PARADISES LOST by Jared Diamond

WHEN THE MULTINEERS FROM HMS BOUNTY LANDED ON PITCAIRN ISLAND, THEY FOUND NO PEOPLE -- JUST A DESOLATE LAND MARKED BY THE RELICS OF A VANISHED SOCIETY. THE STORY OF THAT LOST CIVILIZATION IS JUST NOW BEING LEARNED. AND IT'S FAR MORE FRIGHTENING THAN ANY TALE OF CAPTAIN BLIGH.

MANY CENTURIES AGO, immigrants came to a fertile land blessed with

apparently inexhaustible natural resources. It lacked a few raw materials

that were important for industry, but they were readily obtained by overseas

trade. For a time, the land and its neighbors prospered, and their people

multiplied.

But the population of the rich land grew too large for even its abundant

resources. As its forests were stripped and its soils eroded, the land could

no longer nourish even its own population, let alone grow food for export.

Then, as trade declined, the imported raw materials began to run short. A

kaleidoscopically changing succession of local military leaders overthrew

established political institutions, and civil war spread. To survive, the

starving populace turned to cannibalism. The fate of their former overseas

trading partners was even worse: deprived of the imports on which they had

depended, they ravaged their own environments until no one was left alive.

We don't know yet if this grim sequence of events represents our own future,

but we do know that the scenario has already played itself out on three

tropical Pacific islands. One of them, Pitcairn, is famous as the island to

which the mutineers from HMS Bounty fled in 1790. Unpeopled and very remote,

Pitcairn offered a hiding place for Fletcher Christian and his mates from

the vengeful British Navy. But although Pitcairn was indeed uninhabited when

they landed, the mutineers found evidence that it wasn't always so: temple

platforms, petroglyphs, and stone tools gave mute testimony to Pitcairn's

former Polynesian settlers. Farther east, an even more remote island named

Henderson remains uninhabited to this day, yet it too bears abundant marks

of a former Polynesian population. What happened to those original Pitcairn

Islanders and to their vanished cousins on Henderson?

The romance and mystery of the Bounty, retold in so many books and films,

are matched by the earlier tales of these two populations and their

mysterious ends. Basic information about them has only recently emerged,

thanks to excavations by archeologist Marshall Weisler, who spent eight

months on these lonely outposts as part of his graduate studies at the

University of California at Berkeley during the early 1990s.

He found that the fates of the first Pitcairners and the Henderson Islanders

were linked to a slowly unfolding environmental catastrophe hundreds of

miles away, on their more populous island trading partner Mangareva, where

the inhabitants survived at the cost of a drastically lowered standard of

living. While much mystery remains, enough is already known to warn us that

these three seemingly exotic islands may carry a vivid and important lesson

for our times. Just as the collapse of the Polynesian society on Easter

Island warns us that environmental mismanagement can destroy those guilty of

it, the fates of the people who lived on Pitcairn and Henderson warn us that

societies can also be annihilated by the environmental mistakes of others.

THE POLYNESIAN EXPANSION WAS THE MOST dramatic burst of overwater

exploration in human history. Until around 1500 B.C., humans from the Asian

mainland, traveling through Indonesia's islands to Australia and New Guinea,

had advanced no farther east into the Pacific than the Solomon Islands. But

around that time, a seafaring and farming people apparently originating in

the Bismarck Archipelago northeast of New Guinea swept nearly 2,000 miles

across the open oceans east of the Solomons to reach Fiji, Samoa, and Tonga

and to become the ancestors of the Polynesians. While the Polynesians lacked

compasses, writing, and metal tools, they were masters of navigational arts

and of sailing canoe technology. Abundant archeological evidence at

radiocarbondated sites--such as pottery and stone tools, remains of houses

and temples, food debris, and human skeletons--testifies to the approximate

dates and routes of their expansion. By around A.D. 1000, the Polynesians

had reached every habitable scrap of land in the vast watery triangle of

ocean whose apexes are Hawaii, New Zealand, and Easter Island.

