Easter Island has always been a place that has fascinated me.  It’s a Polynesian island in the southeastern Pacific Ocean at the southeastern most point of the Polynesian Triangle (about 2,000 miles from Chile).  It’s famous for its 887 enormous stone statutes called Moai created by the Rapanui people.   Another reason Easter Island is famous (and peaked my interest) is because it is repeatedly cited as the foremost example of resource scarcity and what can happen when populations do not have regard for the limited resources of their environment.  Recently, more research has indicated that there might be more to the story than anthropologists originally thought.

The dominant school of thought regarding Easter Island was that it was originally inhabited in 1200 A.D. by a small group of Polynesians (possibly a single family).  When the group arrived, the 63-square-mile island was covered with trees – as many as 16 million of them.  The settlers immediately started practicing “slash-and-burn agriculture” meaning they burned down the woods, opened spaces and began to multiply.  Soon thereafter, the island had too many people, too few trees, and then in a few generations no trees at all.   Jared Diamond, in his best-selling book Collapse contends Easter Island is the “clearest example of a society that destroyed itself by over-exploiting its own resources” and called this behavior “ecocide.”   Ultimately, Diamond argues that evidence of the Rapanui cannibalism and the practice of living in caves for protection suggests chaos as a result of resource depletion.  He also warns that Easter Island should serve as a warning to the rest of the world of what can happen if devastating resource depletion continues.

But how did the same people manage to carve enormous statutes weighing up to 75 tones and position them all over the island?  Because people who are weak and starving due to lack of resources probably wouldn’t have the energy to create these statutes and transport them.

Terry Hunt and Carl Lip from the University of Hawaii argue that Easter Island is actually an “unlikely story of success.”   Hunt and Lip claim there is no hard evidence to show that the original settlers set fire to the forest and cleared the land.  Instead, they blame the rats for destroying the trees as a reviewer in the Wall Street Journal reported:

In laboratory settings, Polynesian rat populations can double in 47 days. Throw a breeding pair into an island with no predators and abundant food and arithmetic suggests the result … If the animals multiplied as they did in Hawaii, the authors calculate, [Easter Island] would quickly have housed between two and three million. Among the favorite food sources of R. exulans are tree seeds and tree sprouts. Humans surely cleared some of the forest, but the real damage would have come from the rats that prevented new growth.

What is more mind boggling is that scientists say that Easter Island skeletons from the settlers time period show “less malnutrition than people in Europe.”  Hunt and Lip contend this is because the islanders were consuming the rats as well as whatever vegetables they could grow.  They further argue that Easter Island should be viewed as a success story because even though the ecosystem was severely compromised by the rats, the islanders adjusted and managed to keep going.  The anthropologists explain the decline in population due to the STDs that were most likely transmitted after the Europeans came to visit.

But is this latter narrative a “success” story?   It would certainly show that humans can adapt to even extreme environments, but is this an acceptable scenario?  As J.B. MacKinnon puts it in an interview with NPR:

Humans are a very adaptable species. We’ve seen people grow used to slums, adjust to concentration camps, learn to live with what fate hands them. If our future is to continuously degrade our planet, lose plant after plant, animal after animal, forgetting what we once enjoyed, adjusting to lesser circumstances, never shouting, “That’s It!” — always making do, I wouldn’t call that “success.”

What do you think?  Does this alter your perception of Easter Island?  Is it a “success” story?