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If anyone is interested in a good analysis of this plus the Maya and Easter Islanders (among some others), there's a book by Jared Diamond called "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose...

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The article calls out Collapse as having been influenced by outdated ideas about why the Greenland settlement failed. For instance, rather than depleting the soil, it turns out that they worked to enrich it.

Also, the work on Easter Island is widely disputed. Easter Islanders probably did not purposely cut down all of their big trees, but the trees were devastated by the release of rats which ate their seeds. See "The Statues That Walked" by Prof.s Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo from the University of Hawai'i for a more up to date work.

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