Nick Drake

Easter Island or Rapanui in Polynesian, is located at 27^o South which is exactly as far South from the equator as Houston, Texas is North, it has a mild sub-tropical climate, and its volcanic origins make its soil fertile.

"In theory, this combination of blessings should have made Easter a miniature paradise, remote from the problems that beset the rest of the world" Source: Easter’s End, August 1995.

The island is 64 miles across and is the worlds most isolated piece of habitable land. It is 2,000 miles from the nearest continent, South America; 1,400 miles from the nearest habitable island, Pitcarin.

The Dutch explorer, Jacob Roggeveen landed on Easter Sunday in 1722, which is where the island gets it’s name. His first comment on Easter: "We originally, from a further distance, have considered the said Easter as sandy, the reason for that us this, that we counted as sand the withered grass, hay, or other scorched and burnt vegetation, because it’s wasted appearance could give no other impression than of a singular poverty and bareness".

When Roggeveen arrived on Easter, there were no trees or bushes over ten feet in height. There was no firewood for fuel and the native animals included nothing larger than insects. The only domesticated animals were chickens.

Any Islander’s that greeted Roggeveen and Captain James Cook when he visited in 1774 did so by swimming or canoeing to the explorer’s ships. The indigenous peoples’ crafts were poorly constructed, could hold no more than two people and were not sea-worthy for any great period of time.

Easter is most famous for it’s gigantic statues which weighed up to 82-270 tons, these statues were built with no power, no animals, no wheels and with no power than human muscle. The stone for these statues came from the north-east, quarried at Rano Raraku, red stone used for crowns to decorate more important statues came from an inland site in the south-west called Puna-Pau.

Islanders grew bananas, taro, sweet potato, sugar-cane, and other indigenous Polynesian crops. The islands only domestic animal was the chicken and rats were introduced as stowaways in the European ships. The best farmland was in the south and east, the best fishing ground was found in the north and west coasts.

The identification of the best areas, establishing extracting and redistributing all those raw materials across the island required an efficient, well-managed, well-respected political system. Why when Roggeveen arrived in 1722 was he met by such a barren environment, what happened to this bountiful paradise?

The first evidence of human activity on the island dates back to A.D.400-700, originally thought to be from Polynesia.

Statue construction on the island peaked around A.D.1200-1500

The population of the island during this time, A.D.1200-1500, lie between 7,000 up to 20,000 people which is a little high considering the environmental capacity of the land and resources.

30,000 before the first humans arrived, Easter was a sub-tropical forest consisting of woody areas, bushy floors and towering trees above. On ground level, there were shrubs, herbs, ferns and grasses. In the forests, a rope yielding plant named Hauhau grew. Also grew an Easter palm tree, which resembled the Chilean-wine palm which grew up to 80ft. tall, which would later be used for transport, fishing and fire.

Unlike in Polynesia where over 90% of garbage heap bones were from fish, the coral-less, cooler Easter allowed only shallow water fishing in a few places. Less than one quarter of bones found from A.D.900-1300 were from fish, the inhabitants ate instead porpoises which accounted for one third of their total diet.

The porpoise caught was the common species of dolphin and could weigh up to 165lbs. It lived out at sea meaning capture could only have been from boats constructed on the island using the native palm tree, and then harpooned out at sea.

Easter had twenty-five nesting species of bird, making it the most richest breeding site in the Pacific. Birds included, the albatross, boobies, frigate birds, fulmars, petrels, prions, shearwaters, terns, storm petrels and tropic birds. Land birds were also eaten including barn owls, herons, parrots and rail. Bird stew would be seasoned with the meat from the rats who came to the island with the Europeans.

And so, we are left with an image of Easter as a beautiful paradise 1600 years ago. Why did this all change?

The destruction of Easter’s forests started around AD800, a few centuries after the first humans arrived. From this period onwards, charcoal from the burning of fires is found in sediment cores. As forests were felled, grasses replaced the lost trees and after 1400, the palm was extinct from Easter. The Hauhau rope tree was not extinct during the Polynesian times, but there weren’t enough to make any rope. After 1400, most if not all of the forest from Easter was lost. Trees were cleared for gardens, used for canoe and ship building, to transport the hundred tonne statues across the island using primitive transportation techniques which are 100% reliable on wood for rollers and support. Wood was also used to burn for fire, for use in home construction, seeds deposited were eaten by rats and when bird populations began to decline, the seeds and fruit were not taken anywhere and so the forests of Easter vanished.

Without exception, every single species of land bird became extinct. Even shellfish were overexploited, until islanders ate sea shells. Porpoise bones disappeared from the dinning table around 1500 as the trees needed to build the boats and spear the fish off-shore were now extinct.

In now desperate measures to survive, the people intensified chicken production and turned to the only other food source, humans.

As there was no wood left for burning, islanders instead burnt old grasses, sugar-canes, and sedges which too helped the environmental destruction and bio-diversity crisis on Easter. The deforestation left areas of soil open, where the wind and rain eroded it, the sun dried it then the nutrients seeped out and the soil was useless.

"On Easter as in modern America, society was held together by a complex political system to redistribute locally available resources and to integrate the economies of different areas"

Source: Easter’s End, August 1995.

With the disappearance of food surpluses, Easter could no longer afford to feed and support the chiefs, bureaucrats and priests who had kept a complex society running. Local chaos replaced centralised government and a warrior class took over from the hereditary class. The warriors ruled from between 1600-1700 and their spears and weapons still litter the ground today.

Why didn’t they realise what was happening and replant the trees?

The destruction of Easter happened not quickly but over a period of many decades. Year to year changes would go un-noticed. The building block for modern America’s success and power is found in oil. The building block for Easter island was wood. Without wood from the forests, the statues could not be transported, people wouldn’t have fires for heat, cooking etc, carvers, bureaucrats, chiefs; many people had a vested interest in the continued destruction of the forests.

In answer to the original question, yes, a human-made environmental catastrophe did take place on Easter Island, an island free from the troubles that burden the rest of the world. Also quite significantly, the damage to Easter was done by a population with no contact with the outside world, away from the European explorers seeking out a paradise away from a troubled home.

The true significance of the event is that today, our world is facing a future similar to Easter’s. Resources under threat today are fossil fuels, the world’s fisheries and forests. All once found, are under threat because the building blocks of the western worlds success and power is found in those very resources. The vested interests of the western and civilised people, governments and most importantly businesses involved, survive and exist on the continued destruction of the world.

NTD. 180500 - Word count: 1,377

A copy of this essay may be found at the following address:

http://www.geocities.com/nick1_drake/easter.html

Easter End - http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/3969/lasttree.html

Monument Builders of Rapanui - http://oregon.uoregon.edu/~osma/RAPANUI.HTML

Rapanui (Easter Island) - http://www2.hawaii.edu/usr-cgi/ssis/~ogden/piir/pacific/Rapanui.html

History of Easter Island - http://web.bu.edu/jgfox/history.html