.. what were Easter Islanders saying as they cut down the last tree on the island?

Collapse : How Societies Choose To Fail or Succeed looks at how group-decision making can doom a society to thrive or flounder based on their choices. It also peers into how outside pressures can render that group-decision making irrelevant. Diamond identifies eight pressures that are common in agrarian society;

• Deforestation and habitat destruction
• soil problems (erosion, salinisation etc)
• water management problems
• overhunting
• overfishing
• effects of introduced species
• human population growth
• increased per capita impact of people

He also identifies four modern afflictions;

• Human-caused climate change
• Buildup of toxic chemicals
• Energy shortages
• Full human utilisation of the Earth's photosynthetic capacity

Jared's question of the Easter Islander's state of mind when the last tree came down evokes horror from a modern person who is inundated with cheap, stunning calendars of the wilderness as they walk through the mall.

But Easter Island memory most likely did not extend back more than two generations. Grandparents probably spoke of a time when there were twenty trees on the island rather than forests that the modern mind thinks of. Writing, paper and digital media have largely freed us of such short cultural memory.

Did the Aboriginal people in the north have the same issues when they practised the violence of fire against the landscape? Fire has become a valid means of bush management, so much so that several species are dependant on a good bush-fire to thrive. But did Aboriginal societal memory not extend back past a group of influential eldars who first started setting fire to the bush after each wet-season?

Was it an accidental technology which limited unexpected bush fires into ones that the society and culture could plan for? Was the bush better off for not being burnt each year, but that cultural memory lost after three generations, so no-one was able to produce the empirical data as counter-point to the practice.

Either way, that practise has pervaded not only Aboriginal practice, but modern Australian bush management. Was the bush more abundant before a yearly burn, or after? It does not matter as the abundance with a burn was enough to support the social and cultural norms of a sustainable Aboriginal population that was able to expand throughout the continent.