There goes the Easter Island "ecocide", where the inhabitants deforested themselves & then wiped themselves out in a desperate, fratricidal series of wars over a decaying resource base. Instead, a rat infestation destroyed the trees and the Dutch wiped out the locals via disease and slaving.

Not exactly a conservative reason for crowing - there's those damned colonial bastards again - but it does blow up one of the central canards of the radical ecological case for doom! doom! doooooom! I wonder if they're still teaching the "Mayan civilization collapsed of resource exhaustion" line of argument which was popular when I took Anthropology 101?

Link via Iain Murray at the Corner.