Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (15 page)

that is, a house where we wanted to live for the rest of our lives. Right
here, on our property, we have great horned owls, pheasants, quail, wood
ducks, and a pasture big enough for our two horses.

"People may be born into a time in which they feel that they can live,
and they may not want to live in another time. We love this valley as it was
30 years ago. Since then, it has been filling up with people. I wouldn't want
to be living here if the valley became a strip mall, with a million people liv
ing on the valley floor between Missoula and Darby. A view of open space is
important to me. The land across the road from my house is an old farm
two miles long and half a mile wide, consisting entirely of pastureland, with
a couple of barns as the only buildings. It's owned by an out-of-state rock
singer and actor called Huey Lewis, who comes here for just a month or so
each year to hunt and fish, and for the rest of the year has a caretaker who
runs cows, grows hay, and leases some of the land to farmers. If Huey
Lewis's land across the street got subdivided into house lots, I couldn't stand
the sight facing me every day, and I would move.

"I often think about how I would want to die. My own father recently
died a slow death of lung disease. He lost control over his own life, and his
last year was painful. I don't want to die that way. It may seem cold
blooded, but here is my fantasy of how I would die if I had my choice. In my
fantasy, Pat would die before me. That's because, when we got married, I promised to love, honor, and take care of her, and if she died first, I would know that I had fulfilled my promise. Also, I have no life insurance to sup
port her, so it would be hard if she outlived me. After Pat died
—my fantasy
continues—I would turn over the deed of the house to my son Cody, then I
would go trout-fishing every day as long as I was physically in condition to
do it. When I became no longer capable of fishing, I would get hold of a
large supply of morphine and go off a long way into the woods. I would
pick some remote place where nobody would ever find my body, and from
which I could enjoy an especially beautiful view. I'd lie down facing that
view and—take my morphine. That would be the best way to die: dying in the way that I chose, with the last sight I see being a view of Montana as I
want to remember it."

In short, the life stories of these four Montanans, and my own comments
preceding them, illustrate that Montanans differ among themselves in their
values and goals. They want more or less population growth, more or less government regulation, more or less development and subdivision of

agricultural land, more or less retention of agricultural uses of land, more
or less mining, and more or less outdoor-based tourism. Some of these goals are obviously incompatible with others of them.

We have previously seen in this chapter how Montana is experiencing
many environmental problems that translate into economic problems. Ap
plication of these different values and goals that we have just seen illustrated
would result in different approaches to these environmental problems, presumably associated with different probabilities of succeeding or failing at
solving them. At present, there is honest and wide difference of opinion
about the best approaches. We don't know which approaches the citizens of Montana will ultimately choose, and we don't know whether Montana's en
vironmental and economic problems will get better or worse.

It may initially have seemed absurd to select Montana as the subject of
this first chapter of a book on societal collapses. Neither Montana in par
ticular, nor the U.S. in general, is in imminent danger of collapse. But:
please reflect that half of the income of Montana residents doesn't come
from their work within Montana, but instead consists of money flowing
into Montana from other U.S. states: federal government transfer payments
(such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and poverty programs) and
private out-of-state funds (out-of-state pensions, earnings on real estate
equity, and business income). That is, Montana's own economy already falls
far short of supporting the Montana lifestyle, which is instead supported by and dependent on the rest of the U.S. If Montana were an isolated island, as
Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean was in Polynesian times before European
arrival, its present First World economy would already have collapsed, nor
could it have developed that economy in the first place.

Then reflect that Montana's environmental problems that we have been
discussing, although serious, are still much less severe than those in most of
the rest of the U.S., almost all of which has much denser human popula
tions and heavier human impacts, and much of which is environmentally
more fragile than Montana. The U.S. in turn depends for essential resources on, and is economically, politically, and militarily involved with, other parts
of the world, some of which have even more severe environmental prob
lems and are in much steeper decline than is the U.S.

In the remainder of this book we shall be considering environmental problems, similar to Montana's, in various past and modern societies. For
the past societies that I shall discuss, half of which lack writing, we know far
less about individual people's values and goals than we do for Montana. For
the modern societies, information about values and goals is available, but I

PART
TWO

PAST
SOCIETIES

CHAPTER
2

Twilight at Easter

The quarry's mysteries
· Easter's geography and history ■ People and

food
■ Chiefs, clans, and commoners ■ Platforms and statues ■

Carving, transporting, erecting
■ The vanished forest ■

Consequences for society
■ Europeans and explanations ■

Why was Easter fragile?
■ Easter as metaphor
■

N

o other site that I have visited made such a ghostly impression on
me as Rano Raraku, the quarry on Easter Island where its famous
gigantic stone statues were carved (Plate 5). To begin with, the is
land is the most remote habitable scrap of land in the world. The nearest
lands are the coast of Chile 2,300 miles to the east and Polynesia's Pitcairn
Islands 1,300 miles to the west (map, pp. 84-85). When I arrived in 2002 by
jet plane from Chile, my flight took more than five hours, all spent over the
Pacific Ocean stretching endlessly between the horizons, with nothing to see below us except water. By the time, towards sunset, that the small low speck
that was Easter Island finally did become dimly visible ahead in the twilight,
I had become concerned whether we would succeed in finding the island
before nightfall, and whether our plane had enough fuel to return to Chile if we overshot and missed Easter. It is hardly an island that one would expect to have been discovered and settled by any humans before the large swift
European sailing ships of recent centuries.

