After they left, however, Roggeveen and the commanders of his three ships described it as "exceedingly fruitful, producing bananas, potatoes, sugar-cane of remarkable thickness, and many other kinds of the fruits of the earth…. In his log, Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen, who led the first Europeans to set foot on Rapa Nui, portrayed the island as impoverished and treeless.
Using Rapa Nui as an example of "ecocide," as Diamond has called it, makes for a compelling narrative, but the reality of the island's tragic history is no less meaningful.Īccounts by European visitors to Rapa Nui have been used to argue that by the time of European discovery in 1722 the Rapanui were in a state of decline, but the reports are sometimes contradictory. These prolific rodents may have been the primary cause of the island's environmental degradation. More important, however, was what the rats ate. They brought along chickens and rats, both of which served as sources of food. The first colonists may not have arrived until centuries later than has been thought, and they did not travel alone. The story is more complex than usually depicted. Radiocarbon dates from work I conducted with a colleague and a number of students over the past several years and related paleoenvironmental data point to a different explanation for what happened on this small isle. I am now convinced that self-induced environmental collapse simply does not explain the fall of the Rapanui. As I looked more closely at data from earlier archaeological excavations and at some similar work on other Pacific islands, I realized that much of what was claimed about Rapa Nui's prehistory was speculation. Instead, I found evidence that just didn't fit the underlying timeline. When I first went to Rapa Nui to conduct archaeological research, I expected to help confirm this story. But in a limited ecosystem, selfishness leads to increasing population imbalance, population crash, and ultimately extinction." Its selfishness appears to be genetically inborn…. Bahn worried about what the fate of Rapa Nui means for the rest of human civilization: "Humankind's covetousness is boundless.
Flenley of Massey University in New Zealand and Paul G. In their book Easter Island, Earth Island, authors John R. Once the large stands of palm trees were all cut down, the result was "starvation, a population crash, and a descent into cannibalism." When Europeans arrived in the 18th century, they found only a small remnant of this civilization.ĭiamond is certainly not alone in seeing Rapa Nui as an environmental morality tale. He reviews estimates of the island's native population and says that he would not be surprised if it exceeded 15,000 at its peak. Two key elements of Diamond's account are the large number of Polynesians living on the island and their propensity for felling trees. Are we about to follow their lead?" In his 2005 book Collapse, Diamond described Rapa Nui as "the clearest example of a society that destroyed itself by overexploiting its own resources." "In just a few centuries," he wrote in a 1995 article for Discover magazine, "the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism. Jared Diamond, a geographer and physiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, has used Rapa Nui as a parable of the dangers of environmental destruction. By the end of the 17th century, the Rapanui had deforested the island, triggering war, famine and cultural collapse. Around 1200 A.D., their growing numbers and an obsession with building moai led to increased pressure on the environment. According to this version of events, a small group of Polynesian settlers arrived around 800 to 900 A.D., and the island's population grew slowly at first. The EN_US-part is your locale, you have to change that if you're not playing the english version.In the prevailing account of the island's past, the native inhabitants-who refer to themselves as the Rapanui and to the island as Rapa Nui-once had a large and thriving society, but they doomed themselves by degrading their environment. The localized name of each city is in the file /Assets/Gameplay/XML/NewText/EN_US/CIV5GameText_Cities.xml. TXT_KEY_CITY_NAME_NEW_YORK), not the full, localized name. It contains only the identifiers of the city names (e.g. There is a list of city names per civilization in your Civilization V folder inside the file /Assets/Gameplay/XML/Civilizations/Civ5Civilizations.xml.