THE mysterious inhabitants of Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean did not wreck their pristine environment and so ruin their chances of survival. They were the victims of circumstance and were probably doomed to perish.
Easter Island has long been a mystery: a wind-blasted and treeless landscape dominated by giant stone statues set by its long-since-departed Polynesian inhabitants. Because it was once forested, it has become an emblem of environmental and social decline.
But a detailed study of 70 Pacific islands pinpoints nine environmental predictors of Pacific deforestation before the arrival of Europeans, and comes to a different conclusion (Nature,…
