wiki wrote:The first-recorded European contact with the island was on April 5 (Easter Sunday), 1722, when Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen visited the island for a week and estimated there were 2,000 to 3,000 inhabitants on the island. The number may have been greater, since some may have been frightened into hiding by a misunderstanding that led Roggeveen's men to fire on the natives killing more than a dozen men and wounding several more. The next foreign visitors (on November 15, 1770) were two Spanish ships, San Lorenzo and Santa Rosalia. They reported the island as largely uncultivated, with a seashore lined with stone statues. Four years later, in 1774, British explorer James Cook visited Easter Island, he reported the statues as being neglected with some having fallen down. In 1825, the British ship HMS Blossom visited and reported having seen no standing statues in the places they visited. Easter Island was approached many times during the 19th century, but by then the islanders had become openly hostile towards any attempt to land, and very little new information was reported before the 1860s.
A series of devastating events killed or removed almost the entire population of Easter Island in the 1860s. In December 1862, Peruvian slave raiders struck Easter Island. Violent abductions continued for several months, eventually capturing around 1500 men and women, half of the island's population.[18] Among the great many people they captured was the island's paramount chief and his heir as well as those who knew how to read and write Easter Island's rongorongo script, the only evidence of Polynesian script to have been found to date. When the slave raiders were forced to repatriate the people they had kidnapped in several Polynesian islands, they knowingly disembarked carriers of smallpox together with a few survivors on each of the islands, creating devastating epidemics from Easter Island all the way to the Marquesas islands. Easter Island's population was reduced to the point where some of the dead were not even buried. Tuberculosis introduced by whalers in the mid 1800s had already killed several islanders when the first Christian missionary, Eugène Eyraud, died from it in 1867 taking a quarter of the island's population with him. In the following years, the managers of the sheep ranch and the missionaries started buying the newly available lands of the deceased, and this led to great confrontations between the two.
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Easter Island has suffered from heavy soil erosion in recent centuries, perhaps aggravated by agriculture and massive deforestation. This process seems to have been gradual and may have been aggravated by extensive sheep farming of the Williamson-Balfour Company throughout most of the 20th century. Jakob Roggeveen reported that Easter Island was exceptionally fertile. "Fowls are the only animals they keep. They cultivate bananas, sugar cane, and above all sweet potatoes." In 1786 Jean-François de La Pérouse visited Easter Island and his gardener declared that "three days' work a year" would be enough to support the population.
Rollin, a major in the Pérouse expedition of 1786, wrote, "Instead of meeting with men exhausted by famine... I found, on the contrary, a considerable population, with more beauty and grace than I afterwards met in any other island; and a soil, which, with very little labour, furnished excellent provisions, and in an abundance more than sufficient for the consumption of the inhabitants."
It's pretty obvious you got the idea that the Easter Islanders became extinct because of overpopulation from Jared Diamond's book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive;
http://www.sacredsites.com/americas/chile/easter_island.html
FROM GENOCIDE TO ECOCIDE: THE RAPE OF RAPA NUI
Published in: Energy & Environment, 16:3&4 (2005), pp. 513-539
http://www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpeis/E ... Peiser.pdf
Benny Peiser, Liverpool John Moores University, Faculty of Science
Liverpool L3 2ET, UK. b.j.peiser@livjm.ac.uk B.J.Peiser@ljmu.ac.uk
The 'decline and fall' of Easter Island and its alleged self-destruction has become the poster child of a new environmentalist historiography, a school of thought that goes hand-in-hand with predictions of environmental disaster. Why did this exceptional civilisation crumble? What drove its population to extinction? These are some of the key questions Jared Diamond endeavours to answer in his new book 'Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive.' According to Diamond, the people of Easter Island destroyed their forest, degraded the island's topsoil, wiped out their plants and drove their animals to extinction. As a result of this self-inflicted environmental devastation, its complex society collapsed, descending into civil war, cannibalism and self-destruction. While his theory of ecocide has become almost paradigmatic in environmental circles, a dark and gory secret hangs over the premise of Easter Island's self-destruction: an actual genocide terminated Rapa Nui's indigenous populace and its culture. Diamond, however, ignores and fails to address the true reasons behind Rapa Nui's collapse. Why has he turned the victims of cultural and physical extermination 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.
Just more pr and marketing from the Malthusian Masters of Disaster, I guess. It's all over the place.
But chill out man, I ain't planning to have no more kids. I'm way too old.
I guess you fellows concerned about overpopulation aren't planning to have any (more), and are doing your best to persuade all your friends and relatives to remain childless. Think of the future.
ps I approve of offering (non-coercive/non-manipulative) birth control options to every human on the planet.
