vanguard blog | February 08, 2011 | 45 comments

What We Can Learn From the Environmental Wreck of Easter Island

Adam Yamaguchi is executive producer and a correspondent for Vanguard.

I’m huffing and puffing, hunched over on a rusty old mountain bike as I struggle to eke out one more crank of the pedal. My bike is equally exhausted as I inch toward the peak of the hilltop of Easter Island, a tiny speck of land suspended in the middle of the Earth.

For the uninitiated, Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, was put on the map by the iconic, massive, head statues (moai) that dot the landscape.

If you look at an actual map, look close. Easter is a miniscule island that was swallowed up by the vast Pacific, nearly 3,000 miles off the coast of Chile, to which it belongs.

How’d I end up here? Over the years, I’ve circumnavigated the globe reporting on just about everything—covering two wars, lots of drugs, robots, even the impact of human shit. The Vanguard team has investivated how we’re rapidly gnawing away at the planet, from ecstasy factories deep inside Asia’s rainforests, to Nigerian rebels taking control of the nation’s oil pipelines, to how global warming is rewriting the economy and political situation in Greenland. We've even taken a look at how people are putting human waste to good use.

But everywhere I’ve gone, I’ve seen the same thing: all of our actions take a toll on the environment—yes, including my flying. Easter Island seemed like it could provide a few lessons.

Theory is, a few hundred years ago, Easter Island was inhabited by a couple thousand people of Polynesian descent, whose idol worshipping culture compelled every able-bodied man, woman, and child to get involved in the creation, and movement, of these colossal moai. The people, consumed by the need to carve these 10-14 ton busts from the island’s quarry, exhausted Easter’s resources in order to keep producing, and then transporting these statues across the small island.

As I reach the top of the peak, the results of their effort become clear. A wasteland lies sprawls out beneath my feet, like a forest flattened by a nuke. It’s a beautifully haunting sight to see, and worth the 30 hours of travel it took to get me here.

This once tropical paradise, virtually covered in jungle, was devoured inside out. The population grew beyond the number that the land and its natural resources could sustain, and the people ended up cutting down every single tree to transport the statues. The people basically killed and destroyed every life-giving resource—until they turned on and killed each other.

From atop the hill, my traveling companions and I gasp in awe as we approach the towering moai. These mysterious, magical figures staring back at us look worn and tired. Look in their eyes and you can see why. They were witness to the collapse of civilization.

It’s hard not to look at these monoliths and ask, “What the fuck were they thinking?” In fact, throughout my trip, I blurt this out uncontrollably. I mean, the people must have known what they were doing, and that it was stupid, right?

Well, it’s easy to look back and point out the obvious. But at the time, perhaps it seemed like a worthy use of their time and energy.

Today, we’re faced with the same quandary, albeit on a different scale. With a population approaching seven billion, a fast-accelerating depletion of resources, record-setting species loss, and ultimately unsustainable lifestyles, we’d be stupid not to be asking the same question I think Easter Islanders were asking. Or are we?

See more of Adam's photos after the jump...

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  2. tags:
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45 comments // What We Can Learn From the Environmental Wreck of Easter Island

  • frank_runyeon
  • marshuck
  • DC_Rapanui
    • 0
      DC_Rapanui  

    • This could have been a decent story. Unfortunately, way too much misinformation regarding the history of rapanui as told by tourists. You may not need to be a PhD in history, but you should at least speak to rapa nui people rather than looking at a Chilean sponsored website or worse, receive information as told by anthropologists "studying" the island. http://saverapanui.org/?page_id=274

    • 1 year ago
  • PressCore
    • +1
      PressCore  

    • I saw an expose on Easter Island aired on the History Channel not long
      ago. It started out as an island densely populated with lots of trees but
      sparsely populated with very few people. Trees were the #1 resource on
      the island. As the humans cut down the trees to make dugout canoes to
      fish with the population exploded to 20-30,000 people. But once the trees
      were all cut down, their Monopoly on the one natural resource they clear
      cut but never replaced ran out. And their luck with it. Toward the demise
      of their civilization the stronger survivors turned to canibalism. The pity
      of that is, if they had Hemp, which is an annual, to harvest, they could
      have spared nearly all the trees, and still supported their population.
      Their trajedy carries over today for the entire Earth. There is Hemp
      in the world outside of Easter Island, but because of an evil cabal
      originaly formed inside the USA, the extreme prejudice propagated
      against Cannabis in general has harmfuly deprived us of the use of
      Hemp to spare our trees. And the result will be harmful to all humans.

