Easter Island was wiped out by Little Ice Age; not manmade ecological collapse

Pro-government extremist Nicholas Kristof, a writer for the New York Times, recently repeated claims that the great sculptors of Easter Island were wiped out due to manmade environmental destruction.

Similar claims were made by Professor Jared Diamond in his bestseller “Collapse”–a wide-ranging set of sociological essays culminating in a call for central planning by learned government officials. Both Krisoff and Diamond have been vigorous promoters of the government’s catastrophic-manmade-global-warming-by CO2 theory.

The two pro-government writers have offered Easter Island as an example showing why people must rely on governmental elites to guide their lives. Diamond and Kristof claim the ancient Easter Islanders died off because they cut down all the Island’s palm trees to use as rollers for the massive sculture stones and then were without logs to build canoes. They claim the trapped Easter Islanders then died of starvation when their environment eroded and collapsed. Kristof even entitled his Times essay, “A Parable of Self Destruction.”

But research indicates the claims of Diamond and Kristoff are mostly mythical. The people of Easter Island mostly died off due to the advancing cold of the Little Ice Age. See here.