It Wasn't A Subtle Mistake
Jared Diamond discusses problems and sees four types of reasons, in terms of a sequence, as to why societies make—or don't make—decisions about them : 1) that societies fail to see them coming; 2) that societies see them coming but do nothing to stop them; 3) that a problem has occured and does not know how to solve it; and 4) societies see the problems and try to solve them, but fail to. He writes: “The question that most intrigued my UCLA students was one that hadn't registered on me: how on Earth could a society make such an obviously disastrous decision as to cut down all the trees on which they depended? For example, my students wondered, what did the Easter Islanders say as they were cutting down the last palm tree? Were they saying, think of our jobs as loggers, not these trees? Were they saying, respect my private property rights? Surely the Easter Islanders, of all people, must have realized the consequences to them of destroying their own forest. It wasn't a subtle mistake. One wonders whether — if there are still people left alive a hundred years from now — people in the next century will be equally astonished about our blindness today as we are today about the blindness of the Easter Islanders.”
