Easter Island with Kaye and Merry (2000-2001)
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My two sisters and I decided we wanted to see the beginning of the new millennium arrive while we were sipping cocktails on a remote island, in the middle of the Pacific, this side of the International Date Line. Thus we could be among the last in the southern hemisphere to say farewell to the 20th century and the expiring 2nd millennium. We chose Rapa Nui, Easter Island, Te Pito O Te Henua, the “Uterus of the World” as the destination for our Millennium retreat. For me and Kaye this meant another familiar Christmas together with our feet in the conjoined waters of the ocean. For Merry it was a chance to take an extended vacation and get to know us on our first triple sibling vacation. We flew to Santiago, Chile in December 2000 and stayed there and in Viña del Mar for a couple of days before transferring to our millennial goal: Easter Island — Rapa Nui.
The “mysterious stone statues” (moai) of Easter Island have made it world famous. Waste middens across the island attest to what had been a complex agricultural system in the first several centuries of the island’s human habitation. During the island’s flourishing, traditional Polynesian farming practices were supplemented with deep-sea catches, indicating advanced ship building. In addition to the agricultural and sailing skills of the islanders, the sculptural wonders of the weighty moai reflect skilled quarrying and transportation techniques.
The theories regarding the Easter Island civilization’s destruction have added tragic fame to this isolated human outpost. Rapa Nui transformed from a society with a complex set of villages, a unique written script, and a ceremonial stone-carving tradition into a malnourished, impoverished, disease-riddled, and broken clade of families. The formerly complex civilization was unable to sustain their written language — a language now lost to history except for an untranslatable set of carved fragments.
The explanatory theories our local tour guides presented to us were a synthesis of the various ideological camps that have debated the causes of this devastating collapse. The predations of colonialism were the literal nails in the coffin of Easter Island culture (thanks to diseases and enslavement). Another culprit which may have led to the destruction of the island’s civilization was ecocide. There was never a Lorax on Easter Island to prevent the wholesale destruction of the island’s indigenous forests. Once the last “Truffula tree” (Paschalococos disperta) was felled (around 1650 CE), some scholars have argued, the rest of the complex civilization eventually toppled into the island’s volcanic ash along with it. Other scholars have challenged the ecocide hypothesis. No credible archaeologists or historians challenge the notion that the deforestation of the island was an ecological disaster.
All reputable scholars agreed that the native population had crashed due European diseases and malnutrition. The written language was forgotten, and the already devastated civilization was subjected to further atrocity when hundreds of the Easter Islanders were enslaved and taken to work on the guano mines off the Peruvian coast (guano being useful for producing niter used to make gunpowder). Scholars agreed that the once lushly-forested island had become a nightmarish wasteland, both agriculturally and culturally, well before the arrival of permanent European settlement. There had been an ecological and social disaster. But were they related?
Whether or not the deforestation led to immediate social disintegration is a matter of debate. Soil erosion rapidly increased without the palm forest cover. Throughout the 19th century, crop yields declined. Trapped on the island and unable to combat European diseases, the entire population then collapsed and with it much of the culture that had been a part of the community for five hundred years. Some anthropologists argued that the population decline was due exclusively to European diseases (which may be true) while others point out a loss of seafaring (since there was no longer any wood with which to build sturdy ships) led to a decline in nutritional variety, the loss of top soil led to a loss of productivity and impoverished nutrition. When sheep were introduced to the island in the 19th century, the already perilous fate of the unprotected topsoil was turned to stone. These ecological losses led to social unrest. According to local oral tradition, the Rapa Nuians began to devour each others’ flesh. (This has not been conclusively demonstrated by archaeologists, although our native tour-guide showed us a cave which is known as the Cave of the Man Eaters.) Any way you slice it, the tragedy of Easter Island resulted from human-caused catastrophe, social and ecological, not a “natural” one.
Although the dreadful decline of the island allows us to contemplate the potential catastrophes awaiting humanity, our vacation experience on the island demonstrated the values of cooperation and hope. Our New Year’s Eve dinner, set outside in the open air, became a multi-cultural celebration of many peoples and pasts and stories, happily sharing together the onset of the new age, full of hope in the Everything. That night we watched fireworks shot over the water from the jetty at midnight. Each colorful burst shouted joyfully of the arrival of the new millennium: bits of burning embers of many colors sparkling and flaring and then slowly falling into the sea.
The next day, Merry and I hiked up the crater to the ruined village of Orongo while Kaye stayed back at the hotel, fatigued from our jeep journey and hiking the day before to the quarries, the caves full of human bones, and the soