A Famous Case of ‘Ecocide’ Gets Debunked
24th June 2012
A historical thesis popularized by Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs and Steel, postulates that the tiny and remote Easter Island suffered a devastating ecological collapse as the result of poor stewardship of natural resources by its inhabitants. Diamond goes on to suggest this “ecocide” parallels our own global situation. But these claims have now been challenged by a pair of archaeologists working to investigate the real history of Easter Island.
In a new book titled The Statues That Walked, Carl Lipo and Terry Hunt argue that the story of the downfall of Easter Island as popularized in Diamond’s 2005 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed is almost completely false.