Jared Diamond, author of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

In the book, Diamond describes societies that perished due to climate change and deforestation. Easter Island is one of them. A competition between chiefs to erect the large stone statues led them to cut down every tree on the island to build rollers for moving and raising the statues. The island ecosystem was wrecked. As the soil became infertile, and, with no big logs left to build ocean-going canoes, the islanders had no means of escape. They ate their land birds to extinction, and then they starved and fought one another and cannibalism resulted...