Ecological Suicide of Society: The Supposed Last Generation

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Almost everyone knows them, the roughly 1500-year-old Moai, the colossal stone statues of the Polynesian Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean, but few recognize their decline as a metaphor for the ecological suicide of a society that has destroyed its own. livelihoods from rampant overexploitation and finally perished due to climate change. This happened long before the first European navigators set foot on the most isolated island in the world, as isolated as our planet between Mercury and Venus.

The monumental Moai statues have been a World Heritage Site since 1995. Once 683 figures were cataloged, later experts counted more than 1000 sculptures, some still count.

Erich von Däniken has suggested that aliens may have carved statues from volcanic rock and created the robotic features of the “cosmonauts”. The islanders themselves consider the statues a religious cult of the dead, monuments to famous leaders and relatives. The twelve clans, the “great powers” of the time, had been in an “arms race” for centuries. They destroyed each other’s moai and built new, larger ones. This required more wood and ropes.

Palm trees up to three meters high, which covered the entire island around 900 AD, fell victim to deforestation in the following centuries. The result was severe soil erosion from rain and wind. Crop yields fell and food became scarce. After 1650 there was not even enough firewood to survive the cold, rainy and stormy winter months. Civilization collapsed, anarchy and cannibalism reigned, people hid in caves, military leaders expelled the priestly caste.

When Jacob Roggeveen (1659–1729), a Dutch navigator and explorer, arrived on the island on Easter Sunday 1722 (hence the later name of the island), the area had already been shaved bald. Captain Cook observed 50 years later that the islanders were “small, thin, restless and miserable”.

But allegedly the last generation was not the last. Today, about 800 people live on the small island.

Source: Blick