Dear Friends and Associates,
This is a Very, Very good read!!!
One of the very best articles I have ever come across on the subject.

Best Regards,
Alan Dicey
Miami, Florida

Posted: 2005-08-28 14:44


Ronald Wright explains why this is our last chance to save the planet
Sunday Herald
Aug 28, 2005

OUR main difference from chimps and gorillas – with whom we share a common
ancestor – is that over the past three million years or so, we have been
shaped less and less by nature, and more and more by culture. We have become
experimental creatures of our own making. With the discovery of agriculture,
which began about 10,000 years ago, and the consequent growth of
civilisation in the Near East, Asia and the Americas, our experiment in
material progress began to expand and accelerate; it is now moving very
quickly and on a colossal scale. We have reached a stage where we must bring
the experiment under rational control. If we fail – if we blow up or degrade
the biosphere so it can no longer sustain us – nature will merely shrug and
conclude that letting apes run the laboratory was fun for a while but in the
end a bad idea. The wrecks of our failed experiments lie in deserts and
jungles like fallen airliners whose flight recorders can tell us what went
wrong. Unlike written history, which is often highly edited, archaeology can
uncover the deeds we have forgotten, or have chosen to forget.
The devastation of Easter Island is a case in point. On Easter Day, 1722, a
Dutch fleet in the South Seas, far to the west of Chile and below the Tropic
of Capricorn, sighted an unknown island so treeless and eroded that they
mistook its barren hills for dunes. They were amazed, as they drew near, to
see hundreds of great stone images, some as tall as an Amsterdam house.

Captain Cook later confirmed the island’s desolation, finding no wood for
fuel, nor any fresh water worth taking on board. He described the islanders’
tiny canoes, made from scraps of driftwood stitched together like shoe
leather, as the worst in the Pacific. Nature, he concluded, had “been
exceedingly sparing of her favours to this spot”. The great mystery of
Easter Island was that the stones seemed to have been put there without
tackle, as if set down from the sky.

We now know the answer to the riddle, and it is a chilling one. Pace Captain
Cook, Nature had not been unusually stingy with her favours. Pollen studies
of the island’s crater lakes have shown that it was once well watered and
green, with rich volcanic soil supporting thick woods. No natural disaster
had changed that: no eruption, drought, or disease. The catastrophe on
Easter Island was man.

Rapa Nui, as Polynesians call the place, was settled during the fifth
century AD by migrants from the Marquesas or the Gambiers who arrived in big
catamarans stocked with crops and animals: dogs, chickens, edible rats,
sugar cane, bananas, sweet potatoes and mulberry . The island was also rich
in seafood: fish, seals, porpoises, turtles, and nesting seabirds.

Within five or six centuries, the population had reached about 10,000 – high
for 64 square miles. They built villages and cleared all the best land for
fields. Socially they split into clans, each of which honoured its ancestry
with impressive stone images hewn from the yielding volcanic tuff of a
crater and set up on platforms by the shore. Over time, the statue cult
became increasingly rivalrous and extravagant, reaching its apogee during
Europe’s high middle ages, while the Plantagenet kings ruled England.

Each generation of images grew bigger than the last, demanding more timber,
rope, and manpower for hauling to the altars. Trees were cut faster than
they could grow, a problem worsened by the settlers’ rats, who ate the seeds
and saplings. By AD 1400, no more tree pollen is found in the annual layers
of the crater lakes: the woods had been utterly destroyed by both the
largest and the smallest mammals on the island.

We might think that in such a limited place, steps would have been taken to
halt the cutting, to protect the saplings, to replant. We might think that
as trees became scarce, the erection of statues would have been curtailed,
and timber reserved for essential purposes such as boat-building and
roofing.

But that is not what happened. The people who felled the last tree could see
it was the last, could know with certainty that there would never be
another. And they felled it anyway. All shade vanished from the land except
the hard-edged shadows cast by the petrified ancestors, whom the people
loved all the more because they made them feel less alone.

For a generation or so, there was enough old lumber to haul the great stones
and still keep a few canoes seaworthy. But the day came when the last good
boat was gone. The people then knew there would be little seafood and –
worse – no way of escape. The word for wood, rakau, became the dearest in
their language.

