Anthropomorphic Approach to Environment

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Anthropomorphic approach to the environment In my opinion, the story that provides an excellent example of the dangers and pitfalls of an anthropomorphic approach to the environment is the well-known story of Easter Island. It is often cited as a cautionary tale of the cultural and environmental dangers of overexploitation. In brief, as related in a celebrated book by Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, the facts are as follows: the population of Easter Island, a Polynesian island in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, underwent a tremendous upheaval as changes in the island's ecology precipitated similar distress of the social system. By the time of the European arrival in 1722 the island's indigenous population had dropped to 2,000 – 3,000 from a high of approximately 15,000 just a century earlier and 21 species of trees and all species of land birds were extinct through a combination of over harvesting and over hunting. The island was largely deforested and it did not contain any trees more than ten feet tall. Loss of large trees meant that residents were no longer able to build seaworthy vessels, significantly diminishing their fishing abilities. Diamond rejects climate change – the onset of the Little Ice Age - as a cause of the island's deforestation and insists that the dominant factor was overexploitation of the forests by the islanders. The disappearance of the island's trees coincided with a decline of its civilization at around the 17th and 18th Centuries. The decline was manifested in the fact that the islanders stopped constructing the monumental statues for which the island is so famous today. Archeological evidence shows a sudden drop in quantities of fish and bird bones as the islanders lost the means to construct fishing vessels and the birds lost their nesting sites. Soil erosion resulting from
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