Driuds: Too Much Metal

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Yes, but that doesn't mean they recognized that this would be a Bad Thing, or that even if it was bad, that stopping was the best alternative.

At the risk of violating "common sense isn't common", I'm not blessed with much of it, but I could have told you cutting down the last tree was a bad idea.

Unless they decided a tree's sole purpose was to help build those idols.

 

[Wik]

So, even if the people of Easter Island knew they had a major problem on their hands (which, actually, I'll grant you), we don't know if they'd have really identified the same thing we do as the cause, or the same thing we would as the best way to fix the problem. They probably didn't understand how the system worked, to be able to manipulate it reliably.

If they farmed (and my bet is they did - or at least performed basic horticulture), than they know that plants need to be watered, have seeds, etc. I get your basic assertion - that we cannot look back on past cultures using our base of knowledge - and I fully agree. But at the same, we can't look back on past cultures and assume they were working from a blank canvas.

Agriculture (and thus, the knowledge of how plants work) goes back to the stone age, and we can safely assume that these Easter Islanders knew the basics. They probably didn't know WHY seeds worked the way they did, but they did know that plants begat other plants, etc. And yet, they cut down that last tree because their priorities were skewed towards competition with other local groups, and because the priesthood thought it was a higher priority.

No matter how you look at it - even in the context of their perspective towards their own religious beliefs - this was a very stupid thing to do. And I imagine a good chunk of the population was saying as much - but those in power felt it was their only choice. And this... is dumb.

To give another example where I *don't* fault the culture would be the mesopotamians. These guys had farming techniques that were not sustainable, due to soil salination and decline. There are ways to get around it, but they didn't know that, and so when their fields produced less and less food, they turned towards their priestly caste for guidance. This, from their perspective, makes perfect sense, even though it's ridiculous by modern standards.

But to see your means of subsistence destroyed to erect massive stone "gods", to the point where your subsistence is entirely removed, this is something they WERE aware of. And they did it anyway.

And I think that says something about human nature, because we're still doing it today. And if you think about it, that's a very scary thought.

 

[Celebrim]

At the risk of violating "common sense isn't common", I'm not blessed with much of it, but I could have told you cutting down the last tree was a bad idea.

We've got modern day examples of this. We don't have to guess at the motivations of easter islanders.

Take a google maps view of Haiti and focus on the border with the Dominican Republic. Notice the absense of trees on the Haiti side of the map. Notice that its the same island, but that the DR is heavily forested and Haiti is virtually denuded. In time, if the current trend continues, there will be no trees on the Haitian side.

The reason isn't anything esoteric. It's that wood is being used for cooking on the Haitian side. People need fires to cook. If they can't cook, they might starve. One falacy you here today is that technology is bad for the environment. Actually almost the opposite is true. There is no way the environmental impact of 6 billion humans would be as low as it is without the use of technology. What you can get into in a social collapse is a situation where the technology necessary to support the community at a certain level begins to successively unravel, with each implosion triggering an increased consumption of resources that in term makes the basis of the lower level technology unravel. Eventually a community that prosperously supported itself at some level on some peice of land eats everything down to the insects on the same peice of land and still can't feed itself.

It happened on Easter Island. It happened on Greenland. It apparantly happened with the Mayans.

It's highly likely that construction was just once of the uses wood was being put to. It's highly likely that the last phase of construction occurred when the island was near an economic zenith and heavily populated. They just didn't see the collapse coming. The last trees probably were protected. But trees weren't meant to be alone. Some may have died from disease or old age. Without a forest community, trees would have suffered from erosion and wind both of which could have uprooted hem. There was also likely to be 'poaching' of wood resources dwindled. With the community in crisis and people dying, they probably couldn't have organized a replanting effort to increase the natural rate of reforestation and with similar ecological crisis breaking out in the reefs with collapse of shellfish and fish diversity from over harvesting the whole community just probably imploded and people weren't thinking much beyond their next meal. Starving people are like that, no matter how much 'common sense' they have. By the end of the generation of collapse, they can barely imagine a tree. The last trees were probably woody shrubs that were cut down for the meager fire they would have provided. Then, the long dark night.

 

[pawsplay]

No matter how you look at it - even in the context of their perspective towards their own religious beliefs - this was a very stupid thing to do. And I imagine a good chunk of the population was saying as much - but those in power felt it was their only choice. And this... is dumb.
...
But to see your means of subsistence destroyed to erect massive stone "gods", to the point where your subsistence is entirely removed, this is something they WERE aware of. And they did it anyway.

I'm not any kind of expert on Easter Island. Thinking about this idea generally, there is what I think of as the "purple Kool-Aid barrier." There is some level of certainty of belief that I think is just never warranted; the human being is too fragile a vessel to have confidence in any human being's wisdom, even if they are imagined to be interpreting a superhuman level of insight. When the post-moderns declared "ideology is dead" this is the kind of thing they were hoping we had matured past, but of course they were wrong.

Heading back more in the direction of the original topic, I think it's a fair point that some cultures have what we would recognize as a sort of ecological awareness, and some don't. It is doubtful the historical druids were especially ecological, although they might have had connections with nature worship. What we do know about them:

- The Romans thought they worshipped the Sun, and indicated they thought the Druids practiced human sacrifice
- They didn't build stone henges. Although some of them may have been appropriated by druid religionists, my understanding is that for the most part, the locals thought henges had been built by "giants."
- They are probably resonsible for some but not all of the vestigial pagan symbolism present in the British Isles in the middles ages. The symbolism of mistletoe seems to have come from them.
- Druid comes from a word that means "tree." Some sources translate the original form as "oak-knower" or "oak-wise" or something along those lines. The same root gives us "dryad."

 

[Edvamp]

Because D&D druids are an incredibly bizarre and rather sad mix of post-WWI naturalistic and rustic romanticism and late 20th century radical environmentalist movements.

Hippies. It's ok, you can say it.

 

[WayneLigon]

One falacy you here today is that technology is bad for the environment. Actually almost the opposite is true. There is no way the environmental impact of 6 billion humans would be as low as it is without the use of technology.

Or you could still look at Technology being a bad thing in enabling there to be that many people, a level unsustainable by anything but More Technology.