redwood trees in California, which are the tallest and largest trees in existence now.
The Polynesians who settled on Easter Island found trees that provided lumber to build houses, thatch for roofs, and strong rope. There were big trees whose trunks could be made into seagoing canoes, hardwood trees from which harpoons were made, trees that provided wild fruit and nuts, and the wine palm whose sap could be fermented. The islanders had all they needed to live well. They prospered, and as they grew in numbers, they used more wood and cut down their forests to clear land to grow crops as well.
Like Shel Silverstein's Giving Tree, the trees of Easter Island kept giving and giving until there was no more that could be taken. Once trees go, further loss follows. Through the hydrologic cycle, trees transpire water into the atmosphere and attract rain. Trees provide a habitat for birds, animals, insects, fungi, and microscopic life. Trees protect soil from erosion by wind and rain, and make more soil as their roots break rock into gravel and their leaves compost into organic matter.
The growth of the economy and the population growth based on what trees provided on Easter Island could not be sustained. Diamond describes how deforestation and wind led to a disastrous erosion of the topsoil. Six hundred years after the first settlers arrived, the population of Easter Island had grown to between six thousand and thirty thousand and there were more mouths to feed than food. Widespread starvation led to a descent into cannibalism and the population died off.
When the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen came upon the almost deserted and barren island on Easter Sunday, April 5, 1722, the few human survivors and the mute, mysterious, and monumental stone heads (the moai) were all that remained. The trees had all been cut down. Since Roggeveen first sighted Easter Island, there has been fascination, speculation, and fairly extensive study about the moai. There had apparently been competition between priests or chiefs to outdo each other in erecting larger and larger stone heads, as the size of the moai increased over time. There were hundreds in various stages of completion in the volcanic quarries, some were found as if abandoned near the roads, and every single one of those that had been erected had been toppled, many deliberately felled so that they would break at the neck. The moai were erected on elaborate, large platforms built of stone (ahu) and always faced inland. It's a surprise to learn that the heads that we see in photographs of Easter Island were re-erected much later, and never faced the sea as they do in the pictures.
Deforestation of Earth
Once upon a time, like Easter Island, most of Earth was covered with forests. Almost half of the United States, threequarters of Canada, almost all of Europe, and much of the rest of the world were forested. Most of the deforestation occurred in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East prior to this century. The United States was logged extensively. Most old growth forests, particularly in the East, were clearcut by 1920. Now old growth trees and forests are being cut at an accelerated rate in the tropical rain forests and boreal rain forests. Deforestation is a major contributor to global warming. Al Gore, in his 2009 book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, wrote that 20 percent of carbon emission is due to deforestation—more than the amount produced by all of the world's cars and trucks combined.
Easter Island is an extreme example of deforestation. People object to the idea that the islanders created their own downfall. Surely, they wouldn't be so foolish as to cut down all their trees, when the consequences would have been so obvious to them? Jared Diamond comments that this question nags everyone who has wondered how it happened, including himself. He writes: “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 fearmongering’?” (Collapse, 2005, p. 114).
This imagined conversation echoes the rationalization to justify cutting down ancient trees by logging companies with profit as the sole motivation, and by the men hired to do the job. In developing countries, once the most valuable trees are efficiently harvested, the trees that are still standing are likely to be taken down for firewood or charcoal. On seeing the effects of deforestation when there is poverty, it is easy to see what happened on Easter Island: the trees became extinct, due to the deforestation that was done when the island was prosperous and then, later, when anything that could burn was used for fuel. Until one day, there was no tree left standing.
Like Easter Island, there is nowhere to go if we use up what sustains us on planet Earth. If we continue to pollute the water, use up resources, cut down the trees and the rain forests, destroy the ozone layer, turn fertile land into deserts, continue to create larger, more sprawling, more numerous and unmanageable cities—accelerating all of this through wars and the collateral damage that conflict causes to children and women, and trees, Jared Diamond's description of what happened to the people and trees that once inhabited Easter Island foretells what could happen to Earth.
Reforested Islands: Japan and Tikopia
Earth is a solitary island in space, analogous to Easter Island's position in the Pacific Ocean. Just as Easter Island can provide lessons in what not to do, two other island nations provide examples about how to avoid Easter Island's fate: Japan, an archipelago of islands; and Tikopia, one very small island nation. Japanese forests are now so well protected and managed that their extent is still increasing, even though timber is harvested from them. Despite the highest population density of any First World country, almost 80 percent of Japan consists of sparsely populated forested mountains. These are gorgeous green, primeval-appearing forests that cover Japan's mountains from one end of the island chain to the other, a forest mantle that inspires some Japanese to refer to their island nation as “the green archipelago.” Though they appear to be primeval forests, most of Japan's accessible original forests were in fact all cut down by three hundred years ago, a time when the ingredients for a social and ecological catastrophe as happened on Easter Island or could happen on planet Earth were in place.
In The Green Archipelago: Forestry in Preindustrial Japan, author Conrad Totman describes the contrast between what could have been and what is: “Japan today should be an impoverished, slum-ridden, peasant society subsisting on a barren, eroded moonscape characterized by bald mountains and debris-strewn lowlands. Instead, it is a highly industrialized society living in a luxuriantly green realm” (1998, p. 1). Japan's affluence would be impossible without the ecological vitality of the island chain that has been sustained by centuries of effective silviculture. Silviculture, the branch of forestry to do with the development and care of forests, has the same derivation and sound as “sylvan,” which refers to the woods or forest or to what lives there.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Japan was at a crossroad, with ecological disaster within sight. There had been construction booms and deforestation, soil erosion, decreased crops, periodic famines, and an increase in population, especially in urban centers. But instead of following the Easter Island scenario, over the course of the next two centuries Japan gradually achieved a stable population and reforested its land. Japan had the environmental advantages of soil and rainfall and a lack of sheep and goats to graze and destroy young growing green life, elements that supported nature's reforesting on previously logged land, plus the deliberate efforts by a succession of Tokugawa shoguns to preserve and grow trees and limit population growth during an era of peace. Under their leadership, the Japanese people were made aware of having a long-term stake in preserving their own forests.
A second island success story belongs to Tikopia, a really tiny (1.8 square miles or 4.66 square kilometers) and isolated tropical island in the South Pacific, which Jared Diamond cites as a bottom-up success story of forest management, population stability, and sustainability over three hundred years.