Historians used to assume that all those Polynesian islands were discovered

and settled by chance, when canoes full of fishermen happened to get blown

off course. It is now clear, however, that both the discoveries and the

settlements were meticulously planned: since much of Polynesia was settled

against the prevailing winds and currents, it is unlikely that voyagers

could have arrived by drifting. Furthermore, they carried with them many

species of crops and livestock deemed essential to the new colonies'

survival, from taro to bananas and from pigs to chickens--a transfer that

was certainly deliberate.

Among the most remote parts of Polynesia was the southeast, whose sole

habitable islands are Mangareva, Pitcairn, and Henderson. Even Mangareva,

the western most of those islands, lies about 1,000 miles from the nearest

habitable islands outside southeast Polynesia, such as Tahiti and the

Marquesas. By the time settlers reached the southeast, sometime between A.D.

800 and 1000, most of the rest of Polynesia, except perhaps New Zealand, had

already been discovered and settled.

Of those three habitable islands, the one most abundantly endowed with

natural resources important to humans, and capable of supporting the largest

human population, was Mangareva. It consists of a large lagoon 15 miles in

diameter, sheltered by an outer reef enclosing two dozen extinct volcanic

islands and a few coral atolls, with a total land area of ten square miles.

The lagoon, its reefs, and the nearby ocean teem with fish and shellfish.

Especially valuable to Polynesian settlers was the black-lipped pearl

oyster, of which the lagoon offered virtually inexhaustible quantities. Not

only could they eat the oyster itself, but its thick shell, up to eight

inches long, was an ideal raw material for carving into fishhooks, vegetable

peelers and graters, and ornaments.

The higher islands of Mangareva's lagoon receive enough rain to have springs

and intermittent streams, and they were originally forested. Polynesian

colonists built their settlements in the narrow band of flat land around the

coasts. On the slopes behind the villages they grew crops such as sweet

potato and yams; on terraced slopes and fiats below the springs they planted

taro, which they irrigated with springwater; and on higher elevations they

grew tree crops, such as breadfruit and bananas. Mangareva would have been

able to support a human population of several thousand, more than ten times

the likely combined populations of Pitcairn and Henderson in Polynesian

times.

From a Polynesian perspective, Mangareva's most significant drawback was its

lack of high-quality stone for making adzes and other tools. (That's as if

the United States contained every important natural resource except

high-grade iron deposits.) The coral atolls in the lagoon had no good stone

at all, and even the volcanic islands offered only relatively coarse-grained

basalt, which was adequate for building houses and garden walls, for using

as oven stones, and for fashioning into canoe anchors and crude tools but

which yielded only inferior adzes.

Fortunately, that deficiency was spectacularly remedied on Pitcairn, the

much smaller (less than two square miles) and steeper extinct volcanic

island lying 250 miles southeast of Mangareva. Imagine the excitement when

the first canoeload of Mangarevans discovered Pitcairn: after several days'

travel on open ocean, they spied the island, landed at its only feasible

beach, scrambled up the steep slopes, and came upon Down Rope Quarry,

southeast Polynesia's sole usable lode of volcanic glass, whose flakes could

serve as sharp tools for fine cutting tasks--the Polynesian equivalent of

scissors and scalpels. Their excitement would have turned to ecstasy when,

barely a mile farther west along the coast, they discovered the Tautama lode

of fine-grained basalt, which became southeast Polynesia's biggest quarry

for making adzes.

In other respects, Pitcairn offered much more limited opportunities than

Mangareva. It did have intermittent streams, and in its forests grew trees

large enough to fashion into the hulls of outrigger canoes. But Pitcairn was

too small and steep to afford much land suitable for agriculture.

Furthermore, because Pitcairn's coastline lacks a reef, and the surrounding

sea bottom falls off steeply, fishing and searching for shellfish are much

less rewarding than on Mangareva; in particular, Pitcairn has no

black-lipped pearl oysters. Hence the total population of Pitcairn in

Polynesian times was probably not much greater than a hundred people. The

descendants of the original 27 Bounty mutineers and their Polynesian

companions living on Pitcairn today number only 52. When their number

climbed to 194 in the year 1856, that population overtaxed Pitcairn's

agricultural potential, and many people had to be evacuated by the British

government to a distant island.