Rano Raraku is an approximately circular volcanic crater about 600
yards in diameter, which I entered by a trail rising steeply up to the crater
rim from the low plain outside, and then dropping steeply down again
toward the marshy lake on the crater floor. No one lives in the vicinity to
day. Scattered over both the crater's outer and inner walls are 397 stone stat
ues, representing in a stylized way a long-eared legless human male torso,
mostly 15 to 20 feet tall but the largest of them 70 feet tall (taller than the
average modern 5-story building), and weighing from 10 up to 270 tons.
The remains of a transport road can be discerned passing out of the crater
through a notch cut into a low point in its rim, from which three more transport roads about 25 feet wide radiate north, south, and west for up to

9 miles towards Easter's coasts. Scattered along the roads are 97 more stat
ues, as if abandoned in transport from the quarry. Along the coast and oc
casionally inland are about 300 stone platforms, a third of them formerly
supporting or associated with 393 more statues, all of which until a few de
cades ago were not erect but thrown down, many of them toppled so as to
break them deliberately at the neck.

From the crater rim, I could see the nearest and largest platform (called
Ahu Tongariki), whose 15 toppled statues the archaeologist Claudio Cris-
tino described to me re-erecting in 1994 by means of a crane capable of lift
ing 55 tons. Even with that modern machinery, the task proved challenging for Claudio, because Ahu Tongariki's largest statue weighed 88 tons. Yet
Easter Island's prehistoric Polynesian population had owned no cranes, no wheels, no machines, no metal tools, no draft animals, and no means other
than human muscle power to transport and raise the statues.

The statues remaining at the quarry are in all stages of completion.
Some are still attached to the bedrock out of which they were being carved,
roughed out but with details of the ears or hands missing. Others are fin
ished, detached, and lying on the crater slopes below the niche where they
had been carved, and still others had been erected in the crater. The ghostly
impression that the quarry made on me came from my sense of being in a
factory, all of whose workers had suddenly quit for mysterious reasons, thrown down their tools, and stomped out, leaving each statue in whatever
stage it happened to be at the moment. Littering the ground at the quarry
are the stone picks, drills, and hammers with which the statues were being
carved. Around each statue still attached to rock is the trench in which
the carvers stood. Chipped in the rock wall are stone notches on which the carvers may have hung the gourds that served as their water bottles. Some statues in the crater show signs of having been deliberately broken or defaced, as if by rival groups of carvers vandalizing one another's products. Under one statue was found a human finger bone, possibly the result of carelessness by a member of that statue's transport crew. Who carved the statues, why did they carve them at such effort, how did the carvers transport and raise such huge stone masses, and why did they eventually throw
them all down?

Easter's many mysteries were already apparent to its European discov
erer, the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen, who spotted the island on Easter
Day (April 5, 1722), hence the name that he bestowed and that has re
mained. As a sailor who had just spent 17 days crossing the Pacific from

Chile in three large European ships without any sight of land, Roggeveen
asked himself: how had the Polynesians greeting him when he landed on
Easter's coast reached such a remote island? We know now that the voyage
to Easter from the nearest Polynesian island to the west would have taken at
least as many days. Hence Roggeveen and subsequent European visitors
were surprised to find that the islanders' only watercraft were small and
leaky canoes, no more than 10 feet long, capable of holding only one or at
most two people. In Roggeveen's words: "As concerns their vessels, these are
bad and frail as regards use, for their canoes are put together with manifold
small planks and light inner timbers, which they cleverly stitched together
with very fine twisted threads, made from the above-named field-plant. But as they lacked the knowledge and particularly the materials for caulking and making tight the great number of seams of the canoes, these are accordingly
very leaky, for which reason they are compelled to spend half the time in
bailing." How could a band of human colonists plus their crops, chickens,
and drinking water have survived a two-and-a-half-week sea journey in such watercraft?

Like all subsequent visitors, including me, Roggeveen was puzzled to
understand how the islanders had erected their statues. To quote his journal again, "The stone images at first caused us to be struck with astonishment,
because we could not comprehend how it was possible that these people,
who are devoid of heavy thick timber for making any machines, as well as strong ropes, nevertheless had been able to erect such images, which were
fully 30 feet high and thick in proportion." No matter what had been the ex
act method by which the islanders raised the statues, they needed heavy
timber and strong ropes made from big trees, as Roggeveen realized. Yet the
Easter Island that he viewed was a wasteland with not a single tree or bush over 10 feet tall (Plates 6, 7): "We originally, from a further distance, have
considered the said Easter Island as sandy, the reason for that is this, that we
counted as sand the withered grass, hay, or other scorched and burnt vegetation, because its wasted appearance could give no other impression than
of a singular poverty and barrenness." What had happened to all the former
trees that must have stood there?

Organizing the carving, transport, and erection of the statues required a complex populous society living in an environment rich enough to support
it. The statues' sheer number and size suggest a population much larger
than the estimated one of just a few thousand people encountered by European visitors in the 18th and early 19th centuries: what had happened to the