THE mysterious inhabitants of Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean did not wreck their pristine environment and so ruin their chances of survival. They were the victims of circumstance and were probably doomed to perish.
Easter Island has long been a mystery: a wind-blasted and treeless landscape dominated by giant stone statues set by its long-since-departed Polynesian inhabitants. Because it was once forested, it has become an emblem of environmental and social decline.
But a detailed study of 70 Pacific islands pinpoints nine environmental predictors of Pacific deforestation before the arrival of Europeans, and comes to a different conclusion (Nature, vol 431, p 443). 鈥淓aster鈥檚 collapse was not because its people were especially improvident, but because they faced one of the Pacific鈥檚 most fragile environments,鈥� says geographer Jared Diamond of the University of California, Los Angeles.
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The island鈥檚 remoteness in the eastern Pacific meant it rarely, if ever, benefited from fertile volcanic dust brought on the winds from eruptions in Asia. It is also low-lying, small and dry. And the island is distant from the equator, so the Polynesians鈥� favourite trees, such as breadfruit and Tahitian chestnut, would not grow there. These factors would have made it difficult for the island鈥檚 inhabitants to grow new trees to replace those they used.