As suspected cases of human-to-human transmission of bird flu pile up in East Asia, basic values that sustain our early 21st century, globalised world are demanding articulation. Beyond the specifics of epidemiology, possible origins of the disease and its modes of transmission have set off warning alarms. Population increases and pressure on land for expansion of agriculture and poultry farming are rendering developing societies ever more susceptible to leaps of viruses from one species to another. And with brisk movement on global trade and travel routes, a local outbreak can in a matter of days acquire the proportions of a pandemic. That’s the danger. But who is responsible, for such a problem and its management? Those at the site of origin? Yes, many poor societies are wreaking great changes in their habitat, levelling forests, using up groundwater faster than it can be replenished and gathering poultry in close habitation. But they would argue that the immediate imperative to feed people has precedence over long-term risks. What about rich folks far away, who depend on produce from the Third World? Don’t they have a stake in clean and sustainable development in poor countries? Yes, they may point out, but cleaning up vast tracts of the world could amount to encouraging bad environmental practices. After all, isn’t it the problem of other governments? At a time when the world’s richest country has refused to sign on to a major environmental programme (Kyoto), Jared Diamond inquires into past societies that collapsed completely to find lessons for present ones. In the most chilling chapter, he visits Easter Island in the Pacific. He examines those famous stone statues, and wonders how in this almost treeless landscape, on this island hundreds of miles away from anywhere else, these massive structures were moved and straightened. There are no tall trees in sight that could have provided the logs for this task or the timber to make fishing boats to account for the fish protein identified by archaeologists in the people’s diet hundreds of years ago. Truth is, the people of Easter Island destroyed the ground beneath their feet. In the most comprehensive deforestation ever, they cut down every single tree. “I have often asked myself,” writes Diamond, “what did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?” We will never know. And that Easter Islander may not have lived long enough to know that his island could not support its once organised and complex society in a treeless state. That cutting down the last tree would sound the countdown to soil erosion, water runoff, lack of raw materials to build boats to escape, extinction of bird and animal species making the people dependent on rats for nutrition, revolts against the elites (that today are hinted at by toppled statues across the island).
