The Downfall of Easter Island

When David Suzuki visited Hamilton College at the beginning of the semester, his main focus was on “foresight.” The intelligence and cognitive ability that human’s posses in order to exhibit forward thinking are unique and helpful for the individual and for society. David Suzuki expresses concern that we have lost the ability to use foresight and are on an unsustainable road towards disaster and crisis.

Jared Diamond, in his book Collapse, tries to identify the reason behind the collapse of many societies. One of the societies he looks at is Easter Island. Easter Island’s culture collapsed because they didn’t use, as David Suzuki would say, their “foresight”. Easter Island was a small island inhabited by about 800 South American Indians. For traditional and religious ceremonies, the Eastern Islanders used their resources to construct enormous, impressive statues. The ability to make these statues documents the high functioning level of their society.

Yet the abandon Easter Island was left as a barren landscape with few resources. So why did Easter Island collapse. Diamond has many interconnected reasons for the downfall of this isolated, advanced community. First, the Islanders overexploited their resources. The area was heavily deforested and the ground lay barren and infertile. This overexploitation was the key to their economy. Island economy consisted of deforesting the area to create large statues. However, when faced with these terrible environmental problems, the political order was thrown out and chaos ensued. In the end, instead of saving their resources in the time of the environmental disaster, the people cut down the last tree and made more statues in hope that the religious structures and god would save them. In the end, this over consumption, the very reason their society was successful, caused the Islanders society to disintegrate, “that leaves two main sets of factors behind Easter’s collapse: human environmental impacts, especially deforestation and destruction of bird populations; and the political, social, and religious factors behind the impacts…Easter’s isolation, a focus on statue construction…competition between clans and chiefs driving the erection of bigger statues requiring more wood, rope, and food”.

David Suzuki visited Hamilton College with a message. His warning and the cautionary lessons from Easter Island are strikingly clear. As aware, intelligent individuals in a high functioning society can we employ the “hindsight” of Easter Island’s fate to activate “foresight” and avoid the path to self-destruction or will we deplete our precious resource in order or worship our gods --- ego and materialism?