History Repeats Itself

I see many similarities between the decline of the ancient civilization on Easter Island and events in North American culture. Easter Island can be seen as a miniature North America, a small scale New World, a pint-sized land of opportunity.

When the first Polynesians settlers arrived on Easter Island They, like our fabled pilgrims, were welcomed by lush forests full of food, building materials, and natural resources ripe for the picking. So, they, like the fist Europeans to land here, decided to settle and why not; to them Easter Island was a virtual cornucopia of comfortable living. So, these Polynesian Pilgrims like there North American counterparts began to prosper and multiply just like any group would if it stumbled upon a cache of resources. Easter Island developed a government and a complex political system similar to ours.

After a while, the Easter Islanders began constructing large stone statues in their spare time. The size of your clan’s statue undoubtedly became a symbol of your wealth and prosperity. As a result the statue’s kept getting bigger and bigger just like the islands population. These seemingly purposeless statues are analogous to North America’s huge houses and gigantic SUV’s; the bigger your house and SUV the better everyone thinks you are. When your neighbor gets a Chevy Trailblazer and a hot tube you’ve just got to have GMC Yukon and an Olympic size pool.

One major difference between North America and Easter Island is that Easter Island is only 64 square miles. So, with their population growing as quickly as it was they reached critical mass rather quickly. The growing population of Easter Island was cutting down the forest faster than it could regenerate; they were outgrowing their resource base. The Easter Islanders, like citizens of the US, could watch as their over consumption destroyed the forest along with varieties of sea and land birds. As the forest disappeared so did the materials needed to transport and erect their statues, resulting in the abandoned statues that can be found all over Easter Island today. Perhaps in a few hundred years one will find abandoned SUV’s and vacant mansions littering the coastlines of North America.

With the decline of their food supply Easter Island could no longer feed their chiefs and bureaucrats who kept their complex society running smoothly, resulting in a regression to survival of the fittest; eat or be eaten, literally.

By the time Easter Island was discovered by Europeans there wasn’t a single bush or tree over ten feet tall, no native animals larger than insects, and the human population had crashed. The question is, do we want to find ourselves in this same predicament? Every day our population increases and our resource base decreases just like Easter Island. I’d say that the biggest difference between us and the Easter Islanders is that we, unlike them, have a recorded history to look at. We have the benefit of being able to look at the fate that Easter Island suffered or the fate that the Mayans suffered and learn from it.

-Wilson Mack