Literature Review On Easter Island

In 1835 the Chatham Islands were discovered by a British seal hunting ship approximately 500 miles off the coast of New Zealand. Because of an abundance of fish and food available, there were numerous inhabitants. However, they did not know how to fight and they had no real weapons to use when they tried to hunt the game accessible to them. The Chatham Islands become inhabited in 1,000 AD. However, the climate is too cold for them to grow crops, and they become hunter gatherers of lobster, shellfish, and seal. The island that was inhabited was too small to support a lot of people, so they castrated some men and boys to handle population control. Contrasting with this new generation, the people on the original island specialized in agriculture and therefore gave rise to more dense populations. The cultivation group-type slaughters the other type because their agricultural society made them more bloodthirsty and warlike due to the more complicated features that an agricultural community possess. This leads Diamond to develop six major environmental variations that can apply to all societies: Climate, Geological type, Marine Resources, Area, Terrain fragmentation, and Isolation. Environmental factors and innovation are key sources to the success or demise of a

However, how they got to this is because they had used up all their natural resources. Such as in the Lorax the Once-ler cut down all of the trees to create his Thneed. That there was not anymore trees. By this there was not photosynthesis happening so the air was bad. On Easter Island it was that there was nothing to eat, because they ate all of the natural resources up. So the people resulted in eating each other.

In his arguments, the author uses his own point of view, information from other people’s research, and from historical voyages without offering any proper references. Additionally, the author uses non-academic language to inspire literary imagery in order to make the article more attractive to potential readers. This article does make for an interesting read, but it is far from accurate. In my opinion, the author has cherry picked the evidence in order to create a scenario where the blame for the demise of the ecosystem was places squarely on the native’s shoulders which discounts any natural factors that could have happened. The Rapa Nui were a complex society of people who utilized the land in innovative ways. Indeed something catastrophic did take place, and I do not know exactly what that was, but I do not believe it was solely greed and consumption that caused the downfall of an entire society as the author would have you believe.

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

On Easter Day in 1722, Jacob Roggeveen would become the first European to discover what is now known as Easter Island . Before the Dutch explorer first set foot on the island, around the fourth century the first inhabitants arrived . As time goes on, the island ecology decreases rapidly because the population drastically increased. This situation connects to the broad topic of humans and the environment because humans tend to overuse their resources, whether it be plants or animals, to the point where they are unable to recover or to the point of extinction. Mass extinction brought on by the overconsumption of the animals and plants by the Polynesian people who inhabited Easter Island caused the collapse of the society and the land unable to

The foundation of any food system includes natural resources and the knowledge and skill to manipulate them with technology and labor. The economic ability to apply each of these is also paramount to the functionality of that system. “Long Island’s unique ecological and socio-economic environments are the result of our region’s mix of topography, climate, land use, history, traditions, government policies, and economic practices.”(“LI Food System Report Card” 2014) Researching the deep history of this bioregion confirmed my suspicions that human impact poses the greatest strain on this food system.

The novel Guns, Germs, and Steel, written by Jared Diamond, is a 1997 non-fiction that describes the fate of human societies through a geographically based natural experiment (Diamond, Jared). It portrays how varying geography affects its culture, and how the availability of natural resources and the clash of different societies resulted in the supremacy of some societies, at the collapse of others. The rise of the primacy began in the 16th century, on a series of islands known as the chatham islands (Diamond, Jared M). Near the border of New Zealand, the chatham islands in the --__ was the home to a group of indigenous Polynesian people known as the Maori. In the ____, a portion of the Maori population traveled to an uninhabited island of

Easter Island is a remote volcanic island in Polynesia that is well known for its giant moai statues jotted all along it. Many scientists come to Easter Island to study how and why the statues were made. These statues have an average weight of about 20 tons and an average height of 20 feet. Historians are not sure how the native people of Easter Island, also formally known as Rapa Nui, were able to drag and place these large statues in their intended locations, but the most commonly accepted theory is that the people used long pieces of ropes to drag these statues to their places. The Moai statues were carved from the solid volcanic ash of the volcano Rano Raraku. They were then taken to quarries on top of the volcanoes, where the people used ropes to hold the statues at a 45° angle so they could be carved even more in more detail.

Sixty-six square miles into the South East Pacific Ocean, Easter Island can be found. This island is mostly known for its mysterious 32 foot high, 82 ton stone statues that can be found in diverse locations upon the island. These statues known as Moai bring large amounts of tourists to the island, due to their mysterious reasoning. The question that most scientists are asking isn’t about these statues, but about the inhabitants of Easer Island. Where did they go? In the world of environmental science we explain the disappearance of the Polynesian inhabitants of Easter Island with the Tragedy of the Commons, but how does the commons relate to Easter Island?

The humans living in that period were unable to supplement their previous diet, which was rich in protein, and their culture was devastated as a result; this then, is an example of progress (better hunting methods) that led to the failure of an entire culture as its problems were left unsolved. In his third chapter, Wright examines two particular civilizations that thrived but eventually declined due to resource depletion. What is interesting is the similarities that can be drawn from the examples of Easter Island and Sumer, like the widespread ignorance of the masses to actively prevent the abrasion of their land, the perpetual idleness of people to not do anything even when there was enough time to stop the tragic collapse, to current-day situations of people who even flat-out deny climate change and claim it to be part of the left-wing agenda. On Easter Island, it was over-logging that led to their collapse, since as their ecosystem withered away, logging became scarce, and wars broke out for those sparse resources. In Sumer similar environmental destruction occurred (i.e. overgrazing, land clearing), which should alarm the world population of today of what may become of the high levels

In Roderick Nash’s article Island Civilization, Nash describes human impact on the environment and offers a solution to end our man-made plunder. The majority of this article is primarily, Nash stating his opinion in regards to civilization expanding beyond its environmentally sustainable limits. Nash believes that humans have failed our natural environment and are in the process of eliminating all traces of wildlife from our Earth. Nash points out facts that support his argument, and quotes multiple theologians on their similar views on our environmental issues.

One of the debates that continues today is centered primarily around the deforestation of Rapa Nui. An island once thriving with lush tropical forests. On one side scholar’s Tilburg and Diamond attribute the deforestations to societal conflict and degradation while on the other, Hunt and Lipo argue that deforestation was the result of combined human and rat resource depletion. I believe that Easter Island represents a “tragedy of the commons” scenario in which the isolation of the island, from any other island, contributed to the in-fighting for resources (trees), power (chiefdoms), and prestige (moai), ultimately leading to the extinction of a people and their environment.

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 progression of human development has come with its costs. The environment provides an array of resources available for use or appreciation. However, changing elements of this structure such as by removing trees can bring about unintended consequences. These alterations also can cause problems that cannot be fixed by the human population and as a result the population must cope with the loss if possible. The case study here shows how a remote system can be overwhelmed and be unable to support its inhabitants where it once was able to do so. This undesirable outcome more importantly can be avoided if measures are taken to avoid overuse of resources.

The Pintupi people, who live in the Gibson Desert in west-central Australia, are a people who live a very simple life. Rather than producing food and keeping livestock, they have to forage for their food using very simple tools and technology such as hand axes and spears. Foraging includes the hunting of large and small game, fishing, and collecting fruits and vegetation from the land in which they live (Culture Counts 111). Foraging is not meant to support large groups or tribes of people. It usually is practiced with communities ranging from 20 to 50 people and mostly used in either desert or tundra environments (Culture Counts 111).