Consider the following admonitions:
Beware historians and social architects.
Beware experts and pundits.
Beware hypothesizers.
Beware doomsayers.
Consider the following advice:
Think.
Consider before continuing:
In this longer blog, you get to choose an ending, or, if you desire, to write your own.
Consider this background:
I’ve never been to Rapa Nui, but I’ve been influenced by explanations of what happened on that remote island famous for its seaward-looking Mo’ai. I accepted the so-called “collapse” of Easter Island culture that expert hypothesizers attributed to isolation, exploitation of limited resources like palm forests and soils, tribal war, and failure to manage water sustainably under changing climate and the vicissitudes of the Southern Oscillation/El Niño/La Niña events. Having heard all the “reasonable” hypotheses, I was convinced that Easter Island served as a model for twentieth- and twenty-first century practices and that what happened there hinted at the eventual demise of modern civilization. What happened on Easter Island, I thought, begs the question of whether or not we can sustain our lives on island Earth as we compete for its resources.
Not to worry, I learned. A new study seems to indicate that the island people survived natural and artificial environmental change. * The people were resilient. That they cut down their trees, a process linked by experts to the demise of their society, does not figure into the Easter Island equation of population collapse because there was no collapse, or, at least, there was no collapse as portrayed by the standard modelers. The equation can’t balance. Gardens kept the soils in place. In times of lake-draining drought, the islanders found springs. Life went on there as life has gone on for humans everywhere under risk and hardship, tough but for the general population, endurable.
Our species is quite resilient because many individual members are quite hardy and resilient—even in times like these when some humans require “safe spaces” lest they suffer some existential verbal or ideological offense too unbearable for survival. Yes, even in today’s world of wimps, there are resilient people capable of surviving hardships like environmental change and war. You might be one of them—by reading this you prove by your presence in a time of pandemic my point. If you are resilient, thanks. Thanks? Yes, thanks for being the kind of human who will keep the species alive, at least for the immediate future and hopefully for as many millennia into the future as humans have endured so far. Sure, collapses have occurred, but they have happened in the context of an enduring species.
So, why was I so easily convinced to adopt the standard explanations of a societal collapse that now, apparently, didn’t happen or that didn’t happen on the scale ascribed to it? And why did I let those explanations instill in me a doubt about the future? I was thinking without thinking. I accepted the standard model because in light of my having never been to Rapa Nui, those who had been there, the archaeological authorities, had accepted that “collapse.” Those experts seemed to make sense, at least, they made sense to me, a casual thinker on the subject. My thinking was their thinking.
But no one who accepted the societal collapse actually took into account the size of the population on the island during the course of those centuries from initial settlement to European intrusion until Robert J. DiNapoli and others used approximate Bayesian computation of the radiocarbon and paleoenvironmental record that revealed the resilience manifested in a steady or even increasing population on Rapa Nui at the very time when the standard model suggested otherwise. I realize now that I didn’t look at any data; I didn’t question any conclusions. Heck, I even mentioned the supposed collapse and its standard causes to college environmental studies students for whom I stressed the role of environmental degradation by overexploitation. What was I thinking? Now, years later, how can I go back to correct the misinformation—and maybe the negative attitude—I might have instilled in them (assuming, of course, than any of them were listening).
Nevertheless, I still can’t discount that those islanders did cause themselves problems in the context of droughts and exploitation on an island not part of any archipelago. And I can’t discount that the same kind of backyard squabbles we see today were also part of Rapa Nui culture. People on the island were still people like people everywhere and everywhen. Apparently, over the decades ensuing their arrival, they separated into clans or tribes, and, as you probably know if not from your own family, then from others, that rivalries develop, estrangements occur. Cultures might differ, but the same human desires lie at the center of human problems as the Buddha taught, and individual needs frequently run counter to societal demands, even among a homogeneous people like the Rapa Nui.
And if the homogeneous Rapa Nui had internal problems common to all humanity, does it not seem reasonable to assume that, as has occurred elsewhere, an introduced heterogeneity invariably increased any cultural tensions and environmental stresses? So, if, as DiNapoli and colleagues argue, the Rapa Nui survived internal and environmental stresses prior to an invasion by Europeans, should I not entertain the idea that they suffered increased over-the-edge turmoil after that invasion? The Dutch, finding the island first, and then the English, seemed to have introduced rats, plague, smallpox, and STDs into a biologically and culturally stable society that had actually survived previous hardships. Later, slave traders raided the island.
