Response to Jared Diamond - Easter Islands Collapse

The article on Easter Island was very boring to me, that could be because i either did not really understand the points that Jared Diamond was trying to make or because i found it to be very repetitive and it did not seem to catch my interest. It took a lot for me to focus on the reading but overall i was able to find a few interesting things he had to say. It was interesting to see how the people of Easter island is similar to ours, In the article Diamond mentioned that the island was insufficient in their supply of foods and lacked a lot of natural resources for food. The water did not have very many coral reefs and there were no lagoons which meant that fish and shellfish was extremely limited. The people of Easter Island ate mostly carbohydrates which was not a balanced enough diet to be considered healthy. Although we are exposed to protein foods like chicken, pork and fish a large part of most Americans diet consists of unhealthy carbs that are very high in calories and bad for your health. There lack of nutritious food caused the natives to suffer from many health problems from a young age, one of the biggest challenges they had was incidents of cavities and tooth decay which were at an all time high. If the had access to more protein (meats) and fruits the problem most likely would have gone down significantly. It sounded like there priorities were a little questionable, their competitive nature could have possible lead to their collapse, Instead of keeping the crucial resources for themselves they used them to make bigger statues (just to prove a point). One of the first things i noticed when i picked up the article was the picture of the large statues, they had me thinking about the kind of civilization they lived in was like but the people who were descried my Diamond did not seem like the people who would spend all there time building something like that. Similar to the United States there were a society that valued wealth and status before anything else. In America we show out social and financial status by expensive houses, clothes, jewelry and properties that we brag about. "the bigger the better" For them their source of status were the statues, putting that before anything else. Is it too late for us to do something about the collapse that is headed out way? We bring so much media attention to controversial topics like global warming, and we say we will do something to change it and make it better but nothing seems to happen. Why do we wait until the problem is to great to fix it? We take for granted the warning we have a head of time. We live in a extremely selfish world where we only care if it effects us or the people closest to us.