2006-06-26

Return to Easter Island

In the class discussion after I had finished my presentation, the apparently simple question that most puzzled my students was one whose actual complexity hadn't sunk into me before: how on earth could a society make such an obviously disastrous decision as to cut down all the trees on which it depended? One of the students asked what I thought the islander who cut down the last palm tree said as he was doing it....We consciously imagine a sudden change: one year, the island still covered with a forest of tall palm trees being used to produce wine, fruit, and timber to transport and erect tall statues; the next year, just a single tree left, which an islander proceeds to fell in an act of incredibly self-damaging stupidity. Much more likely, though, the changes in forest cover from year to year would have been almost undetectable: yes, this year we cut down a few trees over there, but saplings are starting to grow back again here on this abandoned garden site....Gradually, Easter Island's trees became fewer, smaller, and less important. At the time that the last fruit-bearing adult palm tree was cut, the species had long ago ceased to be of any economic significance....No one would have noticed the falling of the last little palm sapling. By then, the memory of the valuable palm forest of centuries earlier had succumbed to landscape amnesia.

~ Jared Diamond, Collapse

It's hard to remember we're alive for the first time. That every choice we make is new, that this is all really happening for the first time. It's exhilarating. So often, I find myself being lured into believing that I'm following a prescribed course whose trajectory I am in control of, but that is in turn largely governed by a set of inherent characteristics that collectively constitutes who I in fact am. This is true, I suppose, at least partly. It's kind of a relief, in a way - a manner of scapegoating future consequences because things are the way they are just because. But we have the power to change course. We have to, or I am without hope; then I am failing. But no. I am not. Our actions mean something, and through them, we create meaning. This is everything.

Let me be blunt: I do not want this world to end. Every year it gets a little warmer and we all come a little closer to death. But despite my penchant for the apocalyptic and general misgivings about our collective future, my 'I don't really give a fuck about the future' attitude I sometimes present in person (or so I'm told), I really want to be part of the something that gives this world meaning and sees it turn over to another generation, to let everyone have another go at making this thing right. That probably sounds hypocritical coming from me, and probably I am, but hey, it's never too late until it is too late, and by then no one cares anymore what you said anyway.

As Jared Diamond puts forth in his book Collapse, which, it must be partially apparent, I have been and have now just finished reading, there are at least 12 serious problems we as a global commons face over the next 50 years, any of which will cause serious problems for us if left unaddressed and unsolved. (Read the book if you want to know the details of the 12 problems he identifies.) And the sin for which I am guilty in my own life, and for which he castigates us all, is the very common outcome that we sit idly by because we need to spend time identifying which of the 12 problems is the most serious, and then address that one problem. It's all too easy to sit down and figure out the one thing that is bothering me in my life and then solve it and make things better; it gives me a sense of relief to have accomplished something, enough to carry on, while countless other problems are left unaddressed because, well, I'm happy enough to just keep going. We can solve 11 of the 12 problems in the next 50 years and still be fucked globally, because that one issue seemed a little less important than the other 11. Similarly, I can fix my income, or move to a new place, and this will temporarily abate some personal disaster and replenish my sense of success, but it will all matter naught if I don't have my ribs looked at and this proves to be my undoing through a complex and unforeseen chain of consequences.

Was the Easter Island collapse a particularly instructive example? Perhaps only because it is easy to imagine, simple to analogize to the global island we now inhabit, shrouded in mystery, and somewhat poetic. Chopping down that last tree, the last sapling yet!, this image haunts me. I see the sun sinking below the horizon, ocean aflame in orange and the sky in purple, the unsettling wind provokes him, doesn't it? - the goose bumps on his skin, the fire he pictures, the warmth the baby needs, it will be so good, so warm, to sleep beside the burning wood of this fire, the quiet crackling, the comfort, the stars above. Of course we would sacrifice the future for present needs, if the situation were dire enough. Who wouldn't? The tragedy is that our situation perhaps isn't dire yet, and we do it anyway, and I am surely chief among us.

I don't know what I'd be thinking as I cut down the last tree standing. Probably I would've grown deaf to my own thoughts long before then, the plaintive cries of an existence dependent on so much, and such a paucity to quell the clamouring, I would drown in them, these cries, these insistences, because the expediency to end suffering is everything. The thunk of the axe as it bit into wood is all I would hear, its monotony, its indifference; the sound is extinguishing all thoughts of a tomorrow beyond this one.

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