Deforestation on Easter Island, 1200 A.D

It seems that Easter Island extinct much later than Jared Diamond and other scientists had predicted. The cause of the collapse: deforestation. The news is here.

New archaeological evidence suggests that Easter Island, mysterious home of titanic stone heads, was first settled around A.D. 1200, much later than previously thought.

Once there, the colonizers quickly began erecting the famous statues for which the remote eastern South Pacific island (map) is famous. They also helped deplete the island's natural resources at a much faster rate than previously thought, the study says.[...]

Scientists have long treated Easter Island's extinct society as a textbook example of a once thriving civilization that doomed itself by wiping out its natural resources.[...]

Instead the Polynesians immediately began destroying the trees and giant palms, using the wood for their canoes, for fires, and perhaps for moving statues.

Easter Island is a good example that show the trend toward deforestation. Today, there's an increase of tourism on the island, coupled with a large inflow of people from Chile, which threatens to change the Polynesian identity of the island, but that's a political dispute. Presently, the island is covered almost entirely in grassland, sad.