Friday, August 25, 2006

More light on Easter Island history

I posted a couple of months back about the misuse of Easter Island history by Green Party co-leader Norman Russell, an ex-Marxist who now blames overconsumption by ordinary people for most of the world's problems. Leaning on Jared Diamond's recent book Collapse, Russell has been retreading Thor Heyerdahl's myth of a self-destructing Easter Island people to help make his overconsumptionist arguments. In doing so he has wilfully ignored the real history of European depredations that caused massive population and environmental devastation on the island in the nineteenth century.

Now the American Scientist is trumpeting yet more evidence against Heyerdahl's racist myth. Let's hope the exposure this prestigious and popular journal is giving to the real history of Easter Island will help shame Holocaust deniers like Norman Russell into silence.

And while we're on the subject of the shortfalls of Green politics, I'd like to refer y'all to Lenin's Tomb's excellent critique of Greenpeace's latest waste of money.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

You're really bonkers on this whole Easter Island issue bro. Both Diamond's Collapse and Bahn and Flenley's earlier Easter Island Earth Islandlay out a fair amount of evidence not disputed in either of these posts. In fact, this new article doesn't seem to dispute any of Bahn and Flenley's explanation for deforestation.

What I don't understand it where your virulent antipathy for environmentalist politcs comes from.

Russell a Holocaust denier? You're the wacko.

4:31 pm  
Blogger maps said...

Green capitalism and environmentalism are two different things, old chap. Get back to me in a couple of years when your beloved party is in government with the Nats...

5:06 pm  

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