Easter Island is famous the world over for hundreds of carved figures with oversized heads. But it is also a monument to how the overuse of resources can lead to grave consequences for human society. That is a problem which is now becoming world-wide.
“Little Easter Island (is) isolated in the Pacific Ocean, 2,300 miles from the coast of Chile. When they got into difficulty, there was nobody to whom they could turn for help. There was nobody to whom they could look for a model,” Jared Diamond, Pulitzer prize-winning author and professor at UCLA, tells the Found In Conversation podcast.
“They ruined their environment, not because they were particularly stupid or incautious people, but because they had the misfortune to be living on a relatively cool island with light soils and low elevation, a whole list of environmental factors that predispose them towards deforestation.”
Global resource depletion is one of the four major threats to society identified in Diamond’s latest book, “Upheaval”, which looks at how nations have coped with crises in the past and at the problems we face today.
“Here we are on planet Earth, we are living not in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, but in the middle of the universe. And if we get into trouble, there aren't any extra-terrestrials that we can summon for help, we cannot see how they solve their deforestation problems in the Andromeda Nebula. We have to figure it out for ourselves or fail to figure it out, just as was the case on Easter Island,” Diamond says.
“The fundamental difference between Easter Island and the world today is that Easter Island could destroy itself and nobody else was affected because Easter was isolated in the Pacific Ocean. Whereas today, with globalisation and interconnection between societies … the risk that we face is the risk of a global collapse.”
One of the problems is that, unlike the sudden impact of nuclear, climate change and resource depletion are slow processes. It can be all too easy not to notice the gradual trend of deterioration until the damage has been done.
Diamond gives the example of climate change in California, where he lives, noting that in the summer on some days air conditioning was on all day due to record heat.“This is finally getting people's attention. But for decades, the top temperature gradually kept rising. It's not that each year the temperature was 0.3 degrees warmer than the previous year … It was a creeping baseline. And it meant that people forgot what it was like 40 years ago, because there was not a sudden change,” he says.
“For Easter Island, similarly, it's not that … on Saturday the island was covered with palm trees and on Sunday there was one palm tree left. Instead this went on over generations and centuries. It's difficult to see changes that involve a creeping baseline until it's too late.”
Today, there are ever more people placing more stress on the world's resources. But more and more people and businesses are also taking the world's problems seriously.
“That gives me hope,” says Diamond. “Society has got to be honest about dealing with the problem, as opposed to denying the existence of the problem.”
On the face of it, the challenge can seem almost insurmountable – getting 215 countries in the world to agree to work together to solve global problems. But in practice it can be much simpler. A handful of countries account for the majority of the world’s natural resource consumption and produce the bulk of harmful emissions. The US, China, the European Union, India and Japan are responsible for 62 per cent of world CO2 output.
“If one could get an agreement among just five countries, you would have dealt with more than half of the resource consumption in the world,” says Diamond.
The experience of dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic on a global scale could pave the way for more cooperation on other global issues.
“For the first time in human history, we have a crisis that is acknowledged as a global crisis,” says Diamond. “It's clear that no country can solve Covid by itself … So, the world is going to have to unify to deal with Covid as a global problem, to find the global solution.”
“And my hope is that may then inspire us to find a global solution to the global problems of climate change, and resource depletion, and inequality. So my hope is that this tragedy may teach us a much broader lesson.”
If you would like to hear more from Jared Diamond and other experts on understanding the modern world, listen to the Found in Conversation Podcast: foundinconversation.pictet
