Abstract
The history of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) has long been framed as a parable for how societies can fail catastrophically due to the selfish actions of individuals and a failure to wisely manage common-pool resources. While originating in the interpretations made by 18th-century visitors to the island, 20th-century scholars recast this narrative as a “tragedy of the commons,” assuming that past populations were unsustainable and selfishly overexploited the limited resources on the island. This narrative, however, is now at odds with a range of archaeological, ethnohistoric, and environmental evidence. Here, we argue that while Rapa Nui did experience large-scale deforestation and ecological changes, these must be contextualized given past land-use practices on the island. We provide a synthesis of this evidence, showing that Rapa Nui populations were sustainable and avoided a tragedy of the commons through a variety of community practices. We discuss this evidence in the context of Elinor Ostrom’s “core design principles” for sustainable communities and argue that Rapa Nui provides a model for long-term sustainability.
Highlights
Demonstrates that Rapa Nui communities were sustainable in several respects and continued their lifeways and traditions despite the changing ecological conditions and inherent environmental constraints imposed by their marginal island (e.g., [18,19,26,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41])
We first review the state of our knowledge about the archaeological record of Rapa Nui in the context of community sustainability and resilience. We explore how such extensive cooperation among community members might emerge in the absence of top-down governance in ways that would avoid a tragedy of the commons
Robust modeling of the radiocarbon and paleoenvironmental records using an Approximate Bayesian Computation approach instead demonstrates patterns consistent with logistic population dynamics on Rapa Nui—i.e., relatively rapid population growth followed by a plateau that lasted until the timing of European arrival in 1722 AD (Figure 8)
Summary
Demonstrates that Rapa Nui communities were sustainable in several respects and continued their lifeways and traditions despite the changing ecological conditions and inherent environmental constraints imposed by their marginal island (e.g., [18,19,26,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41]). We review current evidence for Rapa Nui community practices within the context of ecological economics research on sustainable management of common-pool resources. We argue that while Rapa Nui populations did cause large-scale changes to the island’s environment, the available data show that communities were resilient to these changes, devised a series of adaptive techniques for dealing with environmental challenges, and lived sustainably for more than five centuries before the arrival of Europeans. We present a model for how a tragedy of the commons was likely avoided through cooperative strategies of common-pool resource management, drawing on Elinor Ostrom’s [42,43] work in ecological economics
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