In the first chapter of his famous book, The Green History of the World (1992), Ponting tells an astonishing fable of human history, a fable derived from the history of Rapa Nui, a distant place on Earth. The island is located in the Pacific Ocean, 3500 km west of Chile; Its closest inhabited place is Pitcorn Island, 2,000 km to its west.
The trees on the modern island were recently retransplanted
Westerners also call it Easter Island because the first Europeans who encountered the island were sailors on a Dutch ship Elena on Easter Day in 1722. Elena's crew found 3,000 people on the island, living in humble huts or caves. They seem to be constantly fighting for the island's scarce food resources. In short, it seems to be an extremely barren place. However, visitors also found about 600 stone statues, each more than 6 meters tall. The statues are beautifully carved and many have Topknot (some weighing up to 10 tons) on top of their heads.
Of the rows of stone statues, only this one is the most spectacular
Carving, transporting and installing these statues certainly required great technical and managerial skills, but there is no indication that the inhabitants of Easter Island in the 18th century knew these skills. Moreover, it is difficult to understand how a society engaged in such a major project can be fed in such a barren environment. In the 18th century, there was only one wild tree on the island, a wild shrub. (Wild trees were extinct by the 20th century, but were later reintroduced from the Swedish Botanical Gardens, where the species was kept.) The only animal food seems to be chicken, as the islanders don't have boats and can't fish. Using modern techniques, such as studying pollen remains, to help archaeologists reconstruct ancient environmental landscapes, we have partially solved the mystery of Easter Island, and a sad story has since been revealed.
Stone buildings of unknown use
The migration to Easter Island occurred during the Holocene era, when about 1,500 years ago, twenty or thirty boat people came to settle on the island, from the island of Marquesas, which is now French Polynesia. Easter Island is small in size and has limited resources, and colonizing the island is not an easy task. The island is only 22.5 km long and no more than 11 km wide. There are no native mammals and fish stocks in the surrounding waters are limited. The settlers brought chickens and rats. They soon discovered that the only crop they were accustomed to, such as dioscaceae tubers, taro, bananas and coconuts, was the only one that flourished on the island. Therefore, chicken and sweet potatoes have become their basic food. The good news is that it doesn't take much effort to live on these basic foods. The island is heavily forested and has fertile volcanic ash. After some time, the population increased and a number of separate villages appeared, spread throughout the island. Competition between villages and village leaders used to take the form of war, but also a very modern way: competition to build monumental buildings. Modern researchers have examined ancient buildings such as stone statues by carbon dating and determined that in 700 AD, villagers began to build huge stone courtyards or ahus, and erected statues.
Stone construction
They may commemorate living or dead local chiefs, as some also have graves. Similar monuments have been found throughout Polynesia, but none as tall as Easter Island. As these societies prospered, economic and political aristocracy was formed, and the management and technical level of the islanders improved. Many Aarhus seem to have formed some relationship with the stars, suggesting that they knew astronomy and could infer that they were descendants of maritime peoples. The islanders even created some kind of simple writing. The extant text is carved on a wooden board called "Rangorango", a dark brown round wooden board, some like wooden paddles, carved with lines of patterns and text symbols. There are winged two-headed people; bipeds with hooked beaks, large eyes, and long horns on the sides of the head; There are threads, boats, lizards, frogs, fish, turtles and other fantasy and real things.
Replica of Lang Lang Lang Ke plank
The main mystery that archaeologists have to answer is how the statues were transported and placed in place. It seems that they were transported on rolling logs made of tree trunks. By about 500 years ago, the island's inhabitants had grown to about 7,000, and competition between villages was fierce. Building and transporting more and more statues meant that more and more trees were being cut down – until the last tree was cut down. Society soon collapsed.
Stone
There are still some unfinished statues left in the island's quarry, and its volcanic rock is only halfway carved, and it is clear that the disaster was unexpected. The loss of forests has had devastating consequences, as wood is used not only to transport statues, but also to build fishing boats and houses, to weave nets (taken from the fibers of the trees), and to fuel cooking and heating. People could no longer fish, make clothes, or build houses, and they were running out of food and began to live in caves or huts. The loss of forests has also led to soil erosion, which has reduced fertility and crop yields. Chicken became the number one delicacy in the recipe. People ended up struggling to build stone fortresses for chickens, and they defended chicken coops in deformity, even bleeding wars for them. Cannibalism occurs from time to time because of animal protein deficiency. Since ceremonies no longer revolve around the construction of statues, the political structure was also destroyed. In fact, the ancient tradition has completely disappeared, so that two centuries later, the inhabitants no longer know the island's past and the significance of the statues.
In short, driven by political and economic competition, population growth and resource consumption lead to sudden environmental and social collapse. The scariest aspect of this story is that the islanders and their leaders must have witnessed it happen. They must know that when they cut down the last trees, they are destroying their own future, the future of their children and grandchildren. But they cut down the tree anyway.
Is Rapa Nui an appropriate metaphor as we consider the larger trajectory of human history? After all, rapid changes over a certain period of time have caused environmental degradation, whether due to the extinction of giant soil animals in the Stone Age, or caused by excessive irrigation in Mesopotamia in 3000 BC or the Mayan lands 1000 years ago, are recurring themes in human history.
As global inequality rises, the amount of resources consumed skyrockets to support the enormous hierarchical structure of modern capitalist society. Modern society has its own competing monuments. Resources from water to trees are consumed faster than they regenerate; Trash from plastics to carbon-emitted waste can be disposed of haphazardly faster than it can be absorbed by the ecological cycle. Yet the population continues to grow, and politicians around the world are arguing for sustained economic growth, or even an acceleration of growth, so that poverty can be reduced in poor countries and living standards in rich countries can be maintained. But is growth actually sustainable? If consumption levels have reached dangerous levels, the idea that the entire population of the world will consume resources and produce garbage at the rate of consumption of resources and waste in the rich industrial countries is extremely frightening.
Gandhi, India's founding father, recognized this problem as early as 1928 when he wrote: "God forbid India to follow in the footsteps of the West and follow in the path of industrialization... If a country of 300 million people carried out similar economic development, it would plunder the whole world like locusts. "Nevertheless, capitalism, the main force of economic development in the world today, prospered by growth; The most powerful political and business leaders respond to requests from local voters for short-term projects and programs, like the statue-building leader on Rapa Nui Island. As on Rapa Nui Island, we do not seem capable of stopping the processes that threaten the future of our children and grandchildren. But maybe we can do a little better than the Easter Islanders. One of the most important reasons for this hope is that collective knowledge can now function more effectively on a large scale than before. If there are solutions to problems for humanity and the biosphere as a whole, then the global information network of modern humans can certainly find them. These networks have provided a variety of technological means to help us reshape the biosphere as we would like, and the vast web of modern collective knowledge will help us recognize the dangers of our growing ecological forces.
In general, the challenge is clear. To avoid a global repeat of the Easter Island disaster, we must find a more sustainable way to survive. We must use water, trees, energy and raw materials at a rate that can feed us for centuries, not decades; We must allow the amount of waste we produce to be safely absorbed without damaging our environment and surrounding organisms. Can we do this?