Recall that population explosions
of some dinoflagellates bring about
calamitous red-tides even as the
dinoflagellate
cells themselves
physically occupy less than
2/1000ths of 1% of
the water sample in which they reside.
In
his 2005 best-selling book Collapse,
one of Jared Diamond's
opening chapters
explores the growth and collapse of the
original human population of Easter Island
Just as it has proven provocative to
calculate that outbreaks of red-tide
dinoflagellates bring calamity upon
themselves and their environment
even as they occupy less than two
one-thousandths of 1% of the water
samples
in which they reside, it also
proves interesting
to apply an identical analysis to the
peak numbers of humans
living on
Easter Island relative to the island's
total area.
Here, then, we set forth an analysis
of Easter Island's total area (open
space) just preceding the collapse
of its human population.
The mathematics suggests that the island's
human population
and their environment
both underwent collapse even though
99.999 97%
of the island's total area was physically
unoccupied and "vast amounts
of open-
space" still remained theoretically-
available.
It is interesting, at least, to note that the results
of the dinoflagellate analysis (2/1000ths of
1% occupancy)
show such an unexpected
similarity to an analysis of the humans living
on Easter Island (less than 3/1000ths of 1%
occupancy) just preceding their collapse.
A major difference, of course, is that impacts
from dinoflagellates result from wastes
that are
released into their surroundings,
while the impacts of the pre-industrial human
population on Easter Island arose
from physical
damage such as deforestation and extensive
over-exploitation of island birds and biota.
The
fact that our own production of industrial
and societal wastes is,
(a) unique
among all animals on earth, and
(b) that our daily production of such wastes
is multiple orders of magnitued worse
than
the production of wastes in even the severest
outbreak of red-tide should serve, perhaps,
as food for thought.
