Essay about Easter Island and the Environment: A Warning to the World

The boundaries between maintenance and the expansion of humanity should be known clearly by everyone, because nature is so unpredictable yet fragile that we should not be continuing to develop and expand blindly. One individual who shares such sentiment is Michael Pollan, in his book “The Idea of a Garden” he talked about a massive tornado which devastated a familiar forest of pines in New England. In the aftermath of this natural disaster, there was a debate about how they were going to clean up such a mess. Two solutions were provided, the first was to let nature as it is and not bother to replace anything that was lost. The second solution was make a huge overhaul, and cut down everything in the forest in order to plant new trees, as a result their descendants can enjoy the radiance that once was. The common theme was that

Roderick Nash states, “The first step toward Island Civilization is to check population growth and turn it back to a total of about 1.5 billion.” This idea places restrictions on humans. We are expected to lower our seven billion people population to 1.5 billion, which is a highly unlikely scenario. In order to lower our ecological footprint precautions must be taken. For instance, we can switch to an alternative source of energy as a country, use more environmentally friendly techniques for industry, and live harmoniously with nature through enforced regulations. Compared to Nash’s proposal, the latter is a better course of action because society is not as limited, but is still working towards a better

trees and the home of all the animals. There was a garden stone with the

Adaptive Failure: Easter's End was written by Jared Diamond and was featured in Discover Magazine in August of 1995, this article was mainly written to discuss the rise and fall of the Easter Island civilization. Easter Island is the world's most isolated habitable land, more than 2,200 miles from the nearest continent (South America), and 1,400 miles from the nearest habitable island (Pitcairn). Diamond concluded that the rise of the Easter Island civilization was around 400 A.D. when the Polynesian ancestors of the Easter Island people.

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

By completely clearing off a majority of the island’s forests, it produced numerous negatively affected the island inhabitants. Due to the clearing of the forests and vegetation through burning and cutting, it led to soil erosion and evaporation, susceptibility to wind damage, and reduced crop yields . Also since they no longer had palm trees to make canoes, they had no way to go fishing, which led to them losing an important resource for protein. Even since the beginning the inhabitants heavily relied on the island’s bird population and other animals. As the islanders continue to hunt the numerous bird species, the birds were unable to produce offspring and continue to expand their populations. Due to the sudden drop in animal population, they people had to find a way to still survive which led to them stealing from neighbors . Not only did the people find it necessary for their wellbeing to steal resources from their neighbors, but they also started to resort to cannibalism in order to get the nutrients that are needed. Although within the Polynesian culture, referring a man as being ‘food’ defiled his mana, mystic power, and reducing the man to the level of an animal is the greatest insult someone could do . However on Easter Island, their act of cannibalism was not exclusively a religious rite or a way to express revenge but it was just a liking towards human flesh and the wanting for fresh meat . With the lack of resources to provide them with nutrients, the next best source are humans because the human body will be able to provide a single family with enough nutrients for an amount of time. The decrease of agriculture and the animal population resulted in about three-quarters of the human population dying off

Then, when the statues were at their resting place, they were lifted up onto a platform called an “ahu.” The ahus were also used as the burial place for the person who the statue was built for. Once placed atop the platform, eye cavities were carved into the head and they added eyes made of coral and red scoria stone. This was the process by which all of the island’s 887 statues were made. It was an advanced method for people to use in 900 A.D. The Moai statues show the advancing culture of the Rapa Nui people. The first ones that were made were very short and stout, but the statues made more recently were very large and slender. The statues tell a lot about the native people’s culture, since they show the religion of the people and their way of demonstrating their social

Easter Island has long been a puzzling intrigue in the minds of historians, scholars, and the common folk alike. What happened to the once tropical lush forests? How did a civilization erect such impressive statues and why were they erected? And where are the people who erected these statues now? Many of these questions have been explained over the years with circumstantial evidence and preposterous assumptions. However, through careful analysis and meticulous evidence gathering, lead scholars like Joanne Van Tilburg, Jared Diamond, Terry Hunt, and Carl Lipo, have established a comprehensive literature on the history and likely events that happened on Easter Island.

In order to advance the islander's society, they began cutting down the vegetation and wooded areas of the island. They found this necessary because by cutting down the trees it allowed for more space for agriculture that the inhabitants needed to satisfy the flourishing population. It was also necessary because the trees were used for canoes, heating, houses, cooking and poles. The greatest abuse of the wooded area came from the need to move the stone statues from the quarry to different sites on the island. Islanders used the tree trunks as rollers since they had to rely on human power to move them. Excessive use of wooded areas resulted in over six hundred large stone statues being made and most of the forest disappearing by the 1600s. The disappearance of the wooded areas brought about great changes to the islander's way of life.

search for further food. Because of all of the deforestation most of the species living in the trees

“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

The reading states that one theory for decimation of the Easter Islanders is invaders, and provides three reasons of support. However, the professor states that the disappearance of Eastern Islanders is still a mystry, and refutes each of the authors' reasons.

Easter Island is a remote and isolated island with limited resources and at the time they didn't have trading. Easter Islanders were once this great society, but when the civil war began and society started using their resources, thus causing deforestation, not knowing that it would effect/ consequence it would have on the island. In addition, the Islanders were using it to build their statues which meant they were using all their wood and as shown on the graph, they reached overpopulation and They didn't have enough resources to go around since they can't fish or farm bc trees are gone. They didn't think about their actions and now they have to turn on to cannibalism to live. Not to mention when they started interacting with the modern world,

The common premise of both Diamond’s book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed and his scholarly article Easter’s End present rather porous arguments that consist of a few over-looked quirks in his reasoning for self-induced environmental degradation. The first problem to consider is the heavily unreliable use of the Rapa Nui people’s oral tradition, which Diamond has credulously considered to be a source of unquestionable references to base many of his claims that he posits in his works as “facts”. The passages Diamond used to enforce his argument for the Rapa Nui peoples socio-environmental collapse seem to have been twisted in a convenient way to help him get his point across without

The article states that a dramatic decline in a number of population of Easter Island which was the prosperous society several hundreds years ago, was caused by massive invasion of other societies. However, the professor explains that this assumtion is invalid and refutes all the arguments the reading provides.