It's the End of the World (as we know it)
The History Channel showed this great program on Easter Island tonight. I was really fascinated and intrigued. Until they started talking about why the island was a desolate grassland when the Europeans found it.
Turns out Rapanui (Easter Island) was first colonized in the five hundreds. The island has several volcanoes and rich soil. The people that settled there were famous for the gigantic statues they made, called moai.
The moai made them rich, and their population centres got crowded. Agriculture depleted the rich soils so they cut down more trees to grow more food. After repeating this process on such a tiny forrest island, they cut down all the trees, and could grow no more food.
Civil war erupted. The island was destroyed in less than 1500 years.
So naturally I overthought it and got very frightened. We could easily do the same thing on a global scale. As animals, our population increases until it hits some limiting factor like the availibility of food. And for every one person in 1800 there are now like six and a half.
Turns out Rapanui (Easter Island) was first colonized in the five hundreds. The island has several volcanoes and rich soil. The people that settled there were famous for the gigantic statues they made, called moai.
The moai made them rich, and their population centres got crowded. Agriculture depleted the rich soils so they cut down more trees to grow more food. After repeating this process on such a tiny forrest island, they cut down all the trees, and could grow no more food.
Civil war erupted. The island was destroyed in less than 1500 years.
So naturally I overthought it and got very frightened. We could easily do the same thing on a global scale. As animals, our population increases until it hits some limiting factor like the availibility of food. And for every one person in 1800 there are now like six and a half.
posted by Day at 11:02 PM
1 Comments:
I think everything will be ok. Yeah, at some point it will be 'the end of the world as we know it.' But when things get tough, you step up and say, 'this is how it is now,' and move on.
Just like half those folks after Katrina. Or in Indonesia after the tsunamis. There's nothing you can do once it goes down, so you deal with it.
But I really don't think it'll go down like it did on Easter Island. I saw that special too. I do think we could alleviate a large worldwide 'civil war' or 'uprising against the upper class' by giving a LOT more to those who are so poor and hungry. [See India, Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America.]
We could do more.
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