FROM GENOCIDE TO ECOCIDE: THE RAPE OF RAPA NUI

Another great Greenie lie that totally ignores history -- Author of the article below, Benny Peiser, is an anthropologist writing within his own special field on this topic so he KNOWS what actually happened on Easter Island. That most accomplished twister of the facts, Jared Diamond, whose account of Easter Island history Peiser takes apart, is a physiologist

By Benny Peiser, Liverpool John Moores University, Faculty of Science Liverpool L3 2ET, UK.(b.j.peiser@livjm.ac.uk) Paper from Energy & Environment, 16:3&4 (2005), pp. 513-539

ABSTRACT

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.


INTRODUCTION

Of all the vanished civilisations, no other has evoked as much bafflement, incredulity and conjecture as the Pacific island of Rapa Nui (Easter Island). This tiny patch of land was discovered by European explorers more than three hundred years ago amidst the vast space that is the South Pacific Ocean. Its civilisation attained a level of social complexity that gave rise to one of the most advanced cultures and technological feats of Neolithic societies anywhere in the world. Easter Island's stone-working skills and proficiency were far superior to any other Polynesian culture, as was its unique writing system. This most extraordinary society developed, flourished and persisted for perhaps more than one thousand years - before it collapsed and became all but extinct.

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 (Diamond, 2005) in a chapter which focuses on Easter Island. Diamond's saga of the decline and fall of Easter Island is straightforward and can be summarised in a few words: Within a few centuries after the island was settled, 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. When Europeans discovered the island in the 18th century, they found a crashed society and a deprived population of survivors who subsisted among the ruins of a once vibrant civilisation.

Diamond's key line of reasoning is not difficult to grasp: Easter Island's cultural decline and collapse occurred before Europeans set foot on its shores. He spells out in no uncertain terms that the island's downfall was entirely self-inflicted: "It was the islanders themselves who had destroyed their own ancestor's work" (Diamond, 2005).

Lord May, the President of Britain's Royal Society, recently condensed Diamond's theory of environmental suicide in this way: "In a lecture at the Royal Society last week, Jared Diamond drew attention to populations, such as those on Easter Island, who denied they were having a catastrophic impact on the environment and were eventually wiped out, a phenomenon he called 'ecocide'" (May, 2005).

Diamond's theory has been around since the early 1980s. Since then, it has reached a mass audience due to a number of popular books and Diamond's own publications. As a result, the notion of ecological suicide has become the "orthodox model" of Easter Island's demise. "This story of self-induced eco-disaster and consequent self-destruction of a Polynesian island society continues to provide the easy and uncomplicated shorthand for explaining the so-called cultural devolution of Rapa Nui society" (Rainbird, 2002).

The 'decline and fall' of Easter Island and its alleged self-destruction has become the poster child of the new environmentalist historiography, a school of thought that goes hand-in-hand with predictions of environmental disaster. Clive Ponting's The Green History of the World - for many years the main manifest of British eco-pessimism - begins his saga of ecological destruction and social degeneration with "The Lessons of Easter Island" (Ponting, 1992:1ff.). Others view Easter Island as a microcosm of planet Earth and consider the former's bleak fate as symptomatic for what awaits the whole of humanity. Thus, the story of Easter Island's environmental suicide has become the prime case for the gloomiest of grim eco-pessimism.

After more than 30 years of palaeo-environmental research on Easter Island, one of its leading experts comes to an extremely gloomy conclusion: "It seems [...] that ecological sustainability may be an impossible dream. The revised Club of Rome predictions show that it is not very likely that we can put of the crunch by more than a few decades. Most of their models still show economic decline by AD 2100. Easter Island still seems to be a plausible model for Earth Island." (Flenley, 1998:127).

