I am no specialist myself, but I remember reading a long article about Easter Island, signed by several archaeologists. They were really annoyed by the charismatic people that propagated their romantic views on Easter Island and ignored everything the archaeology proved. IIRC they especially blamed the popular book "Collapses", though others non-historians neither archaeologists, like the Kon-Tiki leader, had propagated other fantasies.
Studies proved the Rapa Nui inhabitants were better fed than inhabitants of other Pacific islands, though the women were below the average and the men above. They had developed technologies that palliated the lack of trees, notably an atypical irrigation system: they scattered black stones in their fields where water condensated at night. There are no remains of wars: no heaps of bodies and no weapons. The moais were not brought down by conflicts, they were laid down delicately when the funeral practices changed. At the same time, the inhabitants stopped producing moais, but it was not abrupt, and no statue was left unfinished because of this. No trace of a collapse until the Europeans arrived.
I thought the rise of the birdman cult had something to do with giving up on creating new moai. That would have been a fun contest: annual swim out to a sharp rock where you have to steal a bird egg and bring it back to shore. But the water was shark infested and your fellow competitors would try to stab you to get the sharks riled up.
In any case, Rapa Nui/Easter Island is an amazing place with a fascinating history.
It certainly seems that part of the issue is that "scientific consensus" is frequently wrongly claimed even though there may be a consensus among many mainstream academics in a network.
I appreciate the correction. Thanks.
The loudest proponent of this theory is Jared Diamond, whose credibility among anthropologists is somewhere between non-existent and negative. Given the popularity of his books Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse (the latter of which is particularly egregious in cherry-picking evidence and making stuff up to support his hypothesis), I suspect that's where your evidence came from. The centerpieces of ecological self-destruction--Maya, Rapa Nui, and Norse Greenland--are all not supported by the available evidence. (The cause of Mayan collapse is not agreed-upon, but the climate thesis is problematic since the more marginal sites lasted far longer than the less marginal; Rapa Nui, as noted above, didn't collapse in the suggested timeframe; and Norse Greenland died out when it was dropped from trade routes, not when the environment changed).
The particularity of the (most likely false) Easter Island story is that they ruined their own civilization in the process. I can't think of any other example like that. In all other cases I can think of, technological progress managed to offset whatever damage human activity did, and when it didn't, people simply moved away.
I'm no expert so I probably have details wrong, but basically for decades the scientific consensus was that for some mysterious "penis size contest" type of reason, competing tribes of the Rapa Nui kept building more and more moais, and they needed wood to move them because the moais were heavy. So they had to roll them on tree trunks to their preferred location. They cut down all the trees on the island to move the moais, and when the trees were gone the ecology went to shit (no roots to hold the sand together, etc, lots of trouble).
If the moais weren't moved using enormous amounts of trees, then:
In a weird way I find this a motivating result for humanity. If the Easter Island thing wasn't human-caused, then maybe there's hope left for planet Earth.