Do you, like me, too readily accept causes that are simple, and, as a corollary, also accept effects that appear to be anomaly-free? Accepting causes identified and enumerated by experts makes accepting effects easy, even when both causes and effects might be incorrect or mischaracterized. That collapse of the Rapa Nui seems to have been mischaracterized in both cause and effect, the latter demonstrated by the steady to increasing population size of Rapa Nui into the early 18th century. As a homogeneous population on an island, the Rapa Nui seemed to have survived both natural and anthropogenic environmental changes prior to contact with foreigners, but apparently, they suffered diminished numbers after contact with Europeans.
Ending #1: Is Manhattan Just a Larger Rapa Nui?
Now I’m wondering whether or not I am an independent thinker or a mere parrot. If I was misled by a faulty account of Rapa Nui culture, am I also misled by a faulty account of current culture? Do I accept without thinking explanations of modern cultural problems? Accepting causes identified and enumerated by trusted experts makes accepting effects easy. And today experts abound, so many of them, I’m guessing, that at their rate of proliferation, just about everyone on the planet will be an expert before the end of this century (they’re multiplying faster than rabbits and lawyers).
Are you stuck on explanations for American and European societies’ 21st-century problems that are based on hypotheses about environmental damage and rapid population diversification? Can homogeneous societies, such as Scandinavian countries before the late twentieth- and early twenty-first century surges in immigration survive untouched by social turmoil, disease, and environmental change after the recently introduced heterogeneity during this century’s mass migrations from the Middle East and Africa?
Do cultural problems invariably arise from a contest between Homogeneity and Diversity? Is one better than the other? The Rapa Nui civilization was as homogeneous as a civilization can get. Any mixing of cultures and genetic backgrounds that made the Rapa Nui what they were until the Dutch and English seamen arrived had taken place before the islanders’ voyage across the Pacific to Easter Island. And then a new round of social and genetic mixing took place after the Europeans arrived in the 18th century. Oh-oh. Trouble was a-brewing after those encounters.
It’s difficult to compare coconuts and apples. Easter Island is small and isolated. North America and Europe are large, with the former supporting an “indigenous” population for at least 16 millennia during which mixing probably occurred to engender the American peoples that the Europeans encountered starting in the fifteenth century. Over the long pre-Columbian centuries, those original migrants eventually mixed and then, as humans have always done, separated for the very same kinds of reasons that families separate today. Eventually, the separated “families” coalesced into units of relatively homogenous tribes and “nations,” such as the Natchez, Shawnee, Iroquois, Huron, Choctaw, and Mohicans. Then Europeans and Asians entered the mix of North American “indigenous peoples.” That mixing was sometimes biological and always cultural.
In contrast with North America, Europe, with its longer human presence, experienced mixing over 30 to 60 millennia with notable pulses like the invasion by the Huns moving westward and the Vikings moving eastward. Geography made cultural mixing easier than it was over the vast Pacific. Movements of Vandals, Goths, Visigoths, Greeks, Romans, Anglo-Saxons and others introduced heterogeneity throughout Europe and, in the process, diluted their own homogeneity. Interspersed with many cultural and genetic mixing episodes came the periods of homogenizing that led to our present-day concepts of Poles, Germans, French, Italians, Spanish, etc., all inheritors of mixing and all now seeing themselves identifiable by either culture or biology—or both.
Humans will be humans, so similarities can be found to link people from all places and all times. The Rapa Nui, American, and European societies all exploited the environment. On continents populations decimated wildlife on which they depended for food, and they cleared forests, actions that mirrored those of the Rapa Nui. Migrations and conquest beginning with Columbus introduced heterogeneity rather rapidly in North, Central, and South America with settlements by the Dutch, French, English, and Spanish.
