What have we learned about sustainability? Up to now, our discussion on sustainability and the consequences of neglecting it has remained for the most part theoretical. Has there been a real ecological disaster that has occurred in an unsustainable community? The resounding answer is yes.  An intriguing example of this is the haunting story of Easter Island.

When visited by the Dutch Admiral Roggeveen on Easter, 1722, it was

A society in a primitive state with about 3,000 people living in squalid reed huts or caves, engaged in almost perpetual warfare and resorting to cannibalism in a desperate attempt to supplement the meager food supplies available on the island. (1)

But, despite all the poverty and degradation,

Scattered across the island were over 600 massive stone statues, on average over twenty feet high. When anthropologists began to consider the history and culture of Easter Island early in the twentieth century they agreed on one thing. The primitive people living in such poverty-stricken and backward conditions when the Europeans first visited the island could not have been responsible for such a socially advanced and technologically complex task as carving, transporting and erecting the statues. (2)

What did this mean? Well, this meant that it hadn’t always been this way. People that brutally murder each other for food don’t have the time to carve enormous impressive statues together. For a while scholars were puzzled as to what had happened. Had this been an entirely different civilization altogether? Or had a disaster occurred, reducing the natives to their present state? It was soon discovered that the society’s downfall was due to a catastrophe. The island was never rich in natural resources, but petty clan rivalries contributed to environmental negligence. They competed, building statues and platforms of stone.  But soon afterwards they realized that they needed some way to carry these boulders across the island.

The Easter Islanders' solution to the problem of transport provides the key to the subsequent fate of their whole society. Lacking any draught animals they had to rely on human power to drag the statues across the island using tree trunks as rollers. The population of the island grew steadily from the original small group in the fifth century to about 7,000 at its peak in 1550. Over time the number of clan groups would have increased and also the competition between them. By the sixteenth century hundreds of ahu* had been constructed and with them over 600 of the huge stone statues. Then, when the society was at its peak, it suddenly collapsed leaving over half the statues only partially completed around Rano Raraku quarry. The cause of the collapse and the key to understanding the 'mysteries' of Easter Island was massive environmental degradation brought on by deforestation of the whole island. (3)
      *platforms

Houses could no longer be built because timber was no longer available and there was no fuel for cooking food.  Food was difficult to grow because the trees no longer held the water in the ground, and any rain that fell just ran off ran off the land into the ocean, unable to nourish the plant life that remained.

Generations later, when the Europeans asked the islanders what had happened to their land and their nation, they only responded that they didn’t know. They only knew that once their civilization had been greater and their environment had able to sustain them.

The situation with Easter Island should serve not only as a sorrowful legend, but also as a warning. What happens when a people throws aside concern for the land and resources around them? Desolation, Starvation, and even Death. We cannot afford to make the same mistake the Easter Islanders have.  The fact is that we need the natural resources around us to support us. We have been given these lands to be good stewards of them. As citizens of the world, we must take care of them and move towards sustainability, since only sustainable development will last across the ages. Our goal should be to secure the future for later generations, thereby allowing them to have as good a life as we have had.