.. 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.

Jared Diamond argues that Australia has poor soil fertility due to the lack of recent volcanic or glacial activity. The areas that did have glaciers over-turning the land were the area south of Fremantle and the Adelaide area. By Australian standards these are very fertile - by world standards they are average.

Diamond mentions that Adelaide was the first self-supporting colony using European agricultural methods due to the fertility of its soil. He consequently asks;

... would Australia be better off economically without much of its present agricultural enterprise?

The background to this rethinking is the realisation that only tiny areas of Australian land currently being used for agriculture are productive and suitable for sustained agricultural operations.

While 60% of Australia's land area and 80% of its human water use are dedicated to agriculture., the value of agriculture relative to other sectors of the Australian economy has been shrinking to the point where it now contributes less than 3% of the gross national product.

That's a huge allocation of land and scarce water to an enterprise of such low value. Furthermore, it is astonishing to realise that over 99% of that agricultural land makes little or no positive contribution to Australia's economy.

It turns out that about 80% of Australia's agricultural profits are derived from less than 0.8% of its agricultural land, virtually all of it in the south-western corner, on the south coast around Adelaide, in the south-eastern corner and in eastern Queensland

Those are the few areas favoured by volcanic or recently uplifted soils, reliable winter rains, or both.

I was not aware of the inherent disadvantage in Australian soils. I just assumed soils were soils all over the world. The soils were rich once, but basically over millennia have been leached into the oceans. Ironically, the poor soils mean few nutrients reach the ocean, so much of the fisheries in Australia are poor by world standards as well.

For a long time Australia was not a self-supporting colony. It was dependent upon trade from Britain to sustain itself. We are a trading nation today, maybe we should eradicate subsidies for agriculture and leave ourselves at the mercy of the free market. At worst it will probably mean we pay less for food.

Australians are aware of environmental damage, water is probably the one that we are most cognisant of. It is obvious to most Australians that having a water intensive agricultural industry like rice in the Murray region is repugnant. Maybe awareness of the poor quality of our soils needs to permeate the public conscious in the same way managing a scarce resource like water has .

Jared Diamond argues that the Australian continent was incapable of progressing humanity to agrarianism or the iron age because it lacked three things; a domesticatable animal, domesticatable plants; and finally, because of its isolation as a landmass there was little to no osmosis of technology between societies and cultures.

Jared Diamond is the author of Guns, Germs and Steel, as well as Collapse. Both of which focus on why societies succeed, and, or fail. There is a transcript of a speech he made in 1997 which discusses the geographical differences in why Eurasia came to dominate the globe, while Africa, the Americas and Australia did not. In particular he describes why the Aboriginal people did not develop agriculture and were unable to advance as a society beyond the stone age.

The most obvious answers are that Australian animals and plants have proved impossible to domesticate. Even with 21stC technology we have not managed to domesticate and farm Kangaroos in the same way we do beef or sheep cattle.

Though there is 'the cull' each year in which a million or so Kangaroos are hunted and sent to local abattoirs. But that method of farming Kangaroos is exactly the same as how the Aboriginal people did it, though with the increased productivity of rifles and spotlights, rather than spears.

Diamond notes that the only Australian plant which has proved suitable for domestication is the macadamia nut. Some of our trees are grown overseas, but to get from stone age to iron age there needs to be a food surplus so labor specialisation can occur in towns and cities. Hunter-gatherer societies just don't have that dynamic.

The Aboriginal people did practice land management, and there were also attempts to modify the environment in order to increase the yield of local food; such as placing logs in creeks and rivers so grubs could be harvested each year - but that wasn't sufficient food density to enable the Eurasian agricultural growth in productivity.

The Aboriginal people also managed to domesticate dingos in certain instances, but the dingo isn't suitable for growing as cattle, and the dingoes were used as aids in hunting.

Diamond also argues that Australia's continental isolation was brutally dominant in ensuring that no cultural and technological osmosis happened between the Aboriginals and other cultures or societies - even amongst each other. He uses the Tasmanian Aboriginals as an example:

Astonishingly, the archaeological record demonstrates something further: Tasmanians actually abandoned some technologies that they brought with them from Australia and that persisted on the Australian mainland.

For example, bone tools and the practice of fishing were both present in Tasmania at the time that the land bridge was severed, and both disappeared from Tasmania by around 1500 B.C.

That represents the loss of valuable technologies: fish could have been smoked to provide a winter food supply, and bone needles could have been used to sew warm clothes.

By comparison, Eurasia was connected by one landmass which shared a similar climate. So when sheep were domesticated in the middle east, they quickly ended up in European and Asian flocks. When horses were domesticated on the Russian steppes they quickly spread to China, and when citrus fruits were domesticated in Asia, these soon ended up in European agriculture.

It is interesting to note that when the English and Eora met at Sydney Cove the stealing that went on between them was usually over a prized technology. For instance the Eora quickly realised the productivity enhancements that iron tools offered, while the English valued the Eoran fizgigs (fishing nets) for the same reasons. So immediately upon contact there was technological osmosis.

Diamond continues:

All other things being equal, the rate of human invention is faster, and the rate of cultural loss is slower, in areas occupied by many competing societies with many individuals and in contact with societies elsewhere.

If this interpretation is correct, then it's likely to be of much broader significance. It probably provides part of the explanation why native Australians, on the world's smallest and most isolated continent, remained Stone Age hunter/ gatherers, while people of other continents were adopting agriculture and metal.

I think there is value in that interpretation. We see constantly in other areas of technology and endeavour that the edges are the most dynamic part of a system and that monocultures approximate stagnancy.

It is interesting to note that Bill Mollison designed his Permaculture system around maximising edge effects rather than sterile industrial agricultural practices of thousand upon thousands of acres of monoculture.

Peter Turchin's analysis of political empires, or cliodynamics, identifies the edges as the area of the greatest dynamicism and the nucleation points for future empires.

Modern economics argues the same thing. Protectionism or central planning makes a big national economy with minimal edges. It is sterile, inefficient and unable to progress. The edges in such a system where transfer does occur - unfortunately - is usually through the black market. Witness North Korea.

Free trade effectively makes the edge effects occur everywhere and the borders become self-determining through comparative advantage which stops the sterility that occurs in the mono-economic centre of a protected economy.

To summarise; this pattern of edge effects being absolutely important for innovation and progress is not a new one. I think it, along with the restrictions of the animals and plants on the Australian continent, makes a reasonable explanation why the Aboriginal people did not advance to an agrarian or iron age society.