Today, one of the best examples of heterogeneity lies in the Borough of Queens in NYC. Queens is one of the most genetically diverse places on the planet, and next door, Manhattan Island is far from being a homogeneous Rapa Nui. About 3.5 million people of diverse genetic and cultural backgrounds live together in just those two New York City boroughs, and they flourish with limited natural resources. No farms on their radically altered landscapes provide ample food to support those millions of people. And like Rapa Nui, both boroughs are largely denuded of trees that once covered the area they occupy. Yet, the people of both heterogeneous boroughs have not only survived, but have also increased their numbers in spite of environmental changes and cultural mixing.
Of course, I shouldn’t compare coconuts and apples. Am I wrong in thinking I can compare pre- and post-industrial societies or island and continental cultures as though they were the same? Am I also thinking without thinking by comparing a globalized world with isolated pockets of humanity like that on Rapa Nui in the 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries? Could I be wrong in thinking that what happened on Rapa Nui in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries doesn’t seem to differ from what happened in Europe and North America over millennia. Nevertheless, with regard to an island borough of New York City only half the size of Easter Island, globalization of resources has made the survival of millions easier than survival of a few thousands on the larger and largely resource-less Rapa Nui.
Ending #2: Homogeneity Begets Hegemony
Here’s what I think: Homogeneity begets hegemony.
So, if the early standard model of Rapa Nui cultural demise was only partially correct, it might indicate that no homogeneous society that uses up its local resources is ultimately sustainable, particularly in the context of our planet’s unequal distribution of resources. In the US, for example, there is only one mine, the Molycorp mine, that produces rare earths necessary for modern tech. If Molycorp closes that California mine, then American tech companies will depend solely on foreign sources like China, the leading producer of rare earths, for metals like terbium, yttrium, dysprosium, neodymium, and europium. Will such a monopoly lead to conflict? Coconuts and apples? True, the Rapa Nui did not incorporate rare earths in their rather primitive technology, and they apparently did not explore once they established a life on Easter Island. But they did leave Polynesia for a better life, possibly in the face of war back home or possibly in a desire to conquer a new land—otherwise, why did they leave? But what kept a once seafaring people from further seafaring and exploring? Well, in that standard model of island collapse, the Rapa Nui, having cut down their forests, had no materials to make boats for further exploration even if they had wished to explore.
Their survival on the island indicates they did not, under the circumstances of diminishing resources, simply resign themselves to a slow and inevitable decline. The common effort of groups under stress everywhere to find relief by invention, migration, and hegemony. For the Rapa Nui, invention, not migration or hegemony, appears to have solved some problems. The story of the Rapa Nui begins with their voyage to Easter Island. That drought occurred over the ensuing centuries seems proven, but they were inventive, finding water in the island’s coastal springs when lake water dried up.
Add hubris to the equation for survival. In searches for resources, homogeneous societies on both islands and continents have sought relief beyond their borders. The Romans conquered Cyprus, where they mined the Troodos Massif for copper. Or think of Japan before World War II. The Land of the Rising Sun relied on outside resources to sustain its modern civilization. Unfortunately for the nearby Asian and Southeast Asian populations, Japan’s leaders determined that the only way to sustain their homogeneous population’s growing need for resources was by conquest. In pursuit of that path to sustainability, the Japanese started wars of conquest that ended in their own societal collapse and decimated population. Between 3.5 and 4.3 % of the Japanese populations were directly or indirectly killed by its wars of hegemony.
What if the Rapa Nui had in fifteenth century the capabilities for hegemony that Japan had in the twentieth century? Would they have left the island and conquered the Incas like Conquistadors? One last example, if you please. Wasn’t Hitler’s hegemony driven by his belief in a homogeneity of Germanic peoples, whom he referred to, strangely, as Aryans, a genetic group originating in India? It seems that even the perception of homogeneity is enough to drive hegemony.
Ending #3: Hypothesizing Experts Model a Future That Might Not Happen as Predicted
Greenland’s socialist-leaning government recently decided to end all oil exploration because of global warming. The politicians have listened to the “experts” and have based their carbon-free future on a model that predicts an inevitable melting of the island’s glaciers. If that melting occurs, Greenland will be just like the Greenland of the Eemian Interglacial Stage of 124,000 to 119,000 years ago. *** I guess the government officials believe a warmer Greenland would be less hospitable, even though Greenland’s initial settlement began during the Medieval Warm Period when Vikings sailed to its shores and found the place hospitable.
