Response to the Easter Island Chapter from Collapse

From reading the “Easter Island” chapter by Jared Diamond, what I find the most interesting of is the way he described the people who lived in Polynesia. “Yet Easter Island’s prehistoric Polynesian population had owned no canes, no wheels, no machines, no metal tools, no draft animals, and no means other than human muscle power to transport and raise the statues.” I was surprised that they could do such thing with such effort by erecting the heavy stones to build beautiful statues. As the reactions of the Europeans, “were incredulous that Polynesians, ‘mere savages’, could have created the statues or the beautifully constructed stone platforms.” Followed by his reading, when I read further and find out that the Easter’s geography, I was astonished that they could survive on their native lands. As the geographic factors that Jared Diamond described, the Easter Islanders has fewer food sources compared to the Pacific Islanders, and the weather/climate is not as good as the others’ which has affected the agriculture. However, “Easter Islanders did succeed in getting enough water for drinking, cooking, and growing crops, but it took effort.” Throughout the chapter, Jared Diamond has provided a lot of interesting facts about the Easter Islander’s history. Although they do not have a lot of domesticated animals or food compared to the Pacific Islanders, they are able to use what they have to live the best they can with effort. Such as the rocks they have has benefit them from having better soil to grow things. Though they do not have a lot of water, they have drink sugarcane juice to maintain their lives. More important, “While Polynesians lacked compasses and writing and metal tools, they were masters of navigational arts and of sailing canoe technology.” I thought that the Polynesians are amazing, and they are able to live through their life from advantages and disadvantages. Especially the way they constructed, transported, carved, and erected the statues without any machines. My reactions are similar to Jared Diamond that “what megalomania possessed its carvers”.

When Jared Diamond talks about the competitions that the Easter Islanders have over better statues, it is another interesting aspects that I find it incredulous. “The increase in statue size with time suggests competition between rival chiefs commissioning the statues to outdo each other.” Because of the competitions of statues trying to outdo the others, it caused them to collapse regarding on loss of resources. Such as the way Jared Diamond described, “Similarly displaying their wealth and power by building ever larger, more elaborate, more ostentatious houses”, it is a metaphor of what’s going on in our society. We are very similar to the Easter Islanders that we are competing for power and wealth. It also mentioned that because of the competitions over statues, “the work of constructing them added about 25% to the food requirements of Easter’s population over the 300 peak yeas of construction.” Because people are working so hard to build taller and better statues than the other clans, they have over used the food that they have. In addition to that, they have cut down more trees than they used to be, which lead to the tragedy of collapse. From the botanical surveys of plants, it said that “For hundreds of thousands of years before human arrival and still during the early days of human settlement, Easter was not at all a barren wasteland but a subtropical forest of tall trees and woody bushes.” Since the Easter Islanders used the trees for making canoes, ropes …etc to outdo the others, it caused deforestation. As it mentioned in the chapter, “the sizes of statues had been increasing may reflect not only rival chiefs vying to outdo each other, but also more urgent appeals to ancestors necessitated by the growing environmental crisis”. Without trees, the people in Easter Island could not fuel to keep themselves warm during winter, and it caused them to reduce many activities that relates to fuel. Furthermore, “most sources of wild food were lost”, which leads to starvation, population crash, then to cannibalism. Because of the mistakes that the Easter Islanders had made, it leads their society to collapse. "Easter's isolation makes it the clearest example of a society that destroyed itself by over exploiting its own resources."

“The overall picture for Easter is the most extreme example of forest destruction in the Pacific, and among the most extreme in the world: the whole forest gone, and all of its tree species extinct. Immediate consequences for the islanders were losses of raw materials, losses of wild-caught foods, and decreased crop yields. Raw materials lost or else available only in greatly decreased amounts consisted of everything made from native plants and birds, including wood, rope, bark to manufacture back cloth, and feathers.” The quote basically draws my point of view of parallels between Easter Island and our civilization. In Easter Island, the main reasons that it collapsed are due to human environmental impacts, deforestation, and political, social, and religious factors. In our society, everything seems to be enough and we never thought of the day that things will run out. As what we talked about in class, and the previous unit, now a day everything is industrialized which it requires fossil fuels. If one day the main resources we needed is running out, all the machines will eventually stop. We resemble the Easter Islanders as the way Jared Diamond described one of the theories, “Easter Islander surely wouldn’t have been so foolish as to cut down all their trees, when the consequences would have been so obvious to them.” “Like modern loggers, did he shout ‘Jobs, not trees!’? Or: ‘Technology will solve our problems, never fear, we’ll find a substitute for wood’?” I think most of us think like what Jared Diamond said; we rely on technologies to solve the problems for us instead of paying close attention to what is happening now. Other than that we have different situations as the Easter Islanders, I believe that our consequences will be very similar. I totally agree with what Jared Diamond said in the very end of this chapter that “if mere thousands of Easter Islanders with just stone tools and their own muscle power sufficed to destroy their environment and thereby destroyed their society, how can billions of people with metal tools and machine power now fail to do worse?” What has happened to the Easter Islanders is a metaphor of what is going to happen to us. Especially the way we cut down trees, and doing other things to harm the environment. (Pollution, global warming...etc.) In the end of the chapter, Jared Diamond said that "the reason for Easter's unusually severe degree of deforestation isn't that those seemingly nice people really were unusually bad or improvident. Instead, they had the misfortune to be living in one of the most fragile environments, at the highest risk for deforestation, of any Pacific People." This quote has make me feel even more certain that our society will collapse because we are improvident. Also, we are not in an environment that are highly risk for deforestation. Therefore, by looking at what is happening in our society, I do believe it will collapse. Like what Jared Diamond said, the metaphor is imperfect, but I still think that once the collapse happened, it is impossible for us to flee or turn for help just like the Easter Islanders.