# adam commented : In Guns Germs and Steel Diamond also makes the point that life as a peasant farmer kind of sucks versus that as a hunter gatherer. It's 12 hours a day of back breaking grind for a limited range of foodstuffs that often don't cover nutritional needs. So communities only adopt it under competitive pressure, because a community of farmers can be much larger and hence dangerous in war against a community of hunter gatherers on the same land.

# cam commented : I think the English experience in Sydney and Parramatta with the Eora and Dharug in the 1780s showed that it doesn't have to be war, just competition for land. The establishment of agriculture makes the land unusable for hunter-gatherers.

# avocadia commented : Pedantry:

At the risk of sounding like too much of a pedant, but there were still trees on Easter Island when Europeans arrived. The islanders and the polynesian rat wiped out the native plam, but they still had some trees, howevere small. That pedantry aside, I think the islanders had a pretty good idea what was happening, because the Birdman cult was a reaction to it, essentially the same concept as the position of Dictator in the Roman Republic. You are discounting too much how good oral history can be. In this case at any rate, the loss of the native palms had a crippling effect of moai production, so the moai carvers would have had a good idea of what happened even if oral history had failed elsewhere.

That said, I\'ve not read the book. Diamond may have very well covered those points.

# cam commented : The remaining trees were pretty: small, thin and crappy. No good for canoes, thatch or moving big lumps of stone from the quarries to the coast. So as you said, there wasn\'t a Star Trek moment when the last tree evar was felled.

On the oral history side of things - anecdotal - but I can tell you how I tied and strung a flying fox across the local creek, I could not tell you about the local quality of the water that ran in the creek and whether it deteriated or improved during my childhood.

Environmental impact is so heavily interdependent that even today with all our instrument and recording technology we are finding it hard to quantify rates of change. Technological knowledge is much easier to pass on.

That being said, if there are big sea-going canoes on the island that were made one hundred years ago, and there are no mature trees to make that kind of canoe on the island, then it is obvious something is up.

cam

# avocadia commented : Personal impact:

local quality of the water that ran in the creek and whether it deteriated or improved during my childhood

Were you on town water? If you are on town water, the quality of water in the creek probably doesn\'t mean much to you. On the other hand, the native palm trees were arguably vital to the transportation of the moia - there is some argument. The moia were a large part of the culture before the Birdman cult took over post-deforestation. I believe that when something that is so much a part of an intrinsic part of the society is disappearing, everyone knows about it. It would have been a point of concern for decades.

Of ocurse, if you weren\'t on town water, my simile falls over in a heap.

# cam commented : Nope town water: The point I was trying to make was that oral and even early written history are ok at perpuating moral and technological history, but poor at perpetuating large empirical studies of data that are needed for one generation to the next to have an understanding of their impact on the environment.

Diamond suggests the island was deforested over 800 years. At say 40 years a generation, the first arrivals would have seen a drastic difference in expected tree cover to the last couple of generations. Again that being said, when the European ships arrived the islanders wanted to barter for wood.

cam