[extropy-chat] Collapse, by Jared Diamond

[Hal Finney]

Lee writes:
> Spike asked about Diamond's book "Collapse". I read it and it's
> quite wonderful, especially if you're into history and human
> ecology. Diamond is a writer of vast skill, and reading him is
> simply effortless.
>
> He presents arguments pro and con with a good deal of objectivity,
> well---at least as much as he is able to muster given that he has
> a definite message in mind.

I haven't read this book, but I was recently pointed to an online critique
which claims that Diamond has seriously misstated the scholarship on the
collapse of Easter Island:

http://www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpeis/EE%2016-34_Peiser.pdf

"From Genocide to Ecocide: The Rape of Rapa Nui", by Benny Peiser.
Peiser argues that Diamond has distorted the history of Rapa Nui (Easter
Island) in order to fit his own eco-doomer preconceptions.  Diamond is
somewhat notorious for his claim that agriculture was "the worst mistake
in the history of the human race" and apparently has believed for some
time that human culture tends to lead to environmental disaster.

I'm not sure how convincing Peiser's thesis is here; I've read that he has
an ideological opposition to Diamond's view.  I thought the paper above
was repetitive and rambling.  Nevertheless Peiser makes a good case that
the truth is that we really don't know, and may never know, what happened
on Easter Island.

Peiser argues that the island's culture was successful and still building
statues right up until the natives were attacked and stolen away by
European slave traders.  (Half the statues on the island are still in
the quarries, in the middle of construction.)  I don't know about that,
but it seems clear that by the time Easter Island came to the attention
of anything like the modern anthropoligical community, it had suffered
from the depradations of the Europeans for generations.  Without any
kind of written cultural history, oral accounts from the few remaining
natives were fragmentary and inconsistent.  Worse, descriptions of the
island from early European visitors are equally contradictory, some
describing barrren landscapes while others marvelling at the fertility
and mentioning forests.

Peiser argues that Diamond has picked and chosen among these many
accounts, selecting only those that buttress his thesis of "ecocide".
Peiser sees Diamond's work as falling into a larger class of analyses
which close their eyes to the obvious and well-documented European
genocide of the Easter Islanders, preferring to focus on this supposed
self-destruction.

As I said, I don't know if Peiser really makes a strong case for a
thriving Easter Island culture right up until the 18th and 19 centuries,
but it does seem clear that there are so many lines of evidence pointing
in different ways, that at this point it is impossible to say what
really happened.

Hal