The Rapa Nui Parable

1. The Rapa Nui Parable

2. On Easter Day, 1722 Dutch sailors sighted an island so treeless and eroded that they mistook is barren hills for dunes. • It measured 22 by 11km, roughly the size of Calgary and 4000km from the next closest significant land mass in the south Pacific Ocean. • They named it Easter Island.

3. 4000 Km Away

4. A Mystery • They were amazed as drew closer to see hundreds of stone statues, some a tall as an Amsterdam House. • How could these statues come to be there? The island was desolate with only about few thousand islanders whose tiny canoes were made of scrapes of wood and were the worst in the Pacific.

5. Rapa Nui • Polynesians are believed to have landed around AD 700, sailing from the west. They lived an isolated existence for the next thousand years. • They called it Rapa Nui

6. A Lush Island • Rapa Nui was originally covered with a forest of Chilean wine palms that could grow as big as an oak • There were no native edible plants and the climate was too cold for breadfruit or cocoanut palms but it was rich in sea food: fish, seals, porpoises, turtles and nesting sea birds

7. Alien Invasion • The settlers brought many alien species to the island: • Bananas • Taro • Sweet potato • Sugarcane • Paper mulberry • Chickens • Dogs • Rats • Forests were cut down to grow these plants for food and stone/wood houses built to raise chickens

8. Moai • To honor they ancestry, they carved and placed immense stone figures - moai • the statues were overseeing the people, part of a Polynesian tradition of ancestor worship but on a scale seen nowhere else. • With their backs to the sea they could inspire and protect the Islanders.

9. The Cost of the Moai • The Moai took a tremendous amount of natural resources and human energy; the actual carving of each statue, the finished product hauled to its final location and erected. • It is not known exactly how the moai were moved but the process almost certainly required human energy, ropes, wooden sledges, lifting logs and/or rollers. • There are nearly 900 moai in various stages of completion, some stones weighed 80t, and were transported 16km from the quarry.

10. The Zenith • The society flourished with abundant sea life and farming,from at about AD 1000, Rapa Nui's population rapidly grew to 12,000 by 1550. • They built villages with good house on stone footings and cleared the best land farming. • They split into clans and ranks with nobles, priest and commoners • Moai carving and transport were in full swing from 1400 to 1600, just 122 years before first contact with European visitors to the island.

11. Catastrophe • Rapa Nui underwent a radical change in the 1600s. The construction of moai stopped and many were toppled. Legends talk of a time of warfare, disease, starvation and cannibalism. • Archaeological evidence includes: • The disappearance the island's bird life seems to have disappeared • Disappearance of evidence of people eating porpoise and tuna. • wooden carvings of emaciated people • the appearance of a new implement - spear tips. • Violence and death took hold in the island's society - the people were at war with themselves.

12. What Went Wrong?

13. The Evidence • Studies of pollen from lakebeds shows Easter Island was once covered with palms. Yet the Dutch in 1722 described an island devoid of trees. • The disappearance of tree pollen marked the cutting of the last tree and coincides with the civil war: • The society relied on wood to make canoes. Treeless, their ability to fish for food was limited • The deforested land suffered from soil depletion and erosion, food production drastically declined

14. What Happen to the Trees? • Several factors contributed to the deforestation but it was the combination that was devastating in the end: • The clearing of forests for agriculture • the introduction of the Polynesian rat that ate the palm's seeds • the island's cold climate due to its southern latitude and the climatic effects of the Little Ice Age (1650 to 1850) slowed forest regeneration • House and canoe construction that required large quantities of logs • making moai used huge numbers of trees. The statues had been getting more elaborate at that time, which depleted the forests ever more rapidly.

15. The Moai’s Promise • After the last tree was cut down, for a generation, there was enough old lumber to continue building boats to fish and erect Moai. • But sometime in late 1500 the last piece of wood was gone. There were no boats in which to fish or eventually to escape the island • The islanders, under the promise of the return of plenty in exchange for the their faith and honour, continued to carve Moai. With out wood, the Moai could not be moved.The islanders believed that Moai would walk themselves to the alter sites. • The days plenty did return and the Moai did not walk. The islanders turned on each other in civil war and on the Moai who did not honor their promise.

16. The Last Tree • Trapped in a hell of their own making, without a way off the island, the islanders turned on each other. Decades of misery followed, warfare, famine and disease, eventually by the time the Dutch arrived, only several thousand islanders were left and all the Moai were toppled. • It was a self-inflicted ecological disaster. • Easter Island is an amazing example of total deforestation, sparked by cultural obsession to complete the colossal stone projects. The islanders' cult of ancestor worship destroyed their civilization and cost many of them their lives.

17. Rapa Nui’s Lesson The islanders carried out for us the experiment of permitting unrestricted population growth, profligate use of resources, destruction of the environment and boundless confidence in their religion to take care of the future. The result was an ecological disaster leading to a population crash … Do we have to repeat the experiment on a grand scale? … Is the human personality always the same as that of the person who felled the last tree? Paul Bahn and John Flenley, Easter Island, Easter Island 1992