      Climate change, desertification, super storms, floods, extremes in the
      weather patterns have arrived, and will only get worse. I don't doubt
      that the Sun's cycles will put us into an Ice Age before 2200 despite
      the global warming trend. I've seen that forcast on Kingston,Ontario
      Canadian TV since 1987. But what most humans ignore is that the
      role trees play in keeping the inner spacial temperature stable w/in
      the atmosphere, is similar to the role that water plays in transfering
      heat energy. The oceans functions like the radiator in your car. In
      the 1500os there was a mini Ice Age in Europe because the climate
      change caused by the oceanic heat exchange was radical. It's the
      heat released by the oceans that the atmosphere moves over land
      masses. The Earth needs vast amounts of virgin forrests to produce
      O2 for us to breath and symbioticly absorb the vast amounts of CO2
      we exhale. That slows down the radical shifts in climate change.

      During the past 100,000 years the human populations only grew from
      1-2 Billion people. But in the last 150 years the human populations
      have exploded to 6.5 Billion because of the overuse of pure water & oil
      to drive Corporate farming producing cheaper food to sustain these
      population overgrowths. The Easter Islanders didn't have any central
      planning. Neither does the world population of humans. We needed
      radical change when Theodore Roosevelt advocated conservationism.
      Think about what happens when you redline an engine for too long.

    • 1 year ago
  • Mark701
    • +2
      Mark701  

    • I wonder if they kept carving these things BECAUSE they were ruining their island, hoping to seek the favor of the gods to save them. Just a thought.

    • 1 year ago
  • irishgirlforever
  • wordnerd64
  • cm3kz0ut
    • +4
      cm3kz0ut  

    • It seems there are certain inherent human traits that gave us the competitive advantage but simultaneously turn us into scoundrels. One of course is the devastation of environmental surroundings, the second is the aggression of war and the third the hubris of greed. They all have one ingredient in common: ME first at any cost!

    • 1 year ago
  • Oskavar
    • +2
      Oskavar  

    • I am pretty sure that the same sort of rapid resource depletion took place in the western United States, pre Columbus. I love the post and want more pictures

    • 1 year ago
  • MajorMajorMajorMajor
  • TimeTraveler
    • +2
      TimeTraveler  

    • Thanks for this post Adam. I probably shouldn't be but I am a bit surprised when I come across people who don't know about the Easter Island story. However considering the magnitude of the story of Easter Island and the lessons it provides for a global community under similar pressure your blog doesn't seem to be much more than the typical "sound bite" that is so prevalent in our society today. In other words just like that islander who cut down the last tree we don't seem able to take the time to give serious thought to anything other than our own personal interests. To be able to devote any time to understand and act in the appropriate manner when it concerns the welfare of all creatures, man or beast, it is so much more complicated than any sound bite can convey. Then again whether someone cares to invest more effort in understanding anything is a matter of choice.

      Since you did not mention Jared Diamond's book "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" I am inclined to think you have not read it and I very much recommend reading this book to anyone interested in the story of Easter Island or that bigger island we call Earth. The key word is "Choose" because it is the choices we make that will determine how closely this planet will or will not resemble Easter Island someday.

    • 1 year ago
  • thedirtman
    • +2
      thedirtman  

    • We need a system that works for everyone. We need an order that integrates society into the environment. Currently, our order always leaves the fox to guard the hen house. The fox doesn't care about the hen house and doesn't care about the hens either. The fox cares about eating more hens.

      Our capitalist system is good for driving the populace to work. Like a vehicle, it's useful as a tool, but it isn't and was never intended to be the object of worship. When the motor in the capitalist system fails it is not time to kneel before the vehicle and give thanks and praise to an automotive god. The vehicle needs to be fixed, and will likely require technical expertise to repair it.

      We need to recover our appreciation for technical expertise, and actually pay people for their knowledge, labor and ability. At least, it would be a start. We have been devaluing labor for almost 30 years now.

    • 1 year ago
  • alexandrek
  • coolplanet
    • +1
      coolplanet  
    • alexandrek:

      I will agree that the majority of people "living" today are stupid.
      But that wasn't always so.
      How many hundreds of millions of aboriginal peoples were exterminated in the process of Manifest Destiny with its deseases and weapons?
      People who understand and live in accordance with nature are not stupid.
      Too bad we wiped them all out in our blind lust for gold!

