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Easter Island tells us all we need to know about our greatness and our fallibility, and also about our prognosis as a species. We learn from Easter Island or we repeat Easter Island.
Once the scene of unprecedented human inventiveness, its fast rising civilization was just as quickly destroyed by catastrophic human blindness. Pride preceded, and partly, caused the fall.
The few dozen Rapa Nui Polynesians who colonized Easter Island, 800 years ago, must have been among the smartest and most resourceful people ever to have lived.
Start with their journey—about 1500 miles as the condor flies, over open ocean, against strong prevailing wind and current. Tacking back and forth would have been technically possible, but impractical in distance and time. Instead, they must have planned far ahead to anticipate and exploit the reverse El Nino winds and currents that occurred about once every four years.
Easter Island is a tiny triangular target, literally in the middle of nowhere. Its three sides measure only 10 miles, 11 miles, and 17 miles—the above water tip of an 11,000 foot volcanic mountain, created in lonely ocean isolation by hotspot magma. The nearest island is 1200 miles away, the nearest mainland 2000.
Hundreds of years before Columbus, the Polynesians dwarfed him in navigational skills. They found their way by reading the sky, deciphering the subtle clues provided by ocean salinity and currents, and by following the patterns of bird flight.
The Polynesians were also brilliant at boat building and logistics. Their expedition had to contain enough people to form a self sustaining breeding colony; enough plants, seedlings, and animals to create a self sustaining farming community; and sufficient means to provide food and water for a long journey of uncertain duration.
The oral tradition of the Rapa Nui describes seven exploratory canoes sent out to survey the southeastern Pacific, preparatory to finding a site for colonization. Great obstacles select for only the smartest, the most resilient, and the luckiest people. The Rapa Nui colonists proved to be all of these. Many other less skilled Polynesian thrusts into the unknown must have ended in failure.
The Easter Island they discovered was ill favored compared to other larger and less isolated Pacific Islands. It had little water, poor soil, and no abundant coastal reefs to support a super abundant fish population.
But in its virgin state, Easter Island had its charms and provided opportunities enough to lure the colonists away from their overpopulated parent island. It was covered by tens of millions of trees of about 20 different species; was a predator free, safe haven nesting spot, and port in the storm, for many varieties of birds; and its waters contained 130 species of fish, 30% of which were endemic.
The Rapa Nui were brilliant improvisers and inventors, getting the most out of the fairly meagre resources offered by Easter Island. Within just a couple of centuries, their population had exploded from under 100 to somewhere about 10,000-15,000. Some of their agricultural wealth came from non-sustainable slash and burn agriculture, but they also applied the brilliant strategy of placing billions of mulch rocks throughout the island to protect crops from the cold and salty winds; to retain moisture; and to provide precious nutrients.
The abundance afforded by agricultural productivity led, as it often does, to a highly stratified society, busily engaged in monument building to establish the power and prestige of those presiding at the top of the hierarchy. But never before in human history has such a small and isolated place created so many large and such remarkable monuments.
The 1000 statues are seen almost wherever you look on Easter Island. They are a wonder of brilliant engineering, artistic creativity, and craftsmanship- and also of human greed and vainglory. In the early years the statues were just a few feet high, weighed just a few tons, and were roughly hewn. Their size progressively increased until some were more than 40 feet tall and weighed 80 tons. The craftsmanship and creativity also improved with time, so that the latest statues can compete with any large statues done anywhere in elegance and refinement.
Once carved at a centralized quarry that had the best rock, the massive statues had to be marched over many miles and over many rolling hills to their ultimate destinations all along its circumference.
Tellingly, about half the island's statues were still in preparation at the moment when the civilization collapsed. They stand as a haunting reminder of the greatness we can attain and its futility.
The Rapa Nui were intellectuals of the highest order, among the few peoples in the history of the world to ever independently develop a system of writing. And all this was done in complete isolation, without the usually necessary trade in ideas that comes with the trade of goods. A temporary flash of brilliance, crushed by a lack of wisdom and restraint.
There is great controversy about what led to the collapse of the statue building Rapa Nui civilization. The prime candidates probably all played a contributing role: overpopulation; slash and burn agriculture; rats eating the nuts needed for forest regeneration; climate change, perhaps due to loss of forest; and the killing off of seabirds whose guano helped fertilize the island. The main culprits in most scenarios are man and rats, two intertwined species both blessed with the ability to exploit opportunities, but cursed with the tendency to over-exploit them.
Easter Island is now one of the saddest place on earth, barren scrub dotted with the most magnificent reminders of lost past vainglory. Most great civilizations have similarly been undone just as they attain their peak- by the same forces of greed, population expansion, resource depletion, and conspicuous consumption. A self-controlled, self sustaining relationship to our world doesn't seem to be built into our genome.
Those who don't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. We are mindlessly repeating Easter Island. Archeologists of the future, if any are left after our self made apocalypse, will wonder how we could be both so smart and so dumb.
Easter Island is the perfect metaphor for man's seemingly inescapable fate. I love this place, but sometimes a metaphor can make you cry.
