This is Jared Diamond's haunting account of visiting the mysterious stone statues of Easter Island, showing how a remote civilization destroyed itself by exploiting its own natural resources – and why we must heed this warning. This is an extract from Collapse, first published in 2006.
This book is part of Green Ideas, a series of twenty short books from Penguin Classics that brings you the ideas that have changed the way we think and talk about the living Earth.
Jared Diamond (born1937) is a Professor of Geography at UCLA and a noted polymath whose books about human societies blend biology, geography, anthropology, linguistics and history.