Toppling statues.(SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENT)

Benny Peiser, "From Genocide to Ecocide: The Rape of Rapa Nui," Energy and Environment, forthcoming (multi-science.co.uk/ee)

Jared Diamond's latest bestseller, Collapse, relies strongly on the historical example of Easter Island as a warning that ecological collapse can doom a civilization. In a special issue of the journal Energy and Environment dedicated to discussion of the book, British anthropologist Benny Peiser takes a look at the Easter Island claims popularized in Diamond's book and finds no basis for them in the historical or archaeological record.

Peiser summarizes the theory as follows: "Within a few centuries after the island was settled, the people of Easter Island destroyed their forest, degraded the island's topsoil, wiped out their plants and drove their animals to extinction. As a result of this self-inflicted environmental devastation, its complex society collapsed, descending into civil war, cannibalism, and self-destruction. When Europeans discovered the island in the eighteenth century, they found a crashed society and a deprived population of survivors who subsisted among the ruins of a once vibrant civilization."

It's a lovely ecological morality ...