Collapse of the Easter Island ecocide theory: to what extent does opinion influence research?

The idea that Rapa Nui (Easter Island) society collapsed as a result of over-exploitation of the island’s environment has become a widely held belief. But is this view supported by evidence, or is it opinion?

What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?” Like modern loggers, did he shout “Jobs, not trees!”?‎

This often quoted line comes from Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed1, the celebrated 2005 book by Jared Diamond which draws lessons for today from the role of environmental factors in the collapse of past societies. Rapa Nui (Easter Island) has fascinated people from around the world because of it’s massive stone figures, the moai. In Collapse, Diamond concludes that the people of Rapa Nui destroyed all of the island’s forests within a few centuries of arrival, leading to widespread environmental degradation. This caused the society to collapse into conflict, cannibalism, and self-annihilation with less than 700 people remaining when Captain James Cook visited the island in 1774.

The “Easter Island ecocide” theory put forward by Diamond quickly became a widely promoted mantra, particularly among environmentalists, despite being challenged in the paper ““From Genocide to Ecocide: The Rape of Rapa Nui”“2 soon after the publication of Collapse. Paper author Barry Peiser argues that Diamond’s significant concern for the future and its impacts on the environment clouded his judgement:

The fundamental flaw in his treatment of Easter Island is that he approaches the problems of its evolution and history with the zeal of an environmental campaigner, and not with the dispassionate detachment of a scientist.

Far from irresponsible environmental destroyers, they show, the Easter Islanders were remarkably inventive environmental stewards, devising ingenious methods to enhance the island’s agricultural capacity. They did not devastate the palm forest, and the culture did not descend into brutal violence. Perhaps most surprising of all, the making and moving of their enormous statutes did not require a bloated population or tax their precious resources; their statue building was actually integral to their ability to achieve a delicate balance of sustainability. The Easter Islanders, it turns out, offer us an impressive record of masterful environmental management rich with lessons for confronting the daunting environmental challenges of our own time.

Central to Diamond’s Easter Island ecocide theory is the conclusion that the islanders deforested the island not just for agriculture, but to use the trees to help transport the moai. This assessment was first put forward in the 1992 book Easter Island, Earth Island4.

However, Hunt and Lipo argue that the moai were “walked” vertically from quarries to their final locations, rather than being slid or dragged horizontally across the ground with the assistance of timber. They show that it can be done in a real-life demonstration.

Environmentalist Mark Lynas discussed Hunt and Lipo’s conclusions in a blog post, in which Lynas was heavily critical of Diamond:

Falsely accusing the islanders of killing and eating each other is bad enough. But it gets worse. Whilst the conventional narrative blames the islanders for committing a kind of collective ecological and social suicide (hence the term ‘ecocide’) this reading of history is almost certainly perpetuating a monumental injustice. For the Easter Islanders were indeed subject to a genocide – but it did not come from within. Instead, visiting ships brought epidemics of new diseases which wiped out the majority of the population – with most of the remnants later carted off in slave raids.

It is grimly ironic that Jared Diamond, of all people, missed – or misread – this more realistic version of history, given that it forms the central thesis for his earlier and much more convincing book ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’.

In a subsequent blog post, Lynas gives Diamond the right of reply. Diamond hits back at the criticism, saying that:

Unfortunately, the web postings don’t recognize the compelling reasons why Hunt’s and Lipo’s conclusions are considered transparently wrong by essentially all other archaeologists with active programs on Easter Island.

Diamond goes on to detail what he sees as those compelling reasons, drawing on research findings to support his views. He dismisses Hunt and Lipo’s view that rats had a role in deforestation, rejects their date for the settlement of Rapa Nui, describes their view that the moai were moved vertically (walked) as being implausible, and rejects their view that collapse occurred only after European contact. He finishes by stressing the core message from Collapse: that the collapse of Rapa Nui society was due to the over-exploitation of the environment, and that there are lessons in this for today.

In a further blog post, Lynas allows Hunt and Lipo to respond to Diamond’s rejection of their criticism. They begin their response with:

We are hardly surprised that Jared Diamond would write that we are “transparently wrong” about Easter Island. He has a vested interest in defending his “ecocide” storyline published back in 1995 in Discover Magazine and again in his bestselling book Collapse. We acknowledge that Diamond has much at stake here. But so do the Easter Islanders. So too does the field of archeology. And so too does the truth.

They then address the reasons why Diamond described their views as being wrong. They provide a much more detailed and extensive response than Diamond does in his rejection, and also draw on a wider range of evidence.

Our observations agree with Mulrooney’s (2013) argument of gradual social change and challenge the current paradigm of a human-driven ecological catastrophe causing a social collapse around AD 1000–1200 or later. Both archaeological and paleoecological evidence point to a new view of Easter Island’s history.

On the basis of the growing body of new research, it does appear that Diamond’s influential Easter Island ecocide theory is the product of his opinions about environmental and societal decline rather than being evidence-based, as climate science skeptic Peiser had asserted soon after Diamond published Collapse.

The emerging field of Resilience Thinking7 is also likely to offer insights into how Rapa Nui society was able to adapt to environmental change:

Resilience thinking addresses the dynamics and development of complex social-ecological systems (SES). Three aspects are central: resilience, adaptability and transformability. These aspects interrelate across multiple scales. Resilience in this context is the capacity of a SES to continually change and adapt yet remain within critical thresholds.

Mulrooney, M.A. (2013). An island-wide assessment of the chronology of settlement and land use on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) based on radiocarbon data. Journal of Archaeological Science, 40, 4377 – 4399. ↩

About the Author

Bruce Boyes is Editor and Lead Writer of RealKM Magazine, and a teacher at Shanxi University where he is establishing new knowledge management classes. He is an experienced knowledge manager, environmental manager, and educator with expertise in information and knowledge management, program and project management, environmental management and sustainability, community and stakeholder engagement and development, research, writing and editing, education and training, website management, and event and meeting management. Bruce holds a Master of Environmental Management with Distinction and a Certificate of Technology (Electronics).

With a demonstrated ability to collaboratively identify and implement innovative solutions to complex problems, Bruce’s career highlights include using agile approaches to implement an award-winning $77.4 million river recovery program in western Sydney on time and under budget, leading the development and implementation of a knowledge strategy process for the natural resource management organisations across Australia, and pioneering collaborative learning and governance approaches to help communities to sustainably manage landscapes and catchments.

2 Responses

interesting. and though his work is pooh-poohed by the elite of academia, Thor Heyerdahl wrote a book called Aku Aku, in which he investigated the Moai. He asked actual Rapa Nui residents about how they were moved, and the indigenous people told him they walked the moai. And they demonstrated the walking. I see, in this article, yet another instance when the evidence of indigenous citizens is ignored while outsiders duel over who is the better theorist.

Many thanks Anna Marie for your comment. Although “outsiders”, researchers Hunt and Lipo, Mulrooney, Cooper, and Rull et al. (all referenced in the article) considered the perspectives of Rapa Nui residents, and this contributed to their formation of very different views about the Moai to those of Diamond. So it’s not correct to say that the article ignores the evidence of indigenous citizens, rather, the intention of the article is quite the opposite. The views of local residents are critically important, and so is the scientific method, so there is much to gain from collaborative approaches, for example as discussed in this case study.