Should we consider Greenland to be an analog of Rapa Nui?
Seemingly isolated, Greenlanders are actually connected to a global economy and trade system that provides them with resources that now lie buried under the island’s glaciers. A warmer Greenland would probably provide a climate conducive to more agriculture. An ice-free Greenland would be easier to explore for natural resources. And a warmer island might even foster more tourism, not less. Would global warming be bad for Greenland? Would dependence on foreign sources of energy be good for Greenland?
Could those experts who hypothesize grave peril because of “global warming” be wrong? Recall that 2012 was supposed to be a bad year. Remember about all those “we have only 10 years left” slogans? Remember “save the polar bears”? Could the experts be wrong if not about the world in general then at least wrong about Greenland? Is it possible that global warming might, in fact, benefit many populations by extending growing regions and seasons? Might it benefit Greenlanders?
Assume that the Rapa Nui had no way of predicting the climate change that changes in the Southern Oscillation brought to their small island. Had they climate experts, would they have altered their use of resources? Would they have done everything in their power to abandon the island? Note that even after the appearance of the Europeans, the Rapa Nui continued to carve their Mo’ai, indicating that the work went on regardless of climate-caused hardships. And if, like Greenlanders, the Rapa Nui had oil resources, would they have refused to drill for them because doomsayers hypothesized climate change droughts?
Prediction is a gamble. So far, the prediction is that climates will change because of global warming. And the corollary of that prediction is that humans will suffer an existential threat. But will they?
Ending #4
This is where you start writing. Consider what experts in various categories have told you over the past year. Consider what you accepted as true, but found out to be false. Consider how your acceptance of experts' opinions has shaped your attitude. And consider how you will protect yourself from using others' thoughts as your own. Now think and write.
Notes:
https://phys.org/news/2021-07-resilience-collapse-easter-island-myth.html
**https://phys.org/news/2021-07-greenland-scraps-future-oil-exploration.html
***Gramling, Carolyn. 15 Dec. 2015. Greenland was once ice free. Science. Online at https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/12/greenland-was-once-ice-free
Beware historians and social architects.
Beware experts and pundits.
Beware hypothesizers.
Beware doomsayers.
Consider the following advice:
Think.
Consider before continuing:
In this longer blog, you get to choose an ending, or, if you desire, to write your own.
Consider this background:
I’ve never been to Rapa Nui, but I’ve been influenced by explanations of what happened on that remote island famous for its seaward-looking Mo’ai. I accepted the so-called “collapse” of Easter Island culture that expert hypothesizers attributed to isolation, exploitation of limited resources like palm forests and soils, tribal war, and failure to manage water sustainably under changing climate and the vicissitudes of the Southern Oscillation/El Niño/La Niña events. Having heard all the “reasonable” hypotheses, I was convinced that Easter Island served as a model for twentieth- and twenty-first century practices and that what happened there hinted at the eventual demise of modern civilization. What happened on Easter Island, I thought, begs the question of whether or not we can sustain our lives on island Earth as we compete for its resources.
Not to worry, I learned. A new study seems to indicate that the island people survived natural and artificial environmental change. * The people were resilient. That they cut down their trees, a process linked by experts to the demise of their society, does not figure into the Easter Island equation of population collapse because there was no collapse, or, at least, there was no collapse as portrayed by the standard modelers. The equation can’t balance. Gardens kept the soils in place. In times of lake-draining drought, the islanders found springs. Life went on there as life has gone on for humans everywhere under risk and hardship, tough but for the general population, endurable.
Our species is quite resilient because many individual members are quite hardy and resilient—even in times like these when some humans require “safe spaces” lest they suffer some existential verbal or ideological offense too unbearable for survival. Yes, even in today’s world of wimps, there are resilient people capable of surviving hardships like environmental change and war. You might be one of them—by reading this you prove by your presence in a time of pandemic my point. If you are resilient, thanks. Thanks? Yes, thanks for being the kind of human who will keep the species alive, at least for the immediate future and hopefully for as many millennia into the future as humans have endured so far. Sure, collapses have occurred, but they have happened in the context of an enduring species.
