Easter Island Statues

Situations where self interest and public interest work against each other are known as “commons problems.” In the market model the chief source of conflict is individual’s perceived welfare vs. another’s perceived welfare. In the polis model the chief source of conflict is self interest vs. public interest, or “how to have both private benefits and collective benefits.” Stone notes “most actions in the market model do not have social consequences” but in the polis, commons problems “are everything.” It is rare in the polis that the costs and benefits of an action are entirely self-contained, affect only one or two individuals, or are limited to direct and immediate effects. Actions in the polis have unanticipated consequences, side effects, long-term effects, and effect many people. Stone states, “one major dilemma in the polis is how to get people to give weight to these broader consequences in their private calculus of choices, especially in an era when the dominant culture celebrates private consumption and personal gain.” That is a

Throughout history there have been many examples of tragedy of the commons. Tragedy of the commons is when people in a certain area over exploit a common resource which leads toa higher problem. Tragedy of the commons normally happens when people get greedy and get more than they really need. For example, if one farmer is public grazing area were to add a cow over the limit the field can sustain it won’t do much damage but if the other farmers also add another cow to the field it could end up harming it to the point where it is no longer usable.This comes to show that if even a single person becomes greedy it could ruin so many things for other people. Ideas will be pulled out from Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons” to be used in this essay.

I found this chapter absolutely fascinating. For me the real insights were the role of the political system in the building of the giant stone statues that became Easter Island’s biggest mystery when it was discovered in 1722. There were hundreds of erect statues with no one there. Who built them? As Diamond explains, it was the dozen clans that controlled the island who built them. “The clans competed peacefully by seeking to outdo each other in building

“The mystery of the giant stone figures on Easter Island has puzzled people for centuries.”(Innes 4) Easter Island is a tiny island that lies in the southern Pacific Ocean and is 2000 miles west of the coast of Chile and is known as “Rapanui”. The name Easter Island originally came from a Dutch sailor, Jacob Roggeveen, who first visited the island on Easter Sunday, 1722. Easter Island is famous for its remarkable 887 human stone figures with extremely large finely carved heads and round bodies. The monumental statues in Easter Island are known as”Moai”. The Moai are carved from a stone called Tuff, which is an easily carved, compressed volcanic ash. Easter Island has always contained a mystery and there have been many theories about how the

Similarities and differences are what make things so interesting. Would you be happy if everyone was the same. Every looked the same, and liked the same things and hated the same things. No you wouldn’t because you would want to be you and no one can tell you what you want to be or what you don’t want to be. Even the buildings you make would be the same from a normal house to a normal office building. The “Panama Canal” was one of the most useful canals ever built and they were made to for one reason and that was to transport goods. This was somethings everyone needed to solve at that time(1900s). The great Moai statues of Easter Island are also great structures and are really tremendous to the eye. These buildings and canals were made to one purpose they had to do somethings and that something was to make things easier for the people. Some similarities they had were that they both took a long time and sacrifice to build. A difference they had was that they were built for different purposes and they had their own different struggles.

The tragedy of the commons is a pretty basic concept. So essentially, this theory states that people will use a shared resource to their own self-interests and ultimately “consume” the resource until its value is diminished (Brander, 2014).

In the middle of the Pacific Ocean sits a tiny, remote island. Easter Island takes up 64 square miles and is isolated from the rest of the world. What makes this island so interesting is not it’s size or location, but the large statues found on it. Commonly called Moai statues, they resemble men’s faces and weighed over 80 tons. They were sculpted after the tribal leaders that had died and they sat on platforms to look over the people that lived there to look over after them. These monstrous statues were carved out of a quarry on the island with rocks, which took years, and moved to a certain location. For centuries, this island and its inhabitants were a mystery. Who lived on the island? How did they die? Where did they come from? Why were these statues

The Neoclassical model is a system that “sees human beings on the planet as a corporation or syndicate, a collection of individuals drawn together to benefit its members by optimal use of resources” (124). McFague argues that this model exploits the earth’s resources and causes greed in people, which has led to their being a need for economic reform. Therefore, Mcfague poses the Ecological model as the solution, which “sees the planet as a community that survives and prospers only through the interdependence of all its parts, human and nonhuman” (McFague 127). The ecological model is about sustaining the environment and limiting the greed of individuals by transforming society from thinking about oneself to more of a community mindset. Therefore, McFague mentions people must thinking about the world as a community in order for the world to flourish, which means that the “earth’s resources must be distributed justly among all its inhabitants, human and each other, on a sustainable basis” (120).

What is "the tragedy o the commons"? Explain how the concept might apply to an unregulated industry that is a source of water pollution?

Cornell strategy note taking system, was developed by Dr Pauk of Cornell University, the Cornell strategy is an excellent study system for organizing and reviewing lecture notes to increase comprehension and critical thinking of course materials, which typically results in improved test scores.

Societies have risen, prospered, and fallen from the beginning of human existence through the present day. Something we may ask ourselves is what seeds in society lead to its peaceful prosperity and what seeds in society lead to its destructive collapse? While it may seem daunting or overwhelming to dissect the success or collapse of a multi-faceted society, there are lenses and tools through which we are able to do so, such as political theory and speculative dystopian fiction. By using lenses to analyze the society in which we live, we are able to recognize seeds of both prosperity and destruction in our society that may otherwise be overlooked or ignored. The speculative dystopian fiction of Octavia Butler may be considered as building upon the political theory of the tragedy of the commons. Butler provides her American audience an analysis of the root causes of a commons’ collapse, as well as some possible solutions to preventing its collapse in order to warn her readers against ignoring current trends in our society which could lead to our tragedy of the commons.

The reason on why society on Easter Island collapsed was because the thing that makes it famous; the statues. The resources that were used to bring the statues to life were in fact important for society and environment. As shown in the video, research that was conducted on the land shows that it was an island once filled with many palm trees which is like most tropical islands. However, the palm trees were most likely used and chopped down to move the statues along the island. In our society, gas usage has affected our environment because we use it for cars and the loss of trees negatively impacted their lives and environment which they lived on. These trees were necessities to life because it did not just help in the creation of those statues,

These social dilemmas are related to common-pool resources. The problem of free riding can be an issue. . There has to be governance of common pool resources. If, for example collective action was man’s natural instinct then

This increases the responsibility of the state for looking after its citizens as the poorer population of the country grows in numbers. Hardin demonstrates this in ‘Living on a Lifeboat’ by examining the rate of reproduction of the poor in comparison to the wealthy. According to Hardin, the population of the poorer classes doubles every thirty-five years, whilst the wealthier classes experience the same growth over a period of eighty-seven years. (Hardin, 1974) In a lifeboat situation, this reproduction rate would mean the poor would be heavily reliant on the income and supplies of the wealthy. Due to this Hardin states that the wealthy must assume that the poor will be self-interested and sharing our resources with them will only be harmful to our own survival. (Hardin, 1974) Why should the wealthy share if they get nothing from the poor in return? They deposit their supplies into a shared collective on the boat and the poor on-board take it without giving anything back. Hardin refers to this as the ‘tragedy of the commons’ and if taken into a real-life situation we are presented with the development of social benefits for the poor - a system in which the rich pay taxes in order for the poor to be financially supported through state benefits, social housing etc. (Hardin,

With the commodification of natural resources, there becomes a dependency between those who control the resources and all those who need to use them.  At this stage of society people are no longer self-sufficient, but rely upon the network of society to provide food, shelter and jobs (Rousseau).  At this level of society, the founders most often control the resources and begin to live in excess compared to the rest of the populace.