Published August 10, 2026
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Beyond ecocide: Rapa Nui was not a society that cut down its last tree
Description
Rapa Nui has long served as the archetype of ecocide. Four competing models—resource
overexploitation, rat-driven deforestation, climatic stress, and institutional resilience—have
been treated as rival dominant narratives. This paper integrates them within a single evidence
framework, where independent data classes—differing in inferential logic and error
structure—constrain one another. Ecological collapse was real but dimension-specific,
confined to the large-timber substrate and the life-forms dependent upon it. The island
maintained a resilient steady state from c. 1600 to 1862, absorbing environmental pressure
through adaptive substitution—the food system remained decoupled from and intact relative
to the forest; caves replaced timber houses, swimming replaced lost canoes, and the Birdman
cult replaced the discredited moai ancestor worship. These four models collectively capture
different segments of the trajectory. The underlying driver of institutional transformation was
political. The catastrophic rupture, however, was externally generated: slave raids dismantled
the backbone of island society, while the accompanying diseases erased its future. Rapa Nui
suggests that a society's survival may depend not only on the magnitude of the shocks it
faces, but also on the substitutability of what is lost—a dynamic that human ecodynamics
approaches are uniquely positioned to capture.
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Beyond ecocide Rapa Nui was not only a society that cut down its last tree EN_JICA.pdf
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Dates
- Updated
-
2026-08-07