So, why was I so easily convinced to adopt the standard explanations of a societal collapse that now, apparently, didn’t happen or that didn’t happen on the scale ascribed to it? And why did I let those explanations instill in me a doubt about the future? I was thinking without thinking. I accepted the standard model because in light of my having never been to Rapa Nui, those who had been there, the archaeological authorities, had accepted that “collapse.” Those experts seemed to make sense, at least, they made sense to me, a casual thinker on the subject. My thinking was their thinking.
But no one who accepted the societal collapse actually took into account the size of the population on the island during the course of those centuries from initial settlement to European intrusion until Robert J. DiNapoli and others used approximate Bayesian computation of the radiocarbon and paleoenvironmental record that revealed the resilience manifested in a steady or even increasing population on Rapa Nui at the very time when the standard model suggested otherwise. I realize now that I didn’t look at any data; I didn’t question any conclusions. Heck, I even mentioned the supposed collapse and its standard causes to college environmental studies students for whom I stressed the role of environmental degradation by overexploitation. What was I thinking? Now, years later, how can I go back to correct the misinformation—and maybe the negative attitude—I might have instilled in them (assuming, of course, than any of them were listening).
Nevertheless, I still can’t discount that those islanders did cause themselves problems in the context of droughts and exploitation on an island not part of any archipelago. And I can’t discount that the same kind of backyard squabbles we see today were also part of Rapa Nui culture. People on the island were still people like people everywhere and everywhen. Apparently, over the decades ensuing their arrival, they separated into clans or tribes, and, as you probably know if not from your own family, then from others, that rivalries develop, estrangements occur. Cultures might differ, but the same human desires lie at the center of human problems as the Buddha taught, and individual needs frequently run counter to societal demands, even among a homogeneous people like the Rapa Nui.
And if the homogeneous Rapa Nui had internal problems common to all humanity, does it not seem reasonable to assume that, as has occurred elsewhere, an introduced heterogeneity invariably increased any cultural tensions and environmental stresses? So, if, as DiNapoli and colleagues argue, the Rapa Nui survived internal and environmental stresses prior to an invasion by Europeans, should I not entertain the idea that they suffered increased over-the-edge turmoil after that invasion? The Dutch, finding the island first, and then the English, seemed to have introduced rats, plague, smallpox, and STDs into a biologically and culturally stable society that had actually survived previous hardships. Later, slave traders raided the island.
Do you, like me, too readily accept causes that are simple, and, as a corollary, also accept effects that appear to be anomaly-free? Accepting causes identified and enumerated by experts makes accepting effects easy, even when both causes and effects might be incorrect or mischaracterized. That collapse of the Rapa Nui seems to have been mischaracterized in both cause and effect, the latter demonstrated by the steady to increasing population size of Rapa Nui into the early 18th century. As a homogeneous population on an island, the Rapa Nui seemed to have survived both natural and anthropogenic environmental changes prior to contact with foreigners, but apparently, they suffered diminished numbers after contact with Europeans.
Ending #1: Is Manhattan Just a Larger Rapa Nui?
Now I’m wondering whether or not I am an independent thinker or a mere parrot. If I was misled by a faulty account of Rapa Nui culture, am I also misled by a faulty account of current culture? Do I accept without thinking explanations of modern cultural problems? Accepting causes identified and enumerated by trusted experts makes accepting effects easy. And today experts abound, so many of them, I’m guessing, that at their rate of proliferation, just about everyone on the planet will be an expert before the end of this century (they’re multiplying faster than rabbits and lawyers).
Are you stuck on explanations for American and European societies’ 21st-century problems that are based on hypotheses about environmental damage and rapid population diversification? Can homogeneous societies, such as Scandinavian countries before the late twentieth- and early twenty-first century surges in immigration survive untouched by social turmoil, disease, and environmental change after the recently introduced heterogeneity during this century’s mass migrations from the Middle East and Africa?
Do cultural problems invariably arise from a contest between Homogeneity and Diversity? Is one better than the other? The Rapa Nui civilization was as homogeneous as a civilization can get. Any mixing of cultures and genetic backgrounds that made the Rapa Nui what they were until the Dutch and English seamen arrived had taken place before the islanders’ voyage across the Pacific to Easter Island. And then a new round of social and genetic mixing took place after the Europeans arrived in the 18th century. Oh-oh. Trouble was a-brewing after those encounters.