The remaining habitable island of southeast Polynesia, Henderson, is the

largest (14 square miles) but also the most remote (70 miles northeast of

Pitcairn; 300 miles east of Mangareva) and the most marginal for human

existence. Unlike Mangareva or Pitcairn, Henderson is not volcanic--it's a

coral reef that geologic processes thrust up 100 feet above sea level and is

therefore devoid of basalt or other volcanic rocks suitable for toolmaking.

That's an awful limitation for a society of makers of stone tools. To make

matters worse, because the island consists of porous limestone, Henderson

has no streams or reliable freshwater. At best, water drips from the roofs

of caves and puddles on the ground few days after the unpredictable arrival

of rain. During Marshall Weisler's months on Henderson, he found it a

constant effort to obtain drinking water, even with modern tarpaulins to

catch the rain.

Henderson's tallest trees are only about 40 feet high, not big enough to

fashion into canoe hulls. Its beaches are narrow and confined to the north

and east end, and the south coast consists of vertical cliffs where it is

impossible to land a boat. There, alternating rows of razor-sharp limestone

ridges and fissures are capable of cutting your hands to shreds if you fall.

Europeans have reached the south end only three times, including Weisler's

trip. It took Weisler, wearing hiking boots, five hours to cover the five

miles from Henderson's north coast to its south coast--were he discovered a

rock shelter formerly occupied by barefoot Polynesians.

Offsetting these fearsome disadvantages, Henderson does have attractions. In

the reef and shallow waters nearby live lobsters, crabs, octopuses, and a

limited variety of fish and shellfish, unfortunately not including the

black-lipped pearl oyster. Each year, green turtles come ashore to lay eggs

on the beaches. Henderson used to support at least 17 species of breeding

seabirds, including petrel colonies possibly as large as millions of birds,

whose adults and chicks would have been easy to catch on the nest. There

were enough birds for a hundred people to eat one apiece, every day of the

year, without endangering the colonies' survival. The island was also home

to nine species of resident land birds, several of them flightless or weak

fliers, including three species of pigeons that must have been especially

delectable.

All these features would have made Henderson a great place for an afternoon

picnic ashore, or for a short vacation to glut yourself on seafood and birds

and turtles--but a risky and marginal home in which to try to eke out a

permanent existence. Weisler's excavations nevertheless showed, to the

surprise of anyone who has seen or heard of Henderson, that the island did

evidently support a permanent tiny population of perhaps a few dozen people.

A huge buried midden--an accumulation of shells and of bird and fish bones

and other garbage left behind from generations of people feasting--runs 300

yards along the beach. Every cave and rock shelter near the coast with a

flat floor and accessible opening--even small recesses only two by three

yards wide, barely large enough for two people to sit there protected from

the sun--contained human debris testifying to former habitation. Charcoal,

piles of stones, and relict stands of crop plants showed that the northeast

part of the island had been burned and laboriously converted to garden

patches where crops could be planted in pockets of soil. Among the crops and

useful plants that the settlers must have introduced intentionally, Weisler

found, were coconuts and bananas, several species of timber trees, candlenut

trees whose nut husks are burned for illumination, hibiscus trees yielding

fiber for making rope, and the ti shrub. The latter's sugary roots serve

only as an emergency food supply elsewhere in Polynesia but were evidently a

staple vegetable food on Henderson. Ti leaves could be used to make

clothing, house thatching, and food wrappings.

Thus, southeast Polynesia presented colonists with only a few potentially

habitable islands, each with more or less serious drawbacks. But as

Weisler's excavations show, they managed. He uncovered extensive evidence of

trade among all three islands, whereby each island's surpluses filled the

other islands' deficiencies. Trade objects, even stone ones lacking organic

carbon suitable for radiocarbon dating, can be dated from radiocarbon

measurements on charcoal excavated from the same archeological layer. In

that way, Weisler established that trade began by A.D. 1000, probably

simultaneously with the first settlement by humans, and continued for many

centuries. Numerous objects excavated at Weisler's sites on Henderson could

immediately be identified as imports because they were made from materials

foreign to Henderson: oyster-shell fishhooks, volcanic-glass cutting tools,

and basalt adzes and oven stones.

