What If Climate Change & Nationalism Had the Same Solution?

The scholar Jared Diamond argues that, on Easter Island, between 1400 and the 1600s, the chiefs and priests—the island's elite—laid waste to the forests within a few hundred years using little more than stone axes, in part to create and move the famous giant heads and figures. Even as the island's population plummeted, according to Diamond's account (sometimes called the "ecocide" scenario), the elite would not stop building. In fact, Diamond says, they stepped up their efforts, hoping to propitiate the gods further. Collapse "followed swiftly upon the society's reaching its peak of population, monument construction, and environmental impact," Diamond writes in his 2005 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. As Diamond notes, the inequality present in Easter Island—the collapse of which has come to signify human folly and ecological destruction—meant the rich had the honor of "being the last to starve."