The End Is Near... Again
Last night I was reading about the colonization of Australasia and the South Pacific by humans. It seems that wherever humans went, extinction followed. Through hunting and the introduction of exotic species, animals like the Australian Thylacine and ten species of New Zealand Moa birds became extinct in just a few centuries. As many as 40 bird species may have gone extinct in the Hawai'ian islands before contact with Europeans. The most extreme case of early environmental destruction is Easter Island, where humans succeeded in completely deforesting their island and were forced to revert from a complex civilization to a primitive, subsistence way of life.
Reading this got me wondering if the global environmental collapse we have well underway is inevitable. It is perhaps understandable how the first colonizers of Europe or North America drove big game animals such as Aurochs or Mammoths to extinction (with a little help from climate change). They had no way of knowing how big their prey's habitat was or whether there were more animals just over the next mountain range. You can't say the same thing about the Easter Islanders, though. They knew perfectly well how many trees they had left, and still they cut them down. We may say they were deluded by their religion into thinking their gods would support them, but are we not equally deluded when we put our hopes in technology? Those who have done the math tell us that we do not have enough alternative energy sources to even begin to make up for what we use in petroleum, and still our government keeps our hopes up with promises of hydrogen, biodeisel, wind, and solar. In reality, it is no more possible to power our society on the "alternatives" than it was for the Easter Islanders to be fed, clothed, and sheltered magically by their gods.
