Just because the island’s inhabitants didn’t completely deforest it themselves doesn’t mean Europeans killed them. (And Europeans obviously have done a lot of terrible things)
This seems like a good article on the subject: https://www.americanscientist.org/article/rethinking-the-fall-of-easter-island
The author talks about carbon dating his team did which shows the inhabitants arriving later than originally thought, cutting down trees, and simultaneously introducing rats which ate the trees’ seeds. The rats had no predators and so would have exploded in population quickly. Combined with human activity using trees, ultimately that would result in deforestation.
European explorers: “everywhere we go the natives just die, it must just be what happens with uncivilized savages, we’ll call it ‘fatal impact theory’”
It was God’s will, obviously.
God wanted me to take all their women and stuff, he totally told me so!
We shall tragically never know the cause.
Holy shit, that makes Jared Diamond even more of a shitty person than I thought. (He cited the Rapa Nui people’s “destruction of their own environment” as a reason for their collapse. Even used the tagline “what did the Easter islander [sic] who cut down the last tree think while doing it?” for the book.)
And why is he shitty to begin with in your opinion?
I’m dredging up academic book reviews from long ago out of my my memory banks, so take this with a healthy heap of salt, but the gripe about his work (specifically Guns, Germs, and Steel) is his evangelization of environmental determinism to support his thesis. Notably, I’ve not read his later book (Collapse) which I assume is the specific reference being made above, so I’ll reiterate, very healthy handful of salt.
In essence, Guns, Germs, and Steel sought to answer the question of why European societies tended to dominate other cultures (specifically American, Australasian, and African societies) and not the other way around. To his credit, he explicitly rejected any argument based on inherent racial superiority. However, the answers that he settles upon boil down to a deterministic view of history which rankles some people’s feathers. Essentially, he argues, it was inevitable that Western Europe would conquer the world because the geography of the continent enabled (or even encouraged) imperialism once certain technological thresholds had been met.
My personal, inexpert critique of Diamond’s arguments are that it feels like slapping a coat of late-90s “politically correct” paint on the same racist arguments which he purports to reject, i.e. “we cant claim white people dominated the globe because of racial superiority anymore, but what if we claimed white people’s environment was superior at generating societies with the capacity to dominate?”
This argument does a couple of things. Racists get to pat themselves on the back, inexplicably, for their ancestors utilizing the resources presented to them “better” than brown people, while white folks who feel guilty about the legacy of imperialism can rest assured that it isn’t their (or their ancestors’) fault, it’s the broadly east-west alignment of the European continent which is to blame!
To be clear, I don’t know enough about Diamond or his work as a whole to judge his personal character, and my reductive summation of his arguments should be considered for what they are: a dude on the internet remembering a couple of university lectures 15 years after the fact.
Your brief reply is very much in line with the pinned explanation at r/askhistorians.
I dislike the Old Place too, but r/askhistorians was really, really well moderated/curated.
The idea that geography doesn’t shape history is a strange one. What does, if not geography?
Please understand that I’m not saying that Guns, Germs and Steel isn’t full of inaccuracies or that it doesn’t oversimplify.
I’m just arguing about the idea that geography is the ultimate cause of history.
Well, those are two different arguments. No one will bat an eye at the argument that geography is a contributing cause to culture/history, but eyebrows start raising when you argue that geography is the “ultimate cause” of history. It’s the degree of determinism that sticks in my (and others’) craw.
It’s an update of old arguments which said things like, “the high temperature of the African continent explains why those people are barbaric savages; they’re too hot-blooded to create real civilizations”.
Guns Germs and Steel is wildly oversimplified, and he implies a background in history when his education is actually in the sciences. In general anthropologists see his assessments as shallow, a pretty common issue with popular nonfiction writers.
