The Moai statues on Rapa Nui built between 1250 and 1500 (Photo: Wikimedia commons)
Twenty years ago Jared Diamond published Collapse, which claimed to analyse the danger that environmental degradation would pose to humanity in the 21st century.
I vividly remember the marketing on the London Underground that told one of Collapse’s emblematic stories. It looked at the “ecocide” of the people of Rapa Nui, the Pacific island known in Europe and North America as Easter Island.
A scientific study, published this month, has debunked Diamond’s claims. The adverts told travellers how the population of Rapa Nui, isolated from the rest of humanity, had deforested the island.
The deforestation led to the loss of top soil undermining farming, causing population collapse and even a “descent into cannibalism”. “What did the person who cut the last tree down think?” asked the advertisement.
For Diamond, Rapa Nui was a “metaphor, a worst-case scenario” for our own future. But is it true?
In Collapse, he concluded that societies face a choice to succeed or fail. Those that fail are ones where people make the wrong choices. On Rapa Nui, the islanders’ choices led to the irrational use of resources—and ultimately to ecocide.
Almost immediately after Collapse’s publication, people challenged it. One example was the 2008 book Questioning Collapse. A chapter argued that the population of Rapa Nui did collapse, but it was because of colonisation not self-destruction.
European arrival in 1722 was followed by “one of the most hideous atrocities committed by white men in the South Seas”. Colonisers sold thousands of people—about a third of the population—into slavery and killed others, while thousands more died from smallpox.
A scientific study out this month has confirmed this analysis. In the words of Kathrin Nagele, an anthropologist quoted in the prestigious science journal Nature, it “serves as the final nail in the coffin of this collapse narrative”. She continues, “It’s correcting the image of Indigenous people.”
The scientists behind the study looked at genetic samples from human remains taken from Rapa Nui to France’s Natural History Museum. DNA shows the opposite of what Diamond argued.
Rather than “collapsing”, the population of Rapa Nui grew steadily until the 19th century. This matches the arguments made in Questioning Collapse and elsewhere.
DNA evidence shows the people who lived on Rapa Nui were not isolated. In fact, they had extensive contact across the Pacific Ocean and even had children with Indigenous people from North America.
This intermingling of populations took place hundreds of years before colonisation. This is no surprise to the Indigenous people. As one scientist commented, “Do you think that a community that found things like Hawaii or Tahiti would miss a whole continent?”
We should place the idea that the Pacific Islanders committed ecocide in the dustbin of history. The islanders did not cause their own destruction—they were victims of colonialism, violence and disease.
We should celebrate the amazing accomplishments of those islanders, whose society survived for hundreds of years. One first step to acknowledging this would be the return of human remains from Europe to Rapa Nui.
Today, we do face environmental destruction. However, we should be wary of crude analyses that suggest that people make simple choices that lead to disaster. The story of Rapa Nui is actually one of human innovation and resilience.
The people of Rapa Nui lived for some 500 years in a difficult environmental area. Capitalism, however, in a much shorter period, has brought us to the edge of disaster through its endless quest for profit.
Blaming the people of Rapa Nui for their own destruction is part of a narrative that sees ordinary people as the problem. And, in turn, this lets capitalism off the hook.
