The Easter Islander's Rise And Fall Essay example

Both Easter Island and The Lorax have many things in common , one similarity is overuse of resources. In the Lorax the once-ler invaded and cut down all the Truffula trees to make a thread for universal use. While on Easter Island the native people cut down all the palm trees to make canoes but to manly make boards to move there giant statues around that were made out of stone. Both the Lorax and Easter Island used up all their trees so production of their products had to stop, however they do have their differences.

Homes in the Cherokee villages were often located near rivers. They were made of rivercane and plaster. Roofs were thatched which meant it was made from dry vegetation such as straw, water reed, sedge, rushes, or heather. The houses, though made of what seems weak materials, were nearly as strong as log cabins. Larger buildings were built for ceremonial purposes. Each of the indian villages has a ballpark for entertainment. Each village had a palisade around it for protection from other tribes. Nowadays, Cherokees live in a home or an apartment just like an average American.

Erie Indians lived in communities which were in a palisade made of logs. Erie Indians constructed standing places over these palisades for defenders to use. They built villages as few as ten buildings, or up to 140 buildings. Their palisades were made of wooden stakes from tree trunks that were between 15 and 30 feet high. Each stake was sharpened and was placed close to one another. Some of the Erie lived in long houses with their families.

The Eastern Woodland tribes grew crops. They built wigwams and Longhouses. Wigwams were their most common dwelling. The typical wigwam had an oval framework of poles, bent into dome shapes and was covered with slabs of bark or strips of birch bark sewn together. In the winter they used cattail stalks for the coverings because they added more warmth. They built fires in the center of the wigwam for cooking and

The natives used many resources in many different ways. One of their main resources was trees, trees supplied them with bark, and food. The bark they ripped from the trees was used to in many different ways. For example the bark was used to to make traps that were set all around the forest for animals. Bark was also used to make canoes, weapons, fire, and wigwams. Wigwams are stick structures that Native Americans slept and ate in. They used sticks from trees to support the inside of the wigwams, and the bark from the trees to cover the outside of the wigwams.The trees played an important role in native life

Alcatraz was first discovered in 1775 by a spanish explorer, Juan Manuel del Ayala, which he named the Island of the Pelicans (Williams, 2016). Alcatraz is now a national landmark established in the 1930’s. The renowned island located in the bay of San Francisco, California. During the 1930’s crimes and gangs increased in an alarming rate due to the effects of The Great Depression (Williams, 2016). Many crimes and gangs rose also when many laws were passed and put many behind bars (Raaphorst, 71). Donna Raaphorst, author of “The History Of An Island Prison: From The Development To An American Myth”, states

On Mauna Wauna Tiki Waka we have five sheltered areas. Our island is shaped as a moon then connecting the two ends of the moon is a star. We cut the star into five point so that we could each have our own cabin. Since there is only four of us, we used the other point as a supplies cabin. That is where we store food, tools, wood, etc. All the shelters will be, are out of wood cut down from the forest on the opposite side of the island. The only modification we made to the world was to cut a little sliver of wood off the sides. That helps the wood logs stay input for a safe shelter.

As the island began to suffer from the lack of trees, the society quickly descended into chaos; a chaos that became reality due to the conflicting ideologies of the Polynesian civilization. While structuralist argument may say that the institutions and geography at play on the Easter Island may be the reason for the collapse of the civilization, yet I believe that while the island did have less rainfall than what the Polynesians were accustomed to, the over-deforestation and infighting truly lead to the fall. (Diamond, 2005) Thus, through the readings of Keegan and Diamond, the argument on culture leading to the downfall and collapse of the Easter Island best explains

If we return to our five-point checklist of factors to be considered in connection with environmental collapses, two of those factors – attacks by neighboring enemy societies, and loss of support from neighboring friendly societies – played no role in Easter’s collapse, because there is no evidence that there were any enemies or friends in contact with Easter Island society after its founding.… For a role of a third factor, climate change, we also have no evidence at present, though it may emerge in the future. That leaves us with just two main sets of factors behind Easter’s collapse: human environmental impacts, especially deforestation and destruction of bird populations; and the political, social, and religious factors behind the impacts, such as the impossibility of emigration as an escape valve because of Easter’s isolation, a focus on statue construction for reasons already discussed, and competition between clans and chiefs driving the erection of bigger statues requiring more wood, rope,and food. (Jared Diamond, Pg.

Easter Island was based off of religious perspective of life. Rapa Nui, as Polynesians called the island, settled during the fifth century by migrants from Marquesas. The people who lived on the island were unaware of the damage they were doing to the island. In Wrights’s “Fools Paradise” he states, “not all past civilizations fell because of plague or conquest; many collapsed internally, victims of their own success” (Wright119). This shows that the aftermath of the destruction was not caused by natural causes; the island suffered because of mankind. There is truth to his statement because of progressive problems that are occurring today.

How did such a small remote island become inhabited? Well the first human inhabitants of Isla de Pascua (the Spanish name for Easter Island; its Polynesian name is Rapa Nui) are believed to have arrived on Easter Island in a party of organized emigrants around 300-400 A.D. Tradition underlines

The Rapa Nui people are form Easter Island. Today you wont find any of those people. The Rapa Nui people are responsible for the statues that we see today on Easter Island. The Rapa Nui people are also responsible for the destruction of their own land. There believe that their religion would take care of them lead to the destruction of their land. The Rapa Nui people are responsible for the way that Easter Island is seen today, not nature, and because of what they did they are no longer around today.

Many researchers have a general idea of what caused the collapse of Easter Island, a 63-mile Polynesian island, also called Rapa Nui, located in the Pacific nearly four thousand miles west from the country of Chile (Krulwich 2013). Most of whom who investigate the specific aspects that brought Easter Island to its ultimate downfall, which includes extreme deforestation, pests, soil erosion, and a more or less lack of resources, are able to connect this fatal downward spiral to the rest of the world today (Hillel 1992, 3-11). With the dangerous situation the island of Haiti serves to be presently mending due to their deforestation for charcoal and soil erosion as a consequence, this problem has become a major economic issue for the island’s inhabitants; how do we know that this catastrophe will not occur in other areas of the world, and what types of measures can be taken to eliminate the cycle of deforestation due to the absence of thought for what could happen when the final tree serves as a martyr for an ecosystem that once had the great potential to thrive?

First of all, the reading passage claims that the fact that the environment of the island was destroyed means that this harm was a result of an invasion. On the contrary, the professor argues against this point by saying that indaders did not distroy the trees. He supposes that local communities cut plenty of trees in order to built certain statues, symbols of power in Easter Island. So he believes that islanders damage the nature to

Few crops other than the non-intensive sweet potato gave much free time to the residents. This ample time allowed for monument building. With the extended family as the social unit, this organization and competition helped advance the society but also brought about its collapse. The stone statues, some which were aligned to astronomical positions, consumed much of the peasant labor. Without workhorse animals, the stone blocks for the statues needed to be carried by people. When the society collapsed at its peak, only half of the stone statues were completed, showing that some sudden event occurred that effected much of the population. The statue construction stopped since tree trunks were used to move the stones from the quarry to the monument sites. The once heavily forested island was quickly cleared by the construction and at that point stones could not be transported from the quarry (Ponting, 1991).