Dear Curmudgeon (how aptly named!) and Pericles

Diamond was not the first to discuss the fate of Easter Island - he didn't do the original research. But from what he says and others have written, the first collapse in numbers came a long time before the 19th century sailors finished most of them off, by whatever means. As for trees, it did not support more advanced trees, only the large palms whose trunks could be used to roll the statues from the mine to the coast. Rats, I'm sure, could have contributed to the demise of the trees but the archeological record shows that there was a civilisation there of sorts for some time before collapse. So, as for the analogy with peak oil, Easter Island still holds as far as I'm concerned

Curmudgeon, you will be sad to hear that most of the fracking/shale gas hype is just that - hype. Go do some reading at www.theoildrum.com to find out. Here is one article to get you going:

http://blogs.ft.com/energy-source/2011/02/08/chesapeakes-move-brings-cheer-to-gloomy-us-gas-sector/

"We believe 2011 will be the breaking point, where producers run out of assets to sell to fund growth that is driven by spending 80 per cent more than discretionary cash flow. Natural gas E&Ps are living on borrowed time."

And as to peak coal - while you dismiss the Patzek and Croft paper out of hand it has, in fact, been published in a peer-reviewed journal so its ideas are worth considering at least. Peak Coal may not be this year but it may be soon, and a number of analyses point to it occurring before 2030.

ponnperish - no these theories are drive by Diamond, although I have read that Thor Heyerdahl was the first to propose it and Diamond took it up. However, I repeat that Diamond is virtually alone in making these statements, and there is now some contrary evidence from archeological digs (see Terry L Hunt, Uni of Hawaii). Even that would be fine if he had some sort of archeological evididence to back it up. He doesn't - its not even clear that he has attempted any digs himself on the island - therefore, its a fringe theory until proven otherwise.

michaelinadelaide - go back and look at the article you linked to educate me. It backs up what I said, the Americans are swimming in natural gas. It mentions there a natural gas glut. shale oil is apparently not far behind. Time to dump the peak oil theory and get reading. Peak oil only ever applied to eacy-lift (the stuff in the big reservoirs) in any case.

Well of course you would think that, popnperish.

>>So, as for the analogy with peak oil, Easter Island still holds as far as I'm concerned<<

That's fine, go for it.

But the fact remains that the analogy itself is so tenuous as to be insufficiently robust to sustain an entire article without generating the obvious response... oh, really?

It is true that many others share your opinion. But mainly because it supports their personal views on the environment - very few have actually bothered to look at the facts, and at the vastly conflicting theories, mainly because - quite simply - it suits them not to.

I am not alone in my position, by the way.

"Lipo [Carl Lipo of California State University] thinks the story of Easter Island's civilization being responsible for its own demise might better reflect the psychological baggage of our own society than the archeological evidence. 'It fits our 20th century view of us as ecological monsters'"

http://www.livescience.com/616-view-easter-island-disaster-wrong-researchers.html

To pick one version, from the dozens available, and use it in this cavalier fashion completely annuls any actual information the article may have contained.

It's called a "credibility gap".

This is what Diamond says about alternative views in his 2007 Science paper with many references:

"Thus, major changes unfolded on Easter Island before European arrival. Those changes included deforestation; the loss of palm sap as a food and water source; switching from wood to grasses and sedges as fuel; establishing stone mulching; ceasing to carve statues, because deforestation meant no more big logs and fiber rope for transport; abandoning upland plantations, probably used to feed workers transporting statues; and (as described in oral traditions) increases in warfare, statue destruction by rival clans, and use of refuge caves. However, alternative views have been proposed.

One view is a version of Rousseau's noble savage myth: the claim that bad things began happening on Easter only after European arrival (13-15). Undoubtedly, Europeans on Easter, as elsewhere in the Pacific, did serious harm through slave raids, worsened erosion, and introduced diseases, grazing animals, and plants. But this view ignores or dismisses the abundant evidence, summarized above, for pre-European impacts.

Another view recognizes pre-European deforestation but blames it on hypothesized droughts (2). However, there is no direct information about climate change on Easter between A.D. 1000 and 1700. Easter's forests had already survived tens of thousands of years of climate fluctuations (1), and it seems unlikely that a drought in the 1600s (if there was one) destroyed the forests just coincidently soon after human arrival.

According to a third view, deforestation was caused by introduced rats, as suggested by rat gnaw marks on many nuts of the extinct palm (15). This hypothesis does not account for all those palm stumps cut off at the ground and burned, nor for the larger number of palm nuts burned rather than gnawed, nor for the disappearance of the long-lived palm trees themselves (with an estimated life span of up to 2000 years) (16). If rats were responsible, they were unusual ones, equipped with fire and hatchets. Thousands of other Pacific islands overrun by introduced rats were not deforested, and many other tree species that survived on other rat-infested islands disappeared on Easter (16)."

Cont'd

The link to the whole paper is

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/317/5845/1692.full

The Hunt paper that Curmudgeon referred to is also on the Web

http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/rethinking-the-fall-of-easter-island/1

Note that Hunt admits that it was the people who cut down the trees. The role of the rats (presumably) was in stopping regeneration. He doesn't explain why other rat infested islands weren't deforested or why the people wouldn't have had the wit to protect palm seeds and seedlings.

Pericles likes to pretend that Diamond is just an outlier, but archaeologists have been writing about collapses of societies and their relationship to population and environmental issues for a long time. Good sources, apart from Jared Diamond's book, are Prof. Steven LeBlanc's "Constant Battles" (Archaeology, Harvard), which has very convincing photographs, Prof. Lawrence Keeley's "War Before Civilization" (Archaeology, University of Chicago), and soil scientist Prof. David Montgomery's "Dirt: the Erosion of Civilizations".

Of course, none of this provides absolute proof, but being completely impervious to evidence is the mark of denialism. If we are influenced by what we want to believe, perhaps Pericles is reluctant to believe anything that challenges his growthist ideology, that population and consumption can grow without limit on a finite earth, at least for the foreseeable future.