Where did those imports come from? A reasonable guess, of course, is that

oyster shell for fishhooks came from Mangareva--other islands with oyster

beds are much more distant. A few oyster-shell artifacts have also been

found on Pitcairn and are similarly presumed to have come from Mangareva.

But it is a much more difficult problem to identify sources of the

volcanic-stone artifacts found on Henderson, because both Mangareva and

Pitcairn, as well as many other distant Polynesian islands, have

volcanic-stone sources.

Hence Weisler developed or adapted techniques for discriminating among

volcanic stones from different sources. Volcanoes spew out many different

types of lava, of which basalt (the category of volcanic stone occurring on

Mangareva and Pitcairn) is defined by its chemical composition and color.

However, basalts from different islands, and often even from different

quarries on the same island, differ from each other in finer details of

chemical composition, such as their relative contents of sodium, potassium,

niobium, and strontium. An even finer discriminating detail is that lead

occurs naturally in several forms, or isotopes, whose proportions also

differ from one basalt source to another. To a geologist, these details of

composition constitute a fingerprint identifying the source of a stone.

Weisler arranged for analyses of chemical composition and lead-isotope

ratios in dozens of stone tools and fragments that he had excavated from

dated layers of archeological sites on Henderson. For comparison, he

analyzed volcanic rocks from quarries and other potential sources of useful

rocks on Mangareva and Pitcairn. Just to be sure, he also analyzed volcanic

rocks from more distant Polynesian islands, including Hawaii, Easter, the

Marquesas, and Samoa.

The conclusions that emerged from these analyses were unequivocal. All

analyzed pieces of volcanic glass found on Henderson originated at the Down

Rope quarry- on Pitcairn. Most of Henderson's basalt adzes also originated

on Pitcairn, but some came from Mangareva. On Mangareva itself, although far

fewer searches have been made for stone artifacts there than on Henderson,

some adzes were also evidently made from Pitcairn's high-quality basalt.

Conversely, of the vesicular basalt stones excavated on Henderson, most came

from Mangareva, but a minority were from Pitcairn. Such stones were

regularly used throughout Polynesia as oven stones, to be heated in a fire

for cooking, much like the charcoal bricks used in modern barbecues. Those

putative oven stones on Henderson showed signs of having been heated,

confirming their surmised function.

In short, archeological studies have now documented a former flourishing

trade in raw materials and possibly also in finished tools: in pearl shell,

from Mangareva to Pitcairn and Henderson; in volcanic glass, from Pitcairn

to Henderson; and in basalt, from Pitcairn to Mangareva and Henderson, and

from Mangareva to Henderson. In addition, Polynesia's pigs and its bananas,

taro, and other main crops are species that did not occur on Polynesian

islands before humans arrived. If Mangareva was settled before Pitcairn and

Henderson, as seems likely because Mangareva is the closest of the three to

other Polynesian islands, then trade from Mangareva probably also brought

the indispensable crops and pigs to Pitcairn and Henderson. Especially at

the time when Mangareva's colonies on Pitcairn and Henderson were being

founded, the canoes bringing imports from Mangareva represented an umbilical

cord essential for populating and stocking the new colonies.

As for what products Henderson exported to Pitcairn and Mangareva in return,

we can only guess. They must have been perishable items unlikely to survive

in Pitcairn and Mangareva archeological sites, since Henderson lacks stones

or shells worth exporting. One plausible candidate is live sea turtles,

which today breed m southeast Polynesia only on Henderson, and which

throughout Polynesia were prized as a prestigious luxury food consumed

mainly by chiefs--like truffles and caviar nowadays. A second candidate is

red feathers from Henderson's parrot, fruit dove, and red-tailed tropic

bird, red feathers being another luxury item used for ornaments and feather

cloaks in Polynesia, analogous to gold and sable.

