If you lived on Easter Island, would you really cut down the last mighty tree knowing that would be it? It seems either foolhardy or desperate to knowingly cut down the last of a kind and your last source of timber. So how could it happen?

Jared Diamond, in his book Collapse and article Easter’s End, explains how this situation could happen through a gradual, hardly noticeable decline over many years. Those who remembered the great trees which they used to make rafts, canoes and ships were old or had long since died. The trees seen today may be nothing like the forests and towering trunks of tens or hundreds of years ago.

Gradually trees became fewer, smaller, and less important. By the time the last fruit-bearing adult palm tree was cut, palms had long since ceased to be of economic significance. That left only smaller and smaller palm saplings to clear each year, along with other bushes and treelets. No one would have noticed the felling of the last small palm.

For another perspective, Seth Godin asks who cut down the second-to-last-tree?

Who cut down the last tree?

Back in 1865, a chap called William Stanley Jevons noted that while there had been a number of improvements in coal efficiency in steam engines and the like, instead of reducing consumption the effect was to increase consumption instead — Jevon's paradox.

While it’s not a surefire outcome, there are plenty of parallels like more efficient batteries leading to more overall battery use, washing machines leading to doing more washes rather than less time spent washing, or the ability to recycle some plastics leading to more overall plastic consumption.

This is sometimes known as the rebound effect.

Also see the fifth fuel: energy efficiency, and save some landfill.

Jevon’s Paradox

If a baby wore 2 reusable nappies per day, that’s nearly 1500 nappies saved from landfill by the time a child is 2 years old. If every baby born in the UK did this, that’s 2.5 Big Ben’s worth saved from landfill.

Sketchplanations tagged with environment