    • 1 year ago
  • alexandrek
  • coolplanet
    • +1
      coolplanet  
    • alexandrek:

      I think it was the invention of agriculture some 8,000 years ago that screwed us up.
      It's amazing that humans in America, Asia and the Fertile Crescent developed grasses into corn, rice and wheat all at the same time. (Aliens?)
      This development resulted in deforestation, overpopulation, malnutrition and plagues from rodents.
      Humans evolved to be hunter/gatherers like most animals.
      So you don't live to be 80. Who really wants to anyway?

    • 1 year ago
  • Karlek
  • Karlek
  • coolplanet
    • 0
      coolplanet  
    • Karlek:

      Yes it was the domestication of livestock like the horse that enabled bullies to establish crossroads to collect tolls in order to be "protected" from the bullies on horses.
      The invention of taxes.
      Have you ever read Critical Path by R. Buckminster Fuller?
      He covers this well in the chapter Legally Piggily.....

    • 1 year ago
  • coolplanet
    • 0
      coolplanet  
    • Karlek:

      You don't look a day over 79! ;~)
      But seriously what do you attribute your longevity to?
      Diet, exercise, doctors, drugs, attitude?
      I remember hiking down the 12 mile Angel Bright trail in the Grand Canyon when I was 29. About a mile down a ranger hiking up from the bottom (whom I later learned was 90 yo) took one look at me huffing and puffing and advised me to turn around right away because I still had 11 miles to go downhill. And she laughed at the pillow strapped to my overweight backpack.
      I wouldn't mind living to be 100 if I was still able to walk around the block.

    • 1 year ago
  • Karlek
    • 0
      Karlek  
    • coolplanet:

      I attribute my longevity to medicare. I've had several opportunities to die if I had to pay for my medical care. Of course we have a good diet, but nothing special, an excellent doctor after dumping one who , I didn't take any drugs till I was on medicare and now take handsfull, and my attitude about medicine is cynical. My father died in his 70s from heart failure and my mother died just months short of 100 for no particular reason. You figure it out, I don't bother but just keep going day by day. I may die any time now because I've pretty much finished the books on https://public.me.com/karlek/ , that has kept me going the last couple of decades. I suppose I should add a postscript of how the Egyptian Revolution will affect the next few decades, but that doesn't seem to excite me as much as it did while we were watching to see who'd win. Now that I know it is just following the evolutionary path I could let the reader figure that out as an exercise.

    • 1 year ago
  • coolplanet
    • +1
      coolplanet  

    • Here's another time lapse vid of a forest evapotranspiring rain clouds on the Big Island of Hawaii.
      This is critically important to this discussion and is not being properly addressed.

    • 1 year ago
  • Johnny_Los_Angeles
  • trut
  • just_passing_thru
  • just_passing_thru
  • MajorMajorMajorMajor
  • EmperorThan
    • -1
      EmperorThan  

    • Imagine how dark and depressing the times on Easter Island were before discovery by Europeans, people literally starving to death and cannibalizing each other en masse. For years!

      Imagine the movie Alive with thousands of people lasting for years and years and years...

    • 1 year ago
  • jlweeks
  • TheEnemyIsUS
    • +3
      TheEnemyIsUS  

    • It is my hope that the high profile move of Mr. Olbermann to Current will bring another wave of viewers and that this will keep on snowballing. Despite the much-hyped 'left wing bias' of the news media, the truth is that 97% of everything is pretty much right or center-right, as even the more conscientious networks feel they have to 'prove' that they are not, in fact, in the pocket of the 'powerful left wing interests' - what a joke! The voiceless and the powerless are also for the most part unseen, and they need all the representation they can get. These days, this group even includes a goodly percentage of the middle class - a situation that Current seems to be trying to address. Certainly, common sense, intelligence, and empathy are almost non-existent qualities in either our modern American society or the news media which supposedly chronicles and illuminates it.

    • 1 year ago
  • blaksony
    • 0
      blaksony  
    • TheEnemyIsUS:

      Well said TEIUS! Olbermann's leaving MSNBC left an incredible gap in the balance of news-information reporting and I too hope his coming to Current will not only fill that gap but increase membership here at this site.

