Sierra Sun carried the same piece headlined: "Sawing for Sierra sprawl." The two newspapers and the writer (David Bunker) are flashing an S-O-S to the Tahoe Truckee community: We are allowing our future to be devoured.

What is the likely outcome if the present pace of deforestation for housing, golf courses, etc. continues? In his popular 2004 book, Collapse, Jared Diamond described what happened on isolated Easter Islandin the South Pacific. It is a place that once supported a (relatively) advanced and complex population roughly the size of our own at the moment. The people of Easter Island are known today for the giant, stone statues they left behind.

When the population of Easter Island was 10,000-15,000, the island was heavily forested. The people casually cut down the trees (palms) to build housing and fishing boats (fish were a primary food), and for large logs on which the huge, carved statues could be rolled. The statues were moved miles from the stone quarries to the raising sites scattered around the island.

The island's trees were downed until the last one fell. In his book, Diamond posed this kind of question: What kind of ceremony did the Easter Island people have as the final tree smacked the earth?

As the forests disappeared, larger boats could no longer be built by the people, so fishing for the bigger fish far from land became increasingly difficult. Erosion increased due to the on-going deforestation, and once-fertile farming land washed into the sea. Over time, food became scarce for the islanders. Social problems developed between the haves and the have-nots. Ultimately, in a span of a century or two, the culture, which depended on natural resources, crumbled. Today all the trees and all the people are gone. There are about 400 unfinished statures remaining in the quarries plus several hundred standing statues around the island—silent testimony to a community that ignored the obvious.

The Easter Island, natural-resource story has a haunting ring to it, and the Tahoe World/Sierra Sun story suggests a question that needs to top local agendas soon: What, if anything, can be done to slow the transformation of a primary, Tahoe-Truckee natural resource into cash for distant investors?