Radical Noesis - Thinking outside the box

The `decline and fall' of Easter Island and its alleged self-destruction has become the poster child of a new environmentalist historiography, a school of thought that goes hand-in-hand with predictions of environmental disaster. Why did this exceptional civilisation crumble? What drove its population to extinction? These are some of the key questions Jared Diamond endeavours to answer in his new book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive. According to Diamond, the people of Easter Island destroyed their forest, degraded the island's topsoil, wiped out their plants and drove their animals to extinction. As a result of this selfinflicted environmental devastation, its complex society collapsed, descending into civil war, cannibalism and self-destruction. While his theory of ecocide has become almost paradigmatic in environmental circles, a dark and gory secret hangs over the premise of Easter Island's self-destruction: an actual genocide terminated Rapa Nui's indigenous populace and its culture. Diamond, however, ignores and fails to address the true reasons behind Rapa Nui's collapse. Why has he turned the victims of cultural and physical extermination into the perpetrators of their own demise? This paper is a first attempt to address this disquieting quandary. It describes the foundation of Diamond's environmental revisionism and explains why it does not hold up to scientific scrutiny.

Here's the full paper (PDF). Anyone know anything else about this?

UPDATE: Ok, "Energy and Environment Journal" is a complete joke. I had DailyKos do me some research, and they came up with some serious dirt. Some of the more poignant issues found are this, from July 2005 Environmental Science and Technology Online:

Barton chairs the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Energy and Commerce but does not sit on the Committee on Science. When asked whether the energy committee had any scientists on staff, Barton's spokesperson again responded, "I don't know." She added that Barton has a degree in engineering.

In his letter, Barton references a February news story in The Wall Street Journal that focused on work by Stephen McIntyre, a former director of several small public mineral exploration companies, who charges that Mann's Nature article contains methodological flaws and data errors.

According to Barton's spokesperson, the key arguments in his letter are found in a paper published by McIntyre and McKitrick this year in Energy & Environment--an obscure journal found in only 25 institutions worldwide, according to Journal Citation Reports. Energy & Environment is not included in the Journal Citation Reports list of impact factors for the top 6000 peer-reviewed journals.

According to the person who posted that,

"Energy & Environment" appears to be an apologist journal for polluters, and a place where anti-global warming scientists can get published. It is not peer-reviewed. It is, however, a source for Wall Street Journal op-eds counteracting articles reported in Nature, as if the journals were equivalent.

E & E articles are of great use in trying to shut down genuine scientific input into lawmaking; it proves very convenient when one needs a "controversy" to stall action on science.

So, there you go. Some of the points may be true, the overall idea is to disable diamond's theory, which isn't even HIS theory. As another poster points out,

ALL European records of the island have been of a deforested, depopulated island. There is no reliable evidence of European contact prior to the decline. Whatever the author says, there is no way to claim that the brief, early contacts between Europeans and Rapa Nui can be interpreted as missing large forests and populations given the smallish size of the island.

I would say this "journal article" isn't worth a warm bucket of spit.