I often wonder what California looked prior to 1849. Today, inland from
the ocean the landscape is dotted with huge, majestic live oak trees; were
there thousands more before the forty-niners came and cut them down for
their various gold mining related pursuits? What did the coastal redwood
forests look like before the loggers got to them? As a backpacker I'm
pretty sure I wouldn't want to meet up with a California Grizzly, but I'd
love to have seen how much more diverse the wildlife was back then.
But despite all the exploitation by the early settlers, my home state
remains a fantastically beautiful place and many of its treasures remain.
Can the same be said for Easter Island? Diamond tells us that the island
was once home to twenty two species of trees including what may have been
the world’s largest species of palm tree. No large trees remain.
According to the author, Easter may once have been “the richest breeding
site (for nesting seabirds) in all of Polynesia and probably in the whole
pacific.” The few remaining seabirds now nest on three offshore islets.
Did they know what they were doing to their island? Did they try to do
anything about it? I can just imagine an Island conference to discuss the
preservation of the trees. Would the attendees have come to the
conclusion that it was not economically feasible to curtail the logging?
Was there a faction of ecologically oriented islanders that fought for
preservation?
What led them to build the moai? Was their religious fanaticism integral
to their collapse?
Diamond sees the Island as a metaphor for our modern planet and indeed, I
find the metaphor compelling. We know that we are pumping greenhouse
gasses into the atmosphere and that Antarctic ice cores show that they are
at a much higher level now than at any time in the last 420,000 years*,
but we hesitate to act because of the short term economic impact that may
result as a result of our attempts to slow the warming.
My worry has always been not that the experts on warming are alarmist, but
that they are too conservative in their estimates. If we acted quickly
and an economic disaster followed, the world would be impacted for a
generation or less. If, however, we triggered an ecological disaster, the
repercussions could potentially be far worse.
I have to think that the islanders, conference or no, probably didn’t
realize that they had a serious problem until it was too late to do
anything about it.
What are we waiting for?
*[http://www.daviesand.com/Choices/Precautionary_Planning/New_Data/]
--
Doug
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