We’re making the same mistakes with our essential resources
by Chris Martenson
Chris Martenson’s Peak Prosperity
Remember Easter Island? That place in the pages of National Geographic with the gigantic carved heads peeking up from grassy slopes?
Whether you recall it or not, you live there — in a manner of speaking.
Easter Island was colonized by the Rapanui, a particularly adept seafaring culture. When they arrived, around the year 800 A.D., the island was a lush forested tropical paradise.
But eventually, according to researcher Jared Diamond in his bestseller Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, they committed ecocide.
They cut down every single tree on their island. Eventually the people had no wood to burn in their cookfires. They had to resort to burning grass, a particularly inferior fuel source.