Island in this respect in light of the majority of the environmental problems we are facing today.
3. When a group has perceived a problem, whether or not they try to solve the problem based on rational behaviour of the group. It is proposed that Easter’s chiefs were acting their own self-interest, by building bigger statues to stake their claim as the best chief, which would have caused further soil erosion and deforestation (if you believe that the moai statues were rolled on tree trunks, and this could have majorly contributed to the deforestation. Again its plain to see a parable with today’s society here, as conflicting interests surrounding climate change with China and the rest of the developing work conflicting against the EU and those who are working to curb global warming.
4. A society may fail to solve a problem because some problems are just too difficult to solve given the available technology. With the European’s bringing diseases the natives were immune to, and slave trading, the society were simply incapable of solving their problem with the medicine and weapons they had.

So, have we learnt from Easter Island?

Deforestation rates in the Brazilian Amazon have dropped by 70% over the past 5 years, due to a change in attitude in the Government, famers and cattle owners (see a really interesting podcast by Justin Rowlatt of the BBC, who investigates this deforestation rate drop by talking to farmers, politicians and environmental organisations in associated with this scheme in Brazil - http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p00mmnqv/Business_Daily_Saving_the_Brazilian_Amazon/). As deforestation continued on Easter Island, instead of seeking to improve the complex political system that allowed the settlement of 7000 people on one of the most inhabitable places on Earth, the islanders overthrew the political system. The ‘birdman’ cult was then created, and was (according to legends) fuelled by competition and warfare between tribes, rather than being a peaceful complex political system.

New sustainable businesses (funnily enough, one of the biggest new sustainable business from the Amazon in Brazil is the production of Rainforest friendly condoms, which kills two birds in one stone as it also reduces population expansion!), changing attitudes of farmers, better monitoring through satellites, and pressure and campaigns by pressure groups were all part of saving the Brazilian Rainforest. Could Easter have survived deforestation if they had similar policies and thinking to Brazil’s? I’ll let you decide that one!

The sustainable businesses from the Brazilian Amazon highlights the success of sustainable development, and this has not stopped in just Brazil. There are plenty of successful sustainable development stories and schemes around the world. Lastly there are numerous population growth policies, some successful and others not - China’s one child policy is a well-known example of a country trying to curb its population expansion.

So to conclude this post, yes, we do have many lessons to learn from Easter Island, and it all boils down to policies and decision-making. Even if you do not believe that the ‘ecocide’ theory is correct, and that deforestation, resource depletion and population expansion caused Easter’s demise, what is the harm in believing that we can learn from Easter Island? There is no doubt we are facing many environmental problems today, so if Easter is used a ‘scare tactic’ to kick out society into gear, so what if you believe in the ecocide theory? At the end of the day, if it helps us to face, and make decisions on how to improve some our environmental problems, then we should let it.