DECK 9 Flashcards
(20 cards)
What is Rapa Nui?
Easter Island, located near Chie in the Pacific Islands
What is the agriculture limited by in Rapa Nui?
- Low rainfall
- Poor Soil
- Soil that does not retain water, just percolates through
What is the reason for Easter Island’s severe degree of deforestation?
Due to the unfortunate fragile environment, at the highest risk for deforestation, of any of the pacific islands.
What is Moai?
The stone heads in Easter Island
What is a possible explanation to how these heads showed up?
One possibility was that the original inhabitants of Polynesia had come from South America on rafts, carried by prevailing winds and Humboldt current
What is the Kin-Tiki Expedition?
- In 1947 a Norwegian adventurer and ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl, sailed from Peru to Raroia in French Polynesia in a balsa raft
- He demonstrated that it was possible that Polynesia could have settled from the west
- By using genetic and linguistic tools, scientists have demonstrated that Thors hypothesis was incorrect
- The people of Polynesia are not believed to have come from South-East Asia
What was the condition of Easter Island in the beginning?
When the first inhabitants arrived in the island, it was a dense forest of JUBAEA CHILENSIS (CHILEAN WINE PALM) a temperate zone tree that growth slowly
Explain the history behind the First Contact ion Easter Island
- In the 1600s the population was around 15,000
- Upon arrival in the 1722 of the Dutch, it was found to be a TREELESS island with a population below 5,000
- By 1877, the native population was 111, decimated by diseases brought by Europeans and slave trade, of the 111, only 36 had descendants
Why did Easter Island become a Treeless Island?
- Trees had been used to construct canoes since their diet heavily depended on fishing
- Once there were no more trees, food became scarce because inhabitants were unable to fashion new canoes
- Resource war began to arise
- The depletion rate was low - around 10% per 10 years. Not noticeable in an individuals lifetime
- Stone carving began around 1000AD and peaked around 1400AD. Forests disappeared around 1400AD
- Population surpassed its limit and then crashed devastatingly
What is the current Population in Easter Island?
- Current Population is around 6,000
- Most descendants can trace their ancestry and establish the portion that is a true Easter Islander
- Requirements for property ownership, was business development
What is Malthus’ statement with carrying cpacity?
Population continues to expand until it reaches its carrying capacity of land, at which point it is corrected by famine, diseases, and war. This is why economics was known as a dismal science
Why did other islands not have the same Malthus crash as Easter Island?
Other islands may have had better environmental conditions like better palm trees that grew much quicker than the ones in Easter Island that reduced the risk of the boom-and-bust cycle
In those instances, depletion became more obvious and the population responded by controlling the exploitation rate
How do we control exploitation rates?
- Market Mechanisms - well defined property rights provide a powerful mechanism for ensuring sensible exploitation of resources and avoiding over-pollution
- Governance mechanisms - control by a leader or ruling group that determines access and exploitation rates
Why was there a suggestion that neither market nor top-down governance mechanisms would have been consistent with the understanding of the Polynesian Culture, leading to the inference that culture was the reason to the islands failure?
- By all accounts, that level of control was very difficult to impose and maintain in Polynesian and in most other societies
- Limited control from the top over resources
- Generally wide access to forest resources
- Because the growth period was so long, neither the planter nor his off-springs would benefit from mature tress that could have been harvested
- In property rights settings, this problem is overcome because even an immature forest has value and can be sold
What is the CULT OF THE BIRDMAN?
- Representatives of tribes would compete by swimming through shark-infested waters to Motu Nui
- The first to collect and return with an egg of a “manu tara” would win for his patron important rights and privileges for a year
What is the theory to how the Moais were moved?
The best theory at present is that they were walked downhill to where they were ultimately placed
What are the Interdisciplinary Contributions?
- History
- Archaeology (actual and experimental)
- Anthropology and Ethnography
- Engineering
- Genetics (identifying ancestors)
- Physics (carbon dating)
- Biology and living resources - forest depletion
- Ecology
- Economics
- Climatology
What were the conflict resolutions of the downfall in Easter Island?
- Initially led to conflict, raids, wars, statue toppling, and possibly cannibalism
- But the Cult of the Birdman was a non-violent mechanism that can endow power
What is the ongoing debate about preferred mechanisms for dealing with climate change?
- Market Mechanisms
- Governance Mechanisms
- Both?
Was there a population collapse in Easter Island?
- A growing literature argues that there is no convincing empirical evidence that a population collapse took place and that it was a consequence of deforestation
- But there is also a literature that states that there is no empirical support for the notion that deforestation resulted in strong negative impacts on the human population of Easter Island
