BLAMING THE VICTIMS (via Robert Schwartz):

From Genocide to Ecocide: The Rape of Rapa Nui (Benny Peiser, ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT)

Lord May, the President of Britain’s Royal Society, recently condensed Diamond’s theory of environmental suicide in this way: “In a lecture at the Royal Society last week, Jared Diamond drew attention to populations, such as those on Easter Island, who denied they were having a catastrophic impact on the environment and were eventually wiped out, a phenomenon he called ‘ecocide’” (May, 2005).

Diamond’s theory has been around since the early 1980s. Since then, it has reached a mass audience due to a number of popular books and Diamond’s own publications. As a result, the notion of ecological suicide has become the “orthodox model” of Easter Island’s demise. “This story of self-induced eco-disaster and consequent selfdestruction of a Polynesian island society continues to provide the easy and uncomplicated shorthand for explaining the so-called cultural devolution of Rapa Nui society” (Rainbird, 2002).

The ‘decline and fall’ of Easter Island and its alleged self-destruction has become the poster child of the new environmentalist historiography, a school of thought that goes hand-in-hand with predictions of environmental disaster. Clive Ponting’s The Green History of the World– for many years the main manifest of British eco-pessimism – begins his saga of ecological destruction and social degeneration with “The Lessons of Easter Island” (Ponting, 1992:1ff.). Others view Easter Island as a microcosm of planet Earth and consider the former’s bleak fate as symptomatic for what awaits the whole of humanity. Thus, the story of Easter Island’s environmental suicidehas become the prime case for the gloomiest of grim eco-pessimism. After more than 30 years of palaeo-environmental research on Easter Island, one of its leading experts comes to an extremely gloomy conclusion: “It seems [...] that ecological sustainability may be an impossible dream. The revised Club of Rome predictions show that it is not very likely that we can put of the crunch by more than a few decades. Most of their models still show economic decline by AD 2100. Easter Island still seems to be a plausible model for Earth Island.” (Flenley, 1998:127).

From a political and psychological point of view, this imagery of a complex civilisation self-destructing is overwhelming. It portrays an impression of utter failure that elicits shock and trepidation. It is in form of a shock-tactic when Diamond employs Rapa Nui’s tragic end as a dire warning and a moral lesson for humanity today: “Easter [Island’s] isolation makes it the clearest example of a society that destroyed itself by overexploiting its own resources. Those are the reasons why people see the collapse of Easter Island society as a metaphor, a worst-case scenario, for what may lie ahead of us in our own future” (Diamond, 2005).

While the theory of ecocidehas become almost paradigmatic in environmental circles, a dark and gory secret hangs over the premise of Easter Island’s selfdestruction: an actual genocide terminated Rapa Nui’s indigenous populace and its culture. Diamond ignores, or neglects to address the true reasons behind Rapa Nui’s collapse. Other researchers have no doubt that its people, their culture and its environment were destroyed to all intents and purposes by European slave-traders, whalers and colonists – and not by themselves! After all, the cruelty and systematic kidnapping by European slave-merchants, the near-extermination of the Island’s indigenous population and the deliberate destruction of the island’s environment has been regarded as “one of the most hideous atrocities committed by white men in the South Seas” (Métraux, 1957:38), “perhaps the most dreadful piece of genocide in Polynesian history” (Bellwood, 1978:363).

So why does Diamond maintain that Easter Island’s celebrated culture, famous for its sophisticated architecture and giant stone statues, committed its own environmental suicide? How did the once well-known accounts about the “fatal impact” (Moorehead, 1966) of European disease, slavery and genocide – “the catastrophe that wiped out Easter Island’s civilisation” (Métraux, ibid.) – turn into a contemporary parable of selfinflicted ecocide? In short, why have the victims of cultural and physical extermination been turned into the perpetrators of their own demise?

This paper is a first attempt to address this disquieting quandary. It describes the foundation of Diamond’s environmental revisionism and explains why it does not hold up to scientific scrutiny. [...]

Throughout his writings, Diamond maintains that he is reasonably hopeful about the future of humanity. Nevertheless, he does not hesitate to foretell environmental calamity and societal breakdown in the most unhinged imagery: “By the time my young sons reach retirement age, half the world’s species will be extinct, the air radioactive, and the seas polluted with oil ... I have no doubt that any humans still alive in the radioactive soup of the Twenty-second Century will write equally nostalgically about our own era” (Diamond, 1991:285).

It is this profound anxiety about the future and its impact on the environment that stirs Diamond’s writings and imagination. Regrettably, his eagerness to forestall doom often clouds his ability to assess historical and archaeological evidence in an impartial, even-handed approach. This fixation bears a striking resemblance to other authors who have tried to apply other standardised theoretical models to Easter Island history.

In a powerful critique of the methods applied by Heyerdahl and a number of other authors, Bahn has highlighted a fundamental problem of contemporary research on Easter Island: “The authors make their assumptions. They then look for evidence, pick out the bits they like, ignore the bits that don’t fit, and finally proclaim that their assumptions have been vindicated” (Bahn, 1990:24). A similar criticism can be made of Diamond’s eco-biased approach to the question of Rapa Nui’s collapse.

In many ways, Diamond’s methodological approach suffers from a manifest lack of scientific scrutiny.

It's hardly surprising that this lack of scientific scrutiny hasn't kept him from bering the best-selling science writer of the day. What's interesting to note in this essay though is that while Thor Heyerdahl's theory that the islanders had destroyed themselves was a function of his desire to diminish them and elevate Europeans, Diamond adopts the same theory because it elevates the natives and diminishes us. The notion is bogus in both cases but can be used for completely opposite purposes. Such is the beauty of science.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 24, 2005 7:04 PM