Printed on August 27, 2007
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An Easter Island Lesson
Melissa Harward
Intern, Digital Media
The world revolves around scarcity. There's simply not enough fresh water, nutritious food, or arable land to go around. Especially on an island the size of Washington, D.C.
Easter Island, located some miles off the coast of South America, was once a paradise. Enormous nut-bearing palm trees and other flora covered this island, making it a sort of Eden for its early inhabitants. These people, originally from Polynesia, settled the island, building massive moai statues, tributes to their ancestors.
After many years of slash and burn agriculture and deforestation however, this island paradise was quickly turned into a barren land. Once-friendly tribes turned against each other in the struggle to survive on limited resources. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and when the island was stripped of it's food sources, cannibalism emerged. People turned into savages.
Although the demise of Easter Island cannot be entirely blamed on its people, their seemingly careless use of limited resources began the spiral downwards. After watching Home, which even alluded to the struggles of Easter Island, I wonder what the world would be like if we were all in their situation. If Earth is an island, how long can our own resources last if we continue to use them carelessly? Would the world revert to economic cannibalism, each nation struggling to scrape every tiny crumb into its own hands?
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2 Comments
Looking at photos of Easter Island is so scary. If we don’t take action now, who knows what will become of our beloved planet. :-( I like to follow what other activists are doing to protect Mother Earth (http://www.changents.com/earthkeepers).
This posting makes a major and common assumption, that we, the 21st century inhabitants of planet Earth are locked into the cage of this one "island" in space. Yes, we need to be much better stewards of the Earth, but we need to also look beyond this little blue marble at the immense and limitless resources of space. We are bathed in 24 hour a day energy from the sun, and surrounded by floating rocks (asteroids) made up of all kinds of useful things - some asteroids contain more gold, platinum and precious metals than the world has ever used.
It is important we do not create a future in our minds that is locked into this one world concept, or our vision will narrow, killing hope and imagination. Instead we must break out of our mental cage and look to a future of limitless growth and expansion, with this precious planet as our starting point, not our end.
RNT
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