Jared Diamond in Guns Germs and Steel says on Easter Island that a religious practice gone amok caused the last palm tree to be chopped down thrusting the civilization into darkness.
However, it seems that the island had many many trees right into the 1800s. Then white farm businesses came with pigs and goats. Palm seeds were eaten, young trees eaten and woodlands grew old and died and did not replace themselves.
This theory is expounded in the book The Statues that Walked, Unravelling the Mysteries of Easter island by Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo.
It was, it seems, not an aberrant religion but the introduction of foreign animals and simple capitalism that killed Easter Island!
(Diamond also irked many Canadians when he posited in his book that the early peoples who crossed the Bering Strait and progressed south past Edmonton they carried on over the present U.S. border before stopping to settle down. How of course would they know where the border was to be? And if they came through Edmonton it seems likely a wave stopped here along the way and succeeding generations press on, as kids will do. If they came south, animals would have come with them or come north so there was really no reason other than wanderlust for them to carry over the U.S. border, it seems to me.
Perhaps Diamond would not have won the Pulitzer Price if he wrote about these people being happy living outside the good old U.S. of A.!)
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