Wars broke out over ancient planks and worm-eaten bits of jetsam. They ate
all their dogs and nearly all the nesting birds, and the unbearable
stillness of the place deepened with animal silences. There was nothing left
now but the moai, the stone giants who had devoured the land. And still
these promised the return of plenty, if only the people would keep faith and
honour them with increase. “But how will we take you to the altars?” asked
the carvers, and the moai answered that when the time came, they would walk
there on their own. So the sound of hammering still rang from the quarries,
and the crater walls came alive with hundreds of new giants, growing even
bigger now they had no need of human transport.

The tallest ever set on an altar is over 30 feet high and weighs 80 tonnes;
the tallest ever carved is 65 feet long and more than 200 tons, comparable
to the greatest stones worked by the Incas or Egyptians. Except, of course,
that it never budged an inch.

By the end there were more than 1000 moai, one for every 10 islanders in
their heyday. But the good days were gone – gone with the good earth, which
had been carried away on the endless wind and washed by flash floods into
the sea. The people had been seduced by a kind of progress that becomes a
mania.

When Europeans arrived in the 18th century, they found only one or two
living souls per statue, “small, lean, timid and miserable”, in Cook’s
words. Now without roof beams, many people were dwelling in caves; their
only buildings were stone henhouses where they guarded this last non-human
protein from one another day and night. The Europeans heard tales of how the
warrior class had taken power, how the island had convulsed with burning
villages, gory battles, and cannibal feasts. The one innovation of this end
period was to turn the use of obsidian (a razor-keen volcanic glass) from
toolmaking to weapons.

Daggers and spearheads became the commonest artefacts on the island, hoarded
in pits like the grenades and assault rifles kept by modern-day
survivalists. Even this was not quite the nadir. Between the Dutch visit of
1722 and Cook’s 50 years later, the people again made war on each other and,
for the first time, on the ancestors as well. Cook found moai toppled from
their platforms, cracked and beheaded, the ruins littered with human bone.

Whatever its animus, the destruction on Rapa Nui raged for at least 70
years. Each foreign ship saw fewer upright statues, until not one giant was
left standing on its altar. The work of demolition must have been extremely
arduous for the few descendants of the builders. Its thoroughness and
deliberation speak of something deeper than clan warfare: of a people angry
at their reckless fathers, of a revolt against the dead.

(Some observers, most recently Benny Peiser, have challenged this
interpretation, claiming that Europeans – who undoubtedly killed off most of
the remaining Easter Islanders in the 19th century – were also to blame for
the ecological carnage. But the archaeological evidence for deforestation,
erosion, and population collapse before any Europeans turned up is, in my
view, overwhelming.)

The lesson Rapa Nui holds for our world has not gone unremarked. In 1992,
the archaeologists Paul Bahn and John Flenley wrote that the Easter
Islanders “carried out for us the experiment of permitting unrestricted
population growth, profligate use of resources, destruction of the
environment and boundless confidence in their religion to take care of the
future. The result was an ecological disaster leading to a population
crash … Do we have to repeat the experiment on [a] grand scale? … Is the
human personality always the same as that of the person who felled the last
tree?”

The last tree. The last mammoth. The last dodo. And soon perhaps the last
fish and the last gorilla. During the 20th century, the world’s population
multiplied by four and the economy by more than 40. If the promise of
modernity was even treading water – in other words, if the gap between rich
and poor had stayed proportionally the same as it was when Queen Victoria
died – all human beings would be 10 times better off. Yet the number in
abject poverty today is as great as all mankind in 1901.

By the end of the 20th century, the world’s three richest individuals (all
of whom were Americans) had a combined wealth greater than that of the
poorest 48 countries. In 1998, the United Nations calculated that $40
billion, spent carefully, could provide clean water, sanitation, and other
basic needs for the poorest on earth. The figure may be optimistic, and it
may have grown in the past seven years. But it’s still considerably less
than the funds already set aside for the obscenely wasteful fantasy of a
missile shield that won’t work, isn’t needed, yet could provoke a new arms
race and the militarisation of space.

Joseph Tainter, in his book on societies of the past, identified three
aspects of collapse: the runaway train, the dinosaur, the house of cards.
The rise in population and pollution, the acceleration of technology, the
concentration of wealth and power – all are runaway trains, and most are
linked together.

Population growth is slowing, but by 2050 there will still be three billion
more on earth. We may be able to feed that many in the short run, but we’ll
have to raise less meat (which takes 10 pounds of food to make one pound of
food), and we’ll have to spread that food around. We can’t keep consuming as
we are. Or polluting as we are. We could help countries such as India and
China industrialise without repeating our mistakes. But instead we have
excluded environmental standards from trade agreements. Like sex tourists
with unlawful lusts, we do our dirtiest work among the poor.