From a political and psychological point of view, this imagery of a complex civilisation self-destructing is overwhelming. It portrays an impression of utter failure that elicits shock and trepidation. It is in form of a shock-tactic when Diamond employs Rapa Nui's tragic end as a dire warning and a moral lesson for humanity today: "Easter [Island's] isolation makes it the clearest example of a society that destroyed itself by overexploiting its own resources. Those are the reasons why people see the collapse of Easter Island society as a metaphor, a worst-case scenario, for what may lie ahead of us in our own future" (Diamond, 2005).

While the 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 ignores, or neglects to address the true reasons behind Rapa Nui's collapse. Other researchers have no doubt that its people, their culture and its environment were destroyed to all intents and purposes by European slave-traders, whalers and colonists - and not by themselves!

After all, the cruelty and systematic kidnapping by European slave-merchants, the near-extermination of the Island's indigenous population and the deliberate destruction of the island's environment has been regarded as "one of the most hideous atrocities committed by white men in the South Seas" (Metraux, 1957:38), "perhaps the most dreadful piece of genocide in Polynesian history" (Bellwood, 1978:363).

So why does Diamond maintain that Easter Island's celebrated culture, famous for its sophisticated architecture and giant stone statues, committed its own environmental suicide? How did the once well-known accounts about the "fatal impact" (Moorehead, 1966) of European disease, slavery and genocide - "the catastrophe that wiped out Easter Island's civilisation" (Metraux, ibid.) - turn into a contemporary parable of self-inflicted ecocide?

In short, why have the victims of cultural and physical extermination been turned 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.

FULL PAPER here (PDF). For those who still think Diamond has some credibility, note that "Gene Expression" have up a post on Diamond, who currently claims that race is a myth and that there is no genetic difference between the Western European whites who created the modern world and anybody else. All those "dead white males" did so well purely by accident, apparently. The "Gene Expression" post however reprints one of Diamond's scientific papers from the days before he had hopped onto the politically correct bandwagon -- a paper in which Diamond shows important inherited differences between the races! That blogospheric fact-checking sure is pesky for frauds!







COMMISSARS OF CLIMATE CHANGE STRIKE AGAIN

Another prominent and respected scientist, Roger Pielke Sr., has resigned from an important government panel citing political bias built into the process of researching climate change. Pielke is also the Colorado state climatologist and professor at Colorado State University. "Just like the Commissars of the old Soviet Union, activists in the scientific community brook no dissent in the ranks," said NCPA Senior Fellow H. Sterling Burnett. "They suppress findings that are at odds with their dogmatic view of climate science."

Pielke resigned in a letter to the head of the Climate Change Science Program (CCSP), citing a recent article in The New York Times as the "last straw." He complained not only that certain aspects of a CCSP report had been leaked to The Times, but also that another committee member was surreptitiously circulating a chapter to replace the one for which Pielke was lead author. Referring to other CCSP members in an entry on his blog, Climate Science, Pielke noted that ".they, inappropriately, vigorously discourage the inclusion of diversity of perspectives on the topic of the CCSP report in order to promote a narrowly focused topic which has a clear political agenda." (http://climatesci.atmos.colostate.edu/?p=30). Pielke's resignation follows several other major disputes about the "theology" of climate change:

* Respected hurricane expert, Chris Landsea, resigned from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), charging that its leaders overstated the influence of global warming on hurricanes for political purposes.

* Author and physician Michael Crichton's book, State of Fear, published earlier this year, echoed his Commonwealth Club lecture that environmentalism has become the religion of Western elites.

* In a recent editorial in The Wall Street Journal titled, "The Theology of Global Warming," former Energy Secretary James Schlesinger noted "concerns about objectivity of the international panel (IPCC) of scientists that has led research into climate change."

* John Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama-Huntsville, who is also co-author of the IPCC report said of a recent dispute about global warming in Science Magazine that the debate about climate change has become more political than scientific.

"It's time for all points of view to get a hearing in academic journals and by peer review. Refusing to acknowledge dissenting views undermines our knowledge base, especially when science is the basis for formulating public policy," Dr. Burnett added.

Source

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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