It’s difficult to compare coconuts and apples. Easter Island is small and isolated. North America and Europe are large, with the former supporting an “indigenous” population for at least 16 millennia during which mixing probably occurred to engender the American peoples that the Europeans encountered starting in the fifteenth century. Over the long pre-Columbian centuries, those original migrants eventually mixed and then, as humans have always done, separated for the very same kinds of reasons that families separate today. Eventually, the separated “families” coalesced into units of relatively homogenous tribes and “nations,” such as the Natchez, Shawnee, Iroquois, Huron, Choctaw, and Mohicans. Then Europeans and Asians entered the mix of North American “indigenous peoples.” That mixing was sometimes biological and always cultural.
In contrast with North America, Europe, with its longer human presence, experienced mixing over 30 to 60 millennia with notable pulses like the invasion by the Huns moving westward and the Vikings moving eastward. Geography made cultural mixing easier than it was over the vast Pacific. Movements of Vandals, Goths, Visigoths, Greeks, Romans, Anglo-Saxons and others introduced heterogeneity throughout Europe and, in the process, diluted their own homogeneity. Interspersed with many cultural and genetic mixing episodes came the periods of homogenizing that led to our present-day concepts of Poles, Germans, French, Italians, Spanish, etc., all inheritors of mixing and all now seeing themselves identifiable by either culture or biology—or both.
Humans will be humans, so similarities can be found to link people from all places and all times. The Rapa Nui, American, and European societies all exploited the environment. On continents populations decimated wildlife on which they depended for food, and they cleared forests, actions that mirrored those of the Rapa Nui. Migrations and conquest beginning with Columbus introduced heterogeneity rather rapidly in North, Central, and South America with settlements by the Dutch, French, English, and Spanish.
Today, one of the best examples of heterogeneity lies in the Borough of Queens in NYC. Queens is one of the most genetically diverse places on the planet, and next door, Manhattan Island is far from being a homogeneous Rapa Nui. About 3.5 million people of diverse genetic and cultural backgrounds live together in just those two New York City boroughs, and they flourish with limited natural resources. No farms on their radically altered landscapes provide ample food to support those millions of people. And like Rapa Nui, both boroughs are largely denuded of trees that once covered the area they occupy. Yet, the people of both heterogeneous boroughs have not only survived, but have also increased their numbers in spite of environmental changes and cultural mixing.
Of course, I shouldn’t compare coconuts and apples. Am I wrong in thinking I can compare pre- and post-industrial societies or island and continental cultures as though they were the same? Am I also thinking without thinking by comparing a globalized world with isolated pockets of humanity like that on Rapa Nui in the 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries? Could I be wrong in thinking that what happened on Rapa Nui in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries doesn’t seem to differ from what happened in Europe and North America over millennia. Nevertheless, with regard to an island borough of New York City only half the size of Easter Island, globalization of resources has made the survival of millions easier than survival of a few thousands on the larger and largely resource-less Rapa Nui.
Ending #2: Homogeneity Begets Hegemony
Here’s what I think: Homogeneity begets hegemony.
So, if the early standard model of Rapa Nui cultural demise was only partially correct, it might indicate that no homogeneous society that uses up its local resources is ultimately sustainable, particularly in the context of our planet’s unequal distribution of resources. In the US, for example, there is only one mine, the Molycorp mine, that produces rare earths necessary for modern tech. If Molycorp closes that California mine, then American tech companies will depend solely on foreign sources like China, the leading producer of rare earths, for metals like terbium, yttrium, dysprosium, neodymium, and europium. Will such a monopoly lead to conflict? Coconuts and apples? True, the Rapa Nui did not incorporate rare earths in their rather primitive technology, and they apparently did not explore once they established a life on Easter Island. But they did leave Polynesia for a better life, possibly in the face of war back home or possibly in a desire to conquer a new land—otherwise, why did they leave? But what kept a once seafaring people from further seafaring and exploring? Well, in that standard model of island collapse, the Rapa Nui, having cut down their forests, had no materials to make boats for further exploration even if they had wished to explore.
