WHAT CAUSES AN ISLAND SOCIETY TO COLLAPSE?

GNS Science | Te Pū Ao (otherwise known as the Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences Ltd) is one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s nine crown research institutes. Dr. Troy Baisden, an environmental scientist with GNS Science, is leading a group of scientists “to use sophisticated analytical techniques to solve the mystery of the sudden collapse of the population on Rapa Nui in pre-European times.”

The project is entitled: “Was Collapse Inevitable on Easter Island (Rapa Nui)? Reconstructing a Civilization’s Failure.” View the blog here.

Inspired by Jared Diamond’s 2005 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Baisden developed a research project based upon Rapa Nui’s fragile soil, which hypothesizes “that Easter Islanders would have overshot the carrying capacity of their landscape, reaching maximum population as soil nutrient depletion caused declining crop yields.”

Though the research is examining soil to uncover past events, the implications of the research are potentially far reaching and future oriented: “Collectively, the analyses will enable bio-geochemical modeling to help predict the future of societies around the world where we are stressing carrying capacity of landscapes.”

It would appear that many islands such as Hawai‘i, are either dangerously close to, or have already surpassed their carrying capacity, which is why the project’s research is extremely relevant to our future and how we choose to build a society that succeeds (borrowing Diamond’s terminology).

But what actually constitutes a “collapse?” This is a central issue that Baisden himself returns to in his blog. Equally important is his discussion about what emerges after the collapse:

For me, the take home message of the Birdman cult is that there was recovery after collapse, and that the focus on the dramatic feat of recovering the egg provided a very positive alternative to the clan warfare that appears to have emerged immediately following "collapse."

So, it would seem that in spite of a “collapse,” the Rapa Nui society moved on and forged a less resource-intense culture.

Baisden also summarized the words of John Flenley – former professor and head of geography at Massey University (Aotearoa New Zealand), and author of three books on Rapa Nui with over thirty years of research on the island – from an informal presentation Flenley gave on April 11:

Many of the most remarkable things we learn from deciphering the Rapa Nui experiment, center around the ways the island’s leaders cultivated the moai-building and Birdman rituals to maintain peace between the many tribes/clans on the island. He also notes that the focus of the rituals seemed to shift appropriately from the extremely resource-intensive moai-building to a re-emergence of the creator god Make Make, as resource issues related to deforestation (and presumably maintaining food production) became a dominant source of concern for the society.

This leads me to contemplate: Can we – as local island societies in Hawai‘i and Aotearoa New Zealand, as well as the collective we in the larger global sense of “island earth” – shift our rituals (i.e. consumerism, energy usage, etc.) so that we become less resource intensive while still being able to maintain peace between potentially aggressive groups/countries/regions?

Moreover, what will future generations think when they look back at the beginning of the 21^st century? Will my grandchildren question in disgust how I and my generation chose to live an extravagant and frivolous lifestyle at the expense of all future generations’ ability to live on the planet? Or, will someone in their generation write a tribute to us – similar to the likes of Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation – in reverence to our “extraordinary service, sacrifice and heroics?”

At least one person – Susan George's “We Must Think Big to Fight Environmental Disaster" – has likened climate change for the current generation to that of fascism for the Second World War generation. Let us hope history acts as a good teacher and that we learn the important lessons from the past and draw-up strategic plans to combat our generation’s greatest foe.

Putting a very complex issue into oversimplified terms, there are arguably three broad approaches to “persuade” people to take proactive action against climate change: inspiration, fear and knowledge.

Wasting no time on the persuasion factors are a number of people who have already created films or written books to motivate and shock us into realizing the monstrous task we have to overcome.

Herman Daly wrote a New Scientist piece “Life in a Land Without Growth” about what the world could look like in the near future if a steady-state economy prevailed. Likewise, The Eleventh Hour talks about how we are living at the greatest time in history because we can “turn mankind’s darkest hour into its finest.” Also stating that there are real opportunities to proactively create a better world are many other books such as Peter Senge et al.’s The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organizations Are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World and Cradle to Cradle: Remaking Things the Way We Make Things by William McDonough.

We seem to be standing at a juncture where our actions could have an enormous effect upon future generations. If inspiring us into action does not work, perhaps scaring us will?

Richard Heinberg, in his book Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Decline wrote chapter 10 entitled “A Letter From the Future,” where someone from 2107 writes about the devastation that resulted from our ignorant choices. In a similar vein, the recently-released, independently-funded film The Age of Stupid also has “a man living alone in the devastated world of 2055, looking at old footage from 2008 and asking: Why didn’t we stop climate change when we had the chance?”

The April 8, 2009 Economist reviewed several books relating to climate change. One point picked-up on in Anthony Giddens’ new book The Politics of Climate Change was that “people are more likely to change their habits if offered a happy future to look forward to rather than a bleak one to avoid.”

While this may be partially true, I’m not convinced that this holds true for a majority of people. Does this not assume that most humans are short-term thinkers who are selfish and can’t stomach challenges that would entail some sort of personal sacrifice?

Also in the same review was David MacKay’s book Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air (which can be downloaded free here). His online synopsis gives a great response to those who think we can mitigate climate change without having to make significant changes to our lifestyles: “If everyone does a little, we’ll achieve only a little.” And though a lot of little things do add up to something bigger, the scale of the problem is such that more than just a little action needs to take place - particularly by those who have the higher levels of per capita emissions, energy use and food consumption.

It seems clear that there is no one-size fits all approach, and that a combination of inspiration, fear and knowledge will aid in building a society that succeeds. It also seems abundantly clear that the biggest problem inhibiting this success is something just as complex as the science of climate change: human behavior.