From Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail Or Succeed by Jared Diamond:
I have often asked myself, “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!”? Or: “Technology will solve our problems, never fear, we’ll find a substitute for wood”? Or: “We don’t have proof that there aren’t palms somewhere else on Easter, we need more research, your proposed ban on logging is premature and driven by fear-mongering”? Similar questions arise for every society that has inadvertently damaged its environment.
[tags]books, book, collapse, easter island, logging, environment[/tags]
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[...] Not to long ago I posted a quote from Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail Or Succeed by Jared Diamond. In Collapse, societies that have failed such as that of Easter Island, Norse Greenland, and the Anasazi are examined so that we can learn from those past societies. As Diamond notes in his book, a critic might oppose: “It’s ridiculous to suppose that the collapse of all those ancient peoples could have broad relevance today, especially to the modern U.S. Those ancients didn’t enjoy the wonder of modern technology, which benefits us and which lets us solve problems by inventing new environment-friendly technologies. Those ancients had the misfortune to suffer from effects of climate change. They behave stupidly and ruined their own environment by doing obviously dumb things, like cutting down their forests, overharvesting wild animals sources of their protein, watching their topsoil erode away, and building cities in dry areas likely to run short of water. They had foolish leaders who didn’t have books and so couldn’t learn from history, and who embroiled them in expensive and destabilizing wars, cared only about staying in power, and didn’t pay attention to problems at home.” [...]
[...] In Collapse Jared Diamond asks, “What did the Easter Island who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?†This always seemed like a interesting and legitimate question but maybe the last tree wasn’t cut down… I found a fascinating story via BoingBoing that tells of the fate of the last tree in Tenere, in northeastern Niger. From The Last Tree of Tenere: The Tree of Tenere, as it came to be called, had no companions for 400 km in every direction. Its roots reached nearly 40 m deep into the sand. In 1973, the tree was knocked over by a drunken Libyan truck driver. [...]
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