The Ragged Edge of the World (13 page)

For instance, apart from the rare appearance of a cruise ship, the only visitors to Pitcairn were freighters that occasionally came near the island. Sometimes these ships would anchor for a couple of hours offshore so that the sailors could barter for the artifacts and stamps the islanders sold. The sailors were a rough lot, however, and among the items they would offer in barter were pornographic videos. The unsuspecting islanders would then convene the entire population, including children and the elderly, to watch these movies. They would come away from these viewings believing that they were normal fare for the outside world. (Years later, when I saw news reports of the uncovering of widespread sexual abuse among the Pitcairn Islanders, I thought back to the lawyer's account.)

Our own stop at Pitcairn was very brief. We anchored off the tiny town that clung to the leeward side of the island, but because the seas were frothy, the islanders rowed out to the boat rather than risk the wrath of elderly ladies getting soaked as they rode the surf to shore. (Pitcairn really doesn't have an easy entrance to a harbor, and in fact doesn't have much of a harbor at all.) I bought some stamps and a beautifully carved model of a longboat from one of the residents who rode out. Like many, he was a descendant of Fletcher Christian, the mutineer from HMS
Bounty
who settled on the island in 1790.

Pitcairn is about as far from the image of a Polynesian paradise as might be imagined: It's little more than a rock rising out of a frequently angry Pacific, with scraggly vegetation and no lagoon. Perhaps the most amazing thing about it is the fact that it still retains a cadre of residents.

Easter Island, however, was my principal goal on this latest Polynesian foray, and it did not disappoint. Once we were deposited in the port I hired a cab for a tour. If I hadn't known that it once supported 16 million palm trees I never would have guessed it. The island today has the appearance of a giant meadow, albeit one that is guarded by its
moai,
which look forlornly out to sea. It's a place where a hundred golf courses could be built without changing a feature in the landscape (exactly what some developers intend to do). Still, the setting is charged with all the questions it raises: What was once there? What's the story behind those giant statues? Most of all, what happened?

As noted, Jared Diamond's account, spelled out in his books
Guns, Germs, and Steel
and
Collapse,
is one of ecocide, a cautionary tale of overpopulation and overexploitation in which the population overtaxed the resource base and denuded the island. In this telling, an increasingly desperate population devolved into civil strife and ultimately cannibalism.

Almost from the moment Diamond advanced this narrative, his interpretation prompted vociferous rebuttals from a number of anthropologists, who have subsequently shown through painstaking examination of ancient pollens, charcoal, soils and other evidence that trees persisted on Easter Island long after Diamond and others assumed that it had been completely deforested. Questions were also raised regarding the dates when the island was settled, the rise and fall of its population, and when and how it became deforested. No one doubted that the story of Easter Island was one of ecological collapse; the debate was over whether it had been overpopulation that drove the ecocide.

I first began encountering these critiques in the mid-1990s, but they came to a head in early December 2005, when I was asked to be part of a presidential panel at the annual meeting of the American Association of Anthropologists. The subject was anthropology and the media, and the moderator was Lisa Lucero, a specialist on the fall of the Maya. When I arrived, she informed me that while the panel would proceed as planned, she'd been asked to give time to a group of anthropologists who wanted to respond to Diamond's interpretation of Easter Island's collapse, particularly as it had been unquestioningly echoed by the media.

The most detailed rebuttal came from Terry Hunt of the University of Hawaii. After summarizing the various scenarios of the rise and fall of Rapa Nui, Hunt reviewed the evidence and offered a picture strikingly different from Diamond's. Hunt argued that Easter Island was settled much later than most estimates, probably around AD 1200, and that deforestation began immediately. The culprits were not humans, according to Hunt's research, but rather one of their fellow travelers, the rat. By Hunt's calculations, just a few rats arriving with the natives could have populated the island with 20 million to 30 million descendants within a decade. The Polynesian rat is a seed predator, and Hunt argued that the rats already had demonstrated their capacity for forest destruction, having earlier killed the palms on the Ewa Plain on the island of Oahu in Hawaii. In support of his view about the sequence of events on Rapa Nui, Hunt argued that the carbon dating of charcoal fires and other evidence of settlement showed that the palm forest began declining before humans began exploiting it, although he admits that humans probably hastened the decline through their own fires and cutting.

So what actually did do in the Easter Islanders? Not overpopulation, according to Hunt, who asserts that Rapa Nui had probably reached a relatively stable population before contact with Europeans. Hunt looks past undeniable ecological collapse to diseases like smallpox that were introduced by contact and the repatriation of slaves and other returnees. As for the cannibalism that Diamond argues was symptomatic of the degradation of the culture, Hunt argues that there is no evidence of cannibalism before European arrival and that accounts of it were most likely overheated reimaginings of precontact society by disapproving European chroniclers.

Hunt does not let humans off the hook—he is careful to stipulate that the arrival of Polynesians was an ecological catastrophe for Easter Island (as it has been on virtually every island humans have colonized or visited)—but he avers that a good portion of their destructive and self-destructive impact was an unwitting side effect of their arrival, rather than the direct result of human activities. This is an intriguing argument that has been advanced for other extinctions and collapses coincident with the appearance of modern humans in virgin habitats. For instance, Ross McPhee, who is one of the world's more creative thinkers about prehistory and who is now at the Smithsonian, has argued that the pattern of extinctions of large animals that regularly followed soon after humans penetrated new areas was not (as Diamond argues in his so-called Blitzkrieg hypothesis) the result of their wholesale slaughter, but rather was the result of diseases introduced by the dogs and livestock that accompanied human migrants. With no immunity to these novel organisms, the large, slow-reproducing animals would have easily succumbed to disease. The smaller animals, with more offspring and faster reproductive cycles, would have been better equipped to adapt.

