Sustainability

"Sustainability." That word gets thrown around so much today. What does it really even mean? According to Wikipedia, sustainability is "1) The capacity to endure. 2) The ability of biological systems to remain diverse and productive over time. 3) The potential of long-term maintenance of [human] well-being in environmental, economic and social dimensions."

This month's CSA news from the Crop and Soil Science societies of America is entitled "Sustainability: Learning the lessons of past civilizations." There is a drawing of the iconic Easter island statues on the cover. Easter Island has become the poster child of unsustainable human activity - deforestation, soil degradation, over population. UCLA geography professor Jared Diamond has written a book called "Collapse: How Societies Fail or Succeed." At the 2010 tri-societies meeting in Long Beach, he used the Easter Islanders as an example of the kind of damage we are doing to our planet with massive deforestation, over population and un-sustainable agricultural practices. He issued the warning that once we destroy this planet, we will have no where else to go.

His point is well taken. Humans are very rough on the planet and we do have a difficult time getting ourselves under control. The damage we do today may be too much for the world to handle tomorrow. A small, extremely remote island may hold some valuable lessons for us in the outside world. I did some research into the history of Easter Island and found that it wasn't as dire as I had been led to believe. It is thought to have been colonized by Polynesians who grew in population to about 10,000 to 15,000 people - more than the island could support. The palm trees that supported the wildlife and produced a microclimate on the island may have been used in the transport of their statues and many were cleared for conversion to agriculture. The harvest of these trees may indeed have led to a massive reduction in the population, but when Europeans found the island, it was supporting a population of about 3,000+ people, and the soil was still fertile. Archaeologists and historians suggest that the massive deforestation, soil degradation, war and disease that nearly wiped-out the island's population was due to the Europeans who came to the island in the 18th century.

Now, Easter Island is still inhabited by a small population of Rapa Nui people. It is a special territory of Chile and is classified as a "World Heritage Site" under UNESCO .

So, what are the lessons of Easter Island? Over population inevitably leads to deforestation, erosion, climate change, war, cannibalism, social collapse and eventually extinction? Or, exceeding an ecosystem's carrying capacity will result in massive population reduction, but once the population is reduced to a reasonable size, life, society and the ecosystem will adjust to a new level of sustainability? Maybe both. It's hard to tell what would have happened without the intrusion of outsiders.