Their survival on the island indicates they did not, under the circumstances of diminishing resources, simply resign themselves to a slow and inevitable decline. The common effort of groups under stress everywhere to find relief by invention, migration, and hegemony. For the Rapa Nui, invention, not migration or hegemony, appears to have solved some problems. The story of the Rapa Nui begins with their voyage to Easter Island. That drought occurred over the ensuing centuries seems proven, but they were inventive, finding water in the island’s coastal springs when lake water dried up.
Add hubris to the equation for survival. In searches for resources, homogeneous societies on both islands and continents have sought relief beyond their borders. The Romans conquered Cyprus, where they mined the Troodos Massif for copper. Or think of Japan before World War II. The Land of the Rising Sun relied on outside resources to sustain its modern civilization. Unfortunately for the nearby Asian and Southeast Asian populations, Japan’s leaders determined that the only way to sustain their homogeneous population’s growing need for resources was by conquest. In pursuit of that path to sustainability, the Japanese started wars of conquest that ended in their own societal collapse and decimated population. Between 3.5 and 4.3 % of the Japanese populations were directly or indirectly killed by its wars of hegemony.
What if the Rapa Nui had in fifteenth century the capabilities for hegemony that Japan had in the twentieth century? Would they have left the island and conquered the Incas like Conquistadors? One last example, if you please. Wasn’t Hitler’s hegemony driven by his belief in a homogeneity of Germanic peoples, whom he referred to, strangely, as Aryans, a genetic group originating in India? It seems that even the perception of homogeneity is enough to drive hegemony.
Ending #3: Hypothesizing Experts Model a Future That Might Not Happen as Predicted
Greenland’s socialist-leaning government recently decided to end all oil exploration because of global warming. The politicians have listened to the “experts” and have based their carbon-free future on a model that predicts an inevitable melting of the island’s glaciers. If that melting occurs, Greenland will be just like the Greenland of the Eemian Interglacial Stage of 124,000 to 119,000 years ago. *** I guess the government officials believe a warmer Greenland would be less hospitable, even though Greenland’s initial settlement began during the Medieval Warm Period when Vikings sailed to its shores and found the place hospitable.
Should we consider Greenland to be an analog of Rapa Nui?
Seemingly isolated, Greenlanders are actually connected to a global economy and trade system that provides them with resources that now lie buried under the island’s glaciers. A warmer Greenland would probably provide a climate conducive to more agriculture. An ice-free Greenland would be easier to explore for natural resources. And a warmer island might even foster more tourism, not less. Would global warming be bad for Greenland? Would dependence on foreign sources of energy be good for Greenland?
Could those experts who hypothesize grave peril because of “global warming” be wrong? Recall that 2012 was supposed to be a bad year. Remember about all those “we have only 10 years left” slogans? Remember “save the polar bears”? Could the experts be wrong if not about the world in general then at least wrong about Greenland? Is it possible that global warming might, in fact, benefit many populations by extending growing regions and seasons? Might it benefit Greenlanders?
Assume that the Rapa Nui had no way of predicting the climate change that changes in the Southern Oscillation brought to their small island. Had they climate experts, would they have altered their use of resources? Would they have done everything in their power to abandon the island? Note that even after the appearance of the Europeans, the Rapa Nui continued to carve their Mo’ai, indicating that the work went on regardless of climate-caused hardships. And if, like Greenlanders, the Rapa Nui had oil resources, would they have refused to drill for them because doomsayers hypothesized climate change droughts?
Prediction is a gamble. So far, the prediction is that climates will change because of global warming. And the corollary of that prediction is that humans will suffer an existential threat. But will they?
Ending #4
This is where you start writing. Consider what experts in various categories have told you over the past year. Consider what you accepted as true, but found out to be false. Consider how your acceptance of experts' opinions has shaped your attitude. And consider how you will protect yourself from using others' thoughts as your own. Now think and write.
Notes:
https://phys.org/news/2021-07-resilience-collapse-easter-island-myth.html
**https://phys.org/news/2021-07-greenland-scraps-future-oil-exploration.html
***Gramling, Carolyn. 15 Dec. 2015. Greenland was once ice free. Science. Online at https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/12/greenland-was-once-ice-free
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