Then as now, however, exchanges of raw materials, manufactured items, and

luxuries would not have been the sole motive for transoceanic trade and

travel. Even after Pitcairn's and Henderson's populations had grown to their

maximum possible size, their numbers--about a hundred and a few dozen

individuals, respectively--were so low that people must have had trouble

finding marriage partners not forbidden by incest taboos. Hence exchanges of

marriage partners would have been an additional important function of the

trade with Mangareva. It would also have served to bring craftspeople with

technical skills from Mangareva's large population to Pitcairn and

Henderson, and to reimport crops that by chance died out in those islands'

small cultivable areas. In the same way, more recently, the supply fleets

from Europe were essential not only for populating and stocking but also for

maintaining Europe's colonies in America and Australia, which required a

long time to develop even the rudiments of self-sufficiency.

From the perspective of Mangarevans and Pitcairn Islanders, there would have

been still another probable function of the trade with Henderson. The

journey from Mangareva to Henderson would take three or four days by

Polynesian sailing canoes; from Pitcairn to Henderson, about one day. To

Pacific seafaring peoples, who sail their canoes five days just to buy

cigarettes, such journeys are part of normal life.

For the former Polynesian inhabitants of Mangareva or Pitcairn, a visit to

Henderson for a week would have been a wonderful picnic, a chance to feast

on turtles, birds, and their eggs. To Pitcairn Islanders, living on an

island without reefs or calm inshore waters or rich shellfish beds,

Henderson would also have been attractive for fish, shellfish, and just for

the chance to hang out on the beach. Descendants of the Bounty mutineers

today, bored with their tiny island prison, jump at the chance for a

"vacation" on the beach of a coral atoll a hundred miles away.

TRADE WITHIN SOUTHEAST POLYNESIA CONtinued from about A.D. 1000 to 1450, as

gauged by dates assigned to artifacts on Henderson. But by A.D. 1500 the

trade had stopped. Later archeological layers on Henderson contain no more

imported pearl shell, volcanic glass, fine-grained basalt for cutting tools,

or basalt oven stones. Apparently the canoes were no longer arriving from

either Mangareva or Pitcairn. Because trees on Henderson itself are too

small to make canoes, Henderson's tiny population was now trapped on one of

the most remote, most daunting islands in the world. Henderson Islanders

confronted a problem that seems to us insoluble: how to survive on a raised

limestone reef without any metal, without stones other than limestone, and

without imports of any type.

They survived in ways that strike me as a mixture of ingenious, desperate,

and pathetic. For the raw material of adzes, in place of stone, they turned

to shells of giant clams. For awls, they fell back on bird bones. For oven

stones, they turned to limestone or coral or giant clamshell, all of which

are far inferior to basalt because they retain heat for less time, tend to

crack after heating, and cannot be reused as often. They now made their

fishhooks out of purse shells, which are much smaller than black-lipped

pearl shells, yielding only one hook per shell and restricting the types of

hooks that can be fashioned.

Radiocarbon dates suggest that, struggling on in this way, Henderson's

population of originally a few dozen people survived for several

generations, possibly a century or more, after all contact with Mangareva

and Pitcairn was cut. But by 1606, the year of Henderson's "discovery" by

Europeans, when a boat from a passing Spanish ship landed on the island and

saw no one, Henderson's population had ceased to exist. Pitcairn's

population we know disappeared by 1790 (the year when the Bounty mutineers

arrived to find the island uninhabited), and probably much earlier.

Why did Henderson's contact with the outside world come to a halt? Because

of environmental changes on Mangareva and Pitcairn. All over Polynesia, when

people settled on islands that had developed for millions of years in the

absence of humans, habitat damage and mass extinctions of plants and animals

inevitably followed. Mangareva was no exception. After the islanders

deforested most of the island's hilly interior to plant their gardens, rain

carried topsoil down the steep slopes, and a savanna of ferns, which were

among the few plants able to grow on the now-denuded ground, replaced the

forest. Eventually, little land was left for gardening and tree crops.

Deforestation indirectly reduced yields from fishing as well, because no

trees large enough to build canoes remained: when Europeans came to

Mangareva in 1797, the islanders had no canoes, only rafts.

With too many people and too little food, hunger on Mangareva became

chronic. Modern islanders tell how, starved for protein, people turned to

cannibalism, not only eating freshly dead people but also digging up buried

corpses. Chronic warfare broke out over the precious remaining cultivable

land; the winning side redistributed the land of the losers. Instead of an

orderly political system based on hereditary chiefs, nonhereditary warriors

took over. All that political chaos alone would have made it difficult to

muster the manpower and supplies necessary to cross the ocean, even if there

had been trees left for canoes. While much less is known about environmental

changes on Pitcairn, Weislet's limited archeological excavations indicate

massive deforestation and soil erosion there as well.

