Easter Island Rapa

Easter Everywhere?

By Richard Romano on August 1st, 2011

Here is some interesting summer reading for you.

Since the day it was discovered by Europeans (Easter Sunday, 1722), Easter Island has had a profound air of mystery about it. In particular, the giant stone statues, numbering in the thousands, have raised questions of how and why the small island population carved and moved these mammoth monoliths (each one weighs several tons). I have personally been fascinated by the place ever since seeing it on In Search Of… , about the decline and fall of several civilizations, he holds up Eastern Island (or Rapa Nui, as it’s called by the natives) as the emblematic example of a ecologically reckless culture that destroyed its own environment, cutting down every last tree on the island to make rollers to move their giant statues. A popular meme has it that the person cutting down the last tree on Easter Island knew perfectly well that it was the last tree and cut it down anyway. How’s that for reckless? The story of Easter Island and its self-generated ecocide has become something of a cautionary tale for us in the West who teeter on the brink of environmental disasters of our own making. (The “cautionary tale” even featured in a science-fiction novel called The Stone Gods  about ecocide.)