Collapse of Jared Diamond: A Modern Eco-fantasy

Jared Diamond is a talented writer who has had some success in the publishing world. His recent book Collapse, chronicles the rise and fall of the unfortunate Polynesian tribes of Easter Island, off the coast of Chile. Diamond's sad tale of eco-collapse has been taken up by Peak Oilers and other modern prophets of eco-doom as a cautionary tale for our own time. There is just one problem--Diamond's story may be turning out to be more fantasy than fact.

JD at Peak Oil Debunked Blog has looked into the story behind the story, and suggests the whole thing is a myth. JD links to this article from yahoonews:


Crucial to the conventional account of events on Easter Island is the time when settlers first arrived. If colonization didn't begin until 1200 AD, then the island's population wouldn't have had time to swell to tens of thousands of people.

"You don't have this Garden of Eden period for 400 to 800 years," Hunt said in an accompanying Science article. "Instead, [humans] have an immediate impact."

Also, the few thousand people Europeans encountered when they first arrived on Easter Island might not have been the remnants of a once great and populous civilization as widely believed. The researchers think a few thousand people might have been all the island was ever able to support.

"There may not have actually been any collapse," Lipo told LiveScience. "With only 500 years, there's no reason to believe there had to have been a huge [population] growth."

Europeans and rats to blame

The researchers also dispute the claim that Easter Island's human inhabitants were responsible for their own demise. Instead, they think the culprits may have been Europeans, who brought disease and took islanders away as slaves, and rats, which quickly multiplied after arriving with the first Polynesian settlers.

"The collapse was really a function of European disease being introduced," Lipo said. "The story that's been told about these populations going crazy and creating their own demise may just be simply an artifact of [Christian] missionaries telling stories."

The story of European disease causing disaster in a naive population is very familiar to any student of world history. Diamond himself thoroughly discussed the phenomenom in his bestseller, Guns Germs and Steel.

In science, it is only natural for theories to be proposed, then receive challenges, then either overcome the challenges--or be discarded as wrong. When politics gets caught up with science, the stakes widen and the participants are less likely to let go of a bad theory. The story of Easter Island is still being scrutinized, but it would not be surprising for Diamond's Collapse to be a modern anthropological fantasy, much as Margaret Meade's Samoan tales.