Henderson itself also suffered environmental damage that reduced its human

carrying capacity. Half its species of land birds, and colonies of four of

its species of breeding seabirds, were exterminated. Those extinctions

probably resulted from a combination of hunting for food, habitat

destruction for gardens, and depredations of rats that arrived as stowaways

in Polynesian canoes. Today those rats continue to prey on the remaining

seabirds, which evolved in the absence of rats and so are unable to defend

themselves.

Thus, environmental damage, leading to social and political chaos and to

loss of timber for canoes, ended southeast Polynesia's interisland trade,

cutting Mangarevans off from Pitcairn's sources of high-quality stone for

making tools. For the inhabitants of Pitcairn and Henderson, the results

were even worse: eventually no one was left alive on those islands.

The disappearance of Pitcairn's and Henderson's populations must have

resulted somehow from the severing of the Mangarevan umbilical cord. Life on

Henderson, always difficult, surely became far more so with the loss of all

imported volcanic stone. Did everyone die simultaneously in a mass calamity,

or did the populations gradually dwindle down to a single survivor living

alone with memories for many years? That actually happened to the Indian

population of San Nicolas Island off Los Angeles, reduced finally to one

woman who survived in complete isolation for 18 years. Did the last

Henderson Islanders spend time on the beaches, generation after generation,

staring out to sea in the hopes of sighting the canoes that had stopped

coming, until even the memory of what a canoe looked like grew dim?

WHILE THE DETAILS OF HOW HUMAN life flickered out on Pitcairn and Henderson

remain unknown, I can't tear myself free of the mysterious drama. In my

head, I run through alternative endings of the movie, guiding my speculation

by what I know actually did happen to some other isolated societies. When

people are trapped together, enemies can no longer resolve tensions merely

by moving apart. Those tensions may have exploded in mass murder, which

later nearly destroyed the colony of Bounty mutineers on Pitcairn. Islanders

could also have eaten each other, as happened to the Mangarevans, Easter

Islanders, and-closer to home for Americans--the Donner party in California.

Perhaps people grown desperate killed themselves, or gave way to insanity,

like some members of the Belgian Antarctic Expedition, whose ship was

trapped by ice for more than a year in 1898-1899. Or they may simply have

starved, like Japan's garrison stranded on Wake Island during World War II.

Then my mind turns to gentler possible endings of the movie. After a few

generations of isolation on Pitcairn or Henderson, everyone in their

microsociety of a hundred or a few dozen people would have been too closely

related to marry without violating incest taboos. Hence people may just have

grown old together and stopped having children, as happened to California's

last surviving Yahi Indians, the famous Ishi and his three companions. If

the small population continued to interbreed, congenital physical anomalies

probably proliferated, as deafness has on Martha's Vineyard Island off

Massachusetts and on the remote Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha.

We may never know which way the movies of Pitcairn and Henderson actually

ended. Regardless of the final details, though, the main outline of the

story is already clean The populations of Mangareva, Pitcairn, and Henderson

all inflicted heavy damage on their environments and destroyed many of the

resources necessary for their own lives. Mangarevans were numerous enough to

survive, albeit under chronically terrifying conditions and with a

drastically reduced standard of living. But the inhabitants of Pitcairn and

Henderson depended on imports of agricultural products, technology, raw

materials, and people from Mangareva. Once Mangareva could no longer sustain

exports, not even the most heroic efforts to adapt could save them.

Pitcairn and its neighbors seem exotic and remote to Americans, and it's

easy to think that nothing similar could ever happen to us. Looking around

us, we see no signs of imminent collapse. Our forests are green, water flows

fresh, food is abundant, and peace reigns. But all that was once true on

Mangareva and Pitcairn too, when starvation and universal death loomed in

the near future. What we should examine are not current conditions but

current trends--and those are ominous.