If civilisation is to survive, it must live on the interest, not the
capital, of nature. Ecological markers suggest that in the early 1960s,
humans were using about 70% of nature’s yearly output; by the early 1980s,
we’d reached 100%; and in 1999, we were at 125%. Such numbers may be
imprecise, but their trend is clear – they mark the road to bankruptcy.

None of this should surprise us after reading the flight recorders in the
wreckage of crashed civilisations; our present behaviour is typical of
failed societies at the zenith of their greed and arrogance. This is the
dinosaur factor: hostility to change from vested interests, and inertia at
all social levels.

Reformed currency speculator George Soros calls the economic dinosaurs
“market fundamentalists”. I’m uneasy with this term because so few of them
are true believers in free markets – preferring monopolies, cartels, and
government contracts. But his point is well taken. The idea that the world
must be run by the stock market is as mad as any other fundamentalist
delusion, Islamic, Christian or Marxist.



In the case of Easter Island, the statue cult became a self-destructive
mania . In the United States, market extremism (which one might expect to be
purely materialist, and so open to rational self-interest) has cross-bred
with evangelical messianism to fight intelligent policy on metaphysical
grounds. Mainstream Christianity is an altruistic faith, yet this offshoot
is actively hostile to the public good: a kind of social Darwinism by people
who hate Darwin.

President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of the interior told Congress not to
bother with the environment because, in his words: “I don’t know how many
future generations we can count on until the Lord returns.” George W Bush
surrounded himself with similar minds and pulled out of the Kyoto Accord on
climate change. Adolf Hitler once gleefully exclaimed: “What luck for the
rulers that the people do not think!” What can we do when the rulers will
not think?

Civilisations often fall quite suddenly because as they reach full demand on
their ecologies, they become highly vulnerable to natural fluctuations. The
most immediate danger posed by climate change is weather instability causing
a series of crop failures in the world’s breadbaskets. Droughts, floods,
fires and hurricanes are rising in frequency and severity. The pollution
surges caused by these – and by wars – add to the gyre of destruction.
Medical experts worry that nature may swat us with disease: billions of
overcrowded primates, many sick, malnourished and connected by air travel,
are a free lunch waiting for a nimble microbe.

“Mother Nature always comes to the rescue of a society stricken with …
overpopulation,” Alfred Crosby sardonically observed, “and her ministrations
are never gentle.” The case for reform that I have tried to make is not
based on altruism, nor on saving nature for its own sake. I happen to
believe that these are moral imperatives, but such arguments cut against the
grain of human desire.

The most compelling reason for reforming our system is that the system is in
nobody’s interest. It is a suicide machine. All of us have some dinosaur
inertia within us, but I honestly don’t know what the activist-dinosaurs –
the hard men and women of Big Oil and the far right – think they are doing.
They have children and grandchildren who will need safe food and clean air
and water, and who may wish to see living oceans and forests.

Wealth can buy no refuge from pollution; pesticides sprayed in China
condense in Antarctic glaciers and Rocky Mountain tarns. And wealth is no
shield from chaos, as the surprise on each haughty face that rolled from the
guillotine made clear.

There’s a saying in Argentina that each night God cleans up the mess the
Argentines make by day. This seems to be what our leaders are counting on.

But it won’t work. Things are moving so fast that inaction itself is one of
the biggest mistakes. The 10,000-year experiment of the settled life will
stand or fall by what we do, and don’t do, now. The reform that is needed is
not anti-capitalist, anti- American, or even deep environmentalist; it is
simply the transition from short-term to long-term thinking. From
recklessness and excess to moderation and the precautionary principle.

The great advantage we have, our best chance for avoiding the fate of past
societies, is that we know about those past societies. We can see how and
why they went wrong. Homo sapiens has the information to know itself for
what it is: an Ice Age hunter only half-evolved towards intelligence; clever
but seldom wise.

We are now at the stage when the Easter Islanders could still have halted
the senseless cutting and carving, could have gathered the last trees’ seeds
to plant out of reach of the rats. We have the tools and the means to share
resources, clean up pollution, dispense basic healthcare and birth control,
set economic limits in line with natural ones. If we don’t do these things
now, while we prosper, we will never be able to do them when times get hard.

Our fate will twist out of our hands. And this new century will not grow
very old before we enter an age of chaos and collapse that will dwarf all
the dark ages in our past.

Now is our last chance to get the future right.



This is an edited extract from A Short History Of Progress by Ronald Wright,
Canongate, £12.99