More light on Easter Island history

I posted a couple of months back about the misuse of Easter Island history by Green Party co-leader Norman Russell, an ex-Marxist who now blames overconsumption by ordinary people for most of the world's problems. Leaning on Jared Diamond's recent book Collapse, Russell has been retreading Thor Heyerdahl's myth of a self-destructing Easter Island people to help make his overconsumptionist arguments. In doing so he has wilfully ignored the real history of European depredations that caused massive population and environmental devastation on the island in the nineteenth century.

Now the American Scientist is trumpeting yet more evidence against Heyerdahl's racist myth. Let's hope the exposure this prestigious and popular journal is giving to the real history of Easter Island will help shame Holocaust deniers like Norman Russell into silence.

And while we're on the subject of the shortfalls of Green politics, I'd like to refer y'all to Lenin's Tomb's excellent critique of Greenpeace's latest waste of money.