An obvious difference between modern America and ancient southeast Polynesia

is in our increasing connectedness. The societies of Mangareva, Pitcairn,

and Henderson were joined only to one another, so when they collapsed or

died out, no other societies were affected. Today all human societies are

interconnected, even those of southeast Polynesia. Although Pitcairn may

still rank as the most remote inhabited island in the world, modern Pitcairn

Islanders look to ships from New Zealand for supplies. New Zealand in turn

depends on Australia and Europe and America, which depend on each other and

on everybody else. A survey of garbage washed up on the beaches of

"pristine" uninhabited atolls near Pitcairn revealed 130 glass bottles from

at least 14 different countries (dominated by Suntory whiskey botdes from

Japan), plus a remarkable assortment of other objects, including 65

lightbulbs, 32 shoes, a bicycle pedal, a football, and a Watney's beer

barrel.

As a result of modern high-speed travel, trouble in any part of the world

can lead to trouble anywhere else, no matter how distant. We Americans, who

60 years ago clung to the isolationist notion of Fortress America, have

recently become painfully aware that environmental disasters abroad pose as

much risk to us as do disasters at home. Political instability in

ecologically ravaged faraway lands has required the dispatch of American

troops to Somalia and Bosnia, involved us in fullscale war in the Persian

Gulf, led to an oil embargo and high gas prices, and propelled streams of

illegal immigrants desperate enough to swim ashore from ships.

Looming especially large in America's future are the awful environmental

problems of neighboring Mexico, compounding our superabundance of homegrown

ecological disasters. With its fragile environment, shrinking natural

resources, and growing population, Mexico suffers from widespread poverty

and political unrest. How much more enormous will be the stresses on Mexico,

hence on us, 20 years from now, when Mexico has even more people and far

fewer environmental resources?

Now as then, neighbors stand or fall together. But the definition of

neighbors has changed to encompass the world. The bad news is that we are

exporting our problems to all countries, which are in turn exporting their

problems to us. The good news is that we have a choice, which the ancient

Polynesians never had. We now know, as they could not, of the fates that

environmental mismanagement visited upon past societies.

PHOTO (COLOR): MANGAREVA, PITCAIRN, AND HENDERSON are the only habitable

spots in a vast, remote region Of the Polynesian triangle of settlement.

PHOTO (COLOR): MANGAREVA CORAL ATOLLS and volcanic islands, on one of which

lies Mount Duff, the lagoon's tallest peak.

PHOTO (COLOR): THREE TAUTAMA BASALT ADZES and assorted tools of stone,

volcanic glass, and coral.

PHOTO (COLOR): BECAUSE PITCAIRN'S COASTLINE has no reef, and the surrounding

sea bottom falls off steeply, shellfish and fish are difficult to obtain.

PHOTO (COLOR): RAIN ESCAPES through Henderson's porous limestone. But what

the island lacked in freshwater, it once made up in delectable wildlife.

PHOTO (COLOR): PEOPLE ONCE LIVED in every one of Henderson's tiny caves and

rock shelters.

PHOTO (COLOR): HOW TO MAKE A FISHHOOK: Henderson had no large black-lipped

pearl oysters; its residents had to make do with smaller shells.

PHOTO (COLOR): HENDERSON WAS RICH in luxury exports, such as green sea

turtles and red feathers from red-tailed tropic birds.

~~~~~~~~

By Jared Diamond

-------------------

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Source: Discover, Nov97, Vol. 18 Issue 11, p68, 9p, 9c.

Item Number: 9710214806

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Record: 25

T

Title: Paradises lost.

Subject(s): PITCAIRN Island -- History; HENDERSON Island (Pitcairn Island)

-- History

Source: Discover, Nov97, Vol. 18 Issue 11, p68, 9p, 9c

Author(s): Diamond, Jared

Abstract: Discusses the histories of Pitcairn and Henderson

civilizations. Polynesia expansion during 1500 B.C.;

Description of Pitcairn's environment; Trade; Effect on

Pitcairn and Henderson societies of environmental

mismanagement.

AN: 9710214806

ISSN: 0274-7529

Lexile: 1410

Note: The Library has this title

Database: MAS FullTEXT Ultra