Eastern Island, also known as Rapa Nui is located in the South East Pacific and is famous for its approximately 1,000 carvings of human-faced statues. The famous carvings are massive, up to 12 meters /40 ft tall and 75 tons in weight. they were decorated on top with a soft red stone (Pukao) in the shape of a hat. the statues also have torsos buried beneath the heads. The statues on its platforms can be found ringing almost the entire coast of the island. Despite their seaside location, every single one of them appears to face inland and not out to sea. The build up appears to have stopped when around the time of European contact in 1722, when Dutch explorers landed on the island on Easter Day. Why the construction was abandoned is another mystery. It is known that disease ravaged the island's people after contact with the foreigners.
The island measures about 22 km/14 mi by 11 km/ 7mi at its furthest points and it is often said it can be traversed by foot in a single day.
The volcanic island is the most isolated inhabited land-mass on Earth. The closest inhabited land is the Pitcairn Islands, located about 1,900 km/ 1200 mi to the West. Chile, the closest South American country, is located about 3,700 km/ 2,300 mi to the East.
It has long being held to be the most important example of a traditional society destroying itself. When people first came to the island, around 1000 AD, they would have found the island overgrown with a dense forest of palm trees and shrubs, among other vegetation. In centuries that followed it was deforested until, by the 19th century, the landscape was utterly barren.
Scholars take this example as a parable of today's global environmental problems. Data shows that by early historic times the deforestation of Easter Island was already complete. An anthropologist who collected the data said, "Easter Island has become a paragon for pre-historic human-induced ecological catastrophe and cultural collapse."
The island had a relatively simple ecosystem with vegetation once dominated by millions of palm trees. Almost all of the palm seed shells discovered on the island were found to have been gnawed by rats. Thousand of rat bones have been found, and crucially, much of the damage to forestry appeared to have been done before by fires on the island. Exactly how rats got on to the island is not known. Once they arrived, the rats found palm nuts that offered an almost unlimited high-quality food supply. Under ideal conditions, rats reproduce so rapidly that their numbers double every 47 days; unchecked, a single mating pair can produce a population of nearly 17 million in just over 3 years. It demonstrates that rats were capable, on their own, to deforesting large lowland coastal areas in about 200 years or less.
The environmental catastrophe of Easter Island has been masked by the speculation about the intentions of people that inhabited the island. It is the clearest example of a society that destroyed itself by overexploiting its own resources. Once tree clearing started, it didn't stop until the whole forest was gone. Chemical analyses of teeth from 41 human skeletons excavated on the island revealed the inhabitants ate rats rather than seafood.
Easter Island's fate could one day be our own. We do not dare abuse the trees and animals around us, because if we do, we will go down together.
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