Easter Island Reaction

Easter Island is an interesting case of collapse since it's an isolated community, until it's later years.  Easter Island was a fairly wealthy island in terms resources, until the Islanders became obsessed in competition with other clans.  To show off their resources they spent massive amounts of stone, trees and time to make several large statues.  In the process of making these statues they cut down full forests of trees to roll the statues into place.  The lack of trees made the soil loose and unhealthy, little could grow on it anymore.  Without trees the Islanders couldn't make canoes and fish for food, without any food they turned to cannibalism.  At the very end of all of this the Europeans came and claimed easter island as their own.

There are several important "clues" that hint at collapse that I've seen here.  Ignoring or forgetting your dependence on a resource, the Islanders cut down massive amounts of trees forgetting how much they needed them.  The Islanders also fought among themselves and competed, inner competition or division can also collapse a society.  In most societies I've studied that have collapsed almost got too advanced for their own good.  When a society becomes too advanced or too rich they tend to expand, physically in the case of the Roman Empire, Aesthetically in the case of Easter Island and its statues.  These expansions often lead that particular society's foundation to fail.  Metaphorically if you build a tower of blocks too high or branch out too much it will collapse, to sustain more blocks you must force re-enforce the base, and to do that you must dismantle the whole structure and start again.

America shows many of these signs in early forms, we're losing oil that we depend on, we fight internally on social levels (not nearly as violently as the Eater Islanders but enough to aid in a collapse), and we've expanded too much for our own good.  These are early signs of collapse, we may lose our dependence on foreign oil and use cleaner energies and learn to manufacture materials without crude oils.  Things like that can slow down a collapse but not stop it, we will eventually collapse like every society will.  However it is extremely hard to tell when a collapse will happen because while we may collapse on our own, it's far more likely that an outside source will destroy us.