    • 1 year ago
  • karlek76
    • 0
      karlek76  

    • Back in the 1950s economists realized that if we continued upward mobility and conspicuous consumption to certify upward mobility we'd use up our resources. So the elite arranged things so that most of us experienced downward mobility--the last move being the crash of 2008. In Egypt they were too obvious about it--here our media have convinced us that we are supposed to get poorer. See
      https://public.me.com/karlek/

    • 1 year ago
  • PzLuvHappeniz
  • Karlek
  • jlweeks
    • +1
      jlweeks  

    • How incredible. When will we ever learn? After we've consumed all of the resources at our disposal and kill each other off?

    • 1 year ago
  • Robert_Harris
    • +2
      Robert_Harris  

    • I've searched this island on Google earth many times and found very interesting. I never knew of it's past though. Love the post and hope to see and learn more on this place.

    • 1 year ago
  • trut
  • coolplanet
    • +1
      coolplanet  
    • trut:

      Soil erosion from massive deforestation makes it very diffucult to reforest.
      The Chinese learned this the hard way when they planted a billion trees in the 90s and most of them died.
      Jared Diamond proves that every civilization that has ever collapsed in world history began with deforestation (Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, 2005).

    • 1 year ago
  • trut
    • 0
      trut  
    • coolplanet:

      If you look at the first picture with the half buried statue there appears to be several feet of soil. I would have thought by now they could have replanted some trees even if it takes a little extra effort to get them started. I could get trees to live, I am sure of it.

    • 1 year ago
  • coolplanet
    • +1
      coolplanet  
    • Image
    • trut:

      Environment of Easter Island

      Rapa Nui is a barren island, but this was not always the case. Studies of pollen cores prove that the first Polynesian settlers found an island paradise of lush, subtropical forest. Within 400 years of colonization, deforestation was well underway.
      700 years after colonization, the forests were gone, every species of land bird was extinct and shellfish were overexploited. Without trees, the inhabitants could no longer make sea faring canoes with which to hunt porpoises, the main staple of their diet.
      Without the population lacking sea faring ability, Rapa Nui became a closed system. The inhabitants could not abandon the island and turned to intensive poultry production; rats also became a dietary staple.
      Without wood to burn for cooking and heating fires, sugarcane scraps, grass and sedges were used instead, which in turn impoverished the soil. The population crash happened about 200 years later. In 1722, Jacob Roggeveen found barren grassland, a landscape devoid of trees and shrubs. Botanists have since identified only 47 species of plants, two shrubs and two tree types. In recent years, the accidental introduction of the thistle to the island could become a serious problem.
      One of the tree types, the toromiro, used to grow in great numbers on Rapa Nui. It is a small leguminous tree with yellow flowers. Its beautiful and resistant wood was used for making, among other things, the famous moai 'kava kava'. Palm trees have been planted over the last 30 years and Easter Island is no longer the barren, treeless island that many texts lead you to believe.
      At the time Thor Heyerdahl visited Rapa Nui in 1956, there was apparently but one, very sick, toromiro left. Found by Thor at the base of the Rano Koa crater, he removed a single living branch bearing seed-filled pods and had it delivered to Professor Selling, who in turn took them to the Botanical Garden of Gotebourg.
      By 1980, there were two toromiro plants alive in Gotebourg and it was decided to attempt to reintroduce the plant to Rapa Nui. This and a second attempt in 1988 resulted in failure, due to a root nematode that killed all the seedlings.
      As of 1995 there are still no well-established toromiros on Rapa Nui and all the samples originate from just one tree. However, all is not lost, in 1994 four European botanic gardens, including the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, set up a special Toromiro Management Group to co-operate in the reintroduction project and the enlarging of the dangerously low gene pool of Rapa Nui toromiro.

      Continued @ http://www.apj.co.uk/rapanui_primer/primer_environment.asp

    • 1 year ago
  • trut
  • JanforGore
    • +1
      JanforGore  

    • Great post and pictures. Many civilizations before us followed the same path by overexhausting resources. Is there ever a time when we will actually learn from the past? I think now would be a good time.

    • 1 year ago
  • Ray126
    • +1
      Ray126  

    • I've been following your trips and exploits around the world for awhile now. Keep up the great work, this planet needs more people like you.

      Thank you.

    • 1 year ago
  • blaksony
    • +1
      blaksony  

    • Wow. I think im going to like this TV network, esp with Keith Olber coming on board. And this blog is pretty good also... . Great investivation... er, investigation that is. And good photos also, good work, Adam Yam. Looking forward to seeing more.

    • 1 year ago
  • coolplanet
Adam_Yamaguchi

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