I suspect that Diamond's and McPhee's narratives of the mass extinctions that seem to follow soon after human arrival are not mutually exclusive. It's easy to see how diseases imported by pets and livestock could impact concentrations of large animals adapted to a high survival rate of their young. It's also easy to see how human hunting (as well as predation by pets and fellow travelers) of naïve animals could finish off the job.

It's tougher to find common ground between the very different scenarios offered by Diamond and Hunt. Hunt argues that the Polynesian population had reached a sustainable equilibrium before the Europeans made contact in 1722. It's hard to make the argument that ecological collapse proved fatal for the Polynesian culture if in fact it was smallpox and other European-introduced diseases that brought about a catastrophic drop in numbers.

Still, even if we accept that Diamond was wrong about the chronology of some crucial events, I'm left with questions: With no trees left to make boats or houses—even if some of the deforestation took place after the arrival of Europeans—how could the residents of Rapa Nui fish, and what could they use for shelter? How could they have avoided the fate that Diamond describes? I don't think we've heard the last word on this catastrophe, and I suspect that the mysteries of Easter Island will engage scholars for years to come.

I
made my first trip to Africa in 1974 while researching a book about the impact of voluntary aid on the continent (eventually published by Random House as
The Alms Race
), with an itinerary that took me to Liberia, Zaire, South Africa, Lesotho (the focus of the book), Kenya, Ethiopia and Egypt. I have returned to Africa many times since. In 1982, I went to Senegal and Gambia to report on an attempt by Janis Carter to return a female chimp named Lucy to the wild. Lucy had been raised in suburban Oklahoma and had been the subject of early attempts to teach chimpanzees language. Then, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I made several more trips to Francophone Africa. In 2001 I traveled to Kenya and Uganda with the goal of reaching a chimpanzee research station in Kibale and seeing firsthand a group of chimps that had been observed using weapons.

In the course of this quarter century, I've watched as the continent—at least its sub-Saharan part—has suffered inexorably escalating misery and depredation. Its population has exploded, but standards of living have continued a remorseless and accelerating decline. Every time I visited, it was hard to imagine that things could get worse for ordinary people, and yet every time I returned, that was indeed the case. Civil wars, genocide, starvation, killing epidemics, and kleptocratic and/or sadistic rulers have been the order of the day. For the most part, aid projects only worsened the situation by lining the pockets of corrupt politicians or displacing the primitive but effective structures of village life, while offering no alternative.

For wildlife the decline has been even more precipitous. During the span of my travels, most of the continent's wild elephant populations were hunted down and killed—so, too, its rhinos. Chimps and gorillas that have managed to escape poaching and habitat destruction often fall prey to diseases such as Ebola that have been loosed by the wholesale disruption of the continent's ecosystems.

Why, then, do I recall my journeys there with such fondness? At various times I've been held hostage by greedy officials, chased by mobs, threatened by trigger-happy soldiers, robbed, and weakened by Africa's infinite supply of superambitious microbes. During one particularly bad stretch on my first trip, I slept with a pistol under my pillow after someone attempted to break into my hut. Still, when I look back on them, my first thought is how great each of those trips was, and my second is gratitude that I had the opportunity to get close to the mysterious, awesome power of the continent.

My visits to Africa in the early 1990s revolved around four different stories. Three of them were for
Time
—“Inside the World's Last Eden,” which recounted my trek into the pristine Ndoki rainforest with the botanist and conservationist Michael Fay; “Megacities,” which ran in 1993; and “Lost Tribes, Lost Knowledge,” which ran in 1992. The fourth was “Apes and Humans,” an article I wrote for
National Geographic
in 1992. Since “Apes and Humans” and “Lost Tribes” were both extremely expensive to research and involved many of the same locales, I did a lot of splitting of expenses to minimize the burden. My motivation was not concern for the bottom line (I knew tales of expense account extravagance that would bring a blush to the sultan of Brunei), but rather pure self-interest: I was hoping that my efforts to limit expenses would be recognized by the suits the next time I proposed one of my globe-trotting assignments. Thus, when I had to get from Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, situated on the shores of the Ubangi River, to Bayanga, a small river town on the Sangha, which forms part of the western border of the country, I decided to accept a ride in a truck rather than spend the $5,000 or so to charter a plane.

While driving in New Guinea was physically terrifying, getting around the country was otherwise a fairly straightforward process. Africa has its share of bad—make that impassable—roads and broken-down aircraft, but it's the cumulative impact of bureaucracy, mechanical problems, creative scheduling, roadblocks, and weather that makes traveling in Central Africa more arduous than in any other place I've yet encountered. Much of life is taken up with getting from one place to another. In this respect, the trip to Bayanga did not disappoint.

The origins of this trip dated to 1989, when Mike Fay came through New York and we talked about the region. By that time Mike had already spent several years in Africa, first as a Peace Corps volunteer and then as a graduate student/conservationist working on his PhD in botany. Although he had not yet achieved the conservation superstar status brought by his subsequent work in the Ndoki and his walks across Africa, he exuded a great sense of purpose and intensity. Because I was writing about both apes and conservation issues, my interests intersected with Mike's in several different areas. Mike was tremendously excited by the densities of lowland gorillas he was finding in the corner of Africa where the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Cameroon met. At the same time he was outraged by the corruption (he told me that the party chief in Bayanga had already been caught ten times for poaching with no penalties whatsoever) and the out-of-control poaching that was killing elephants as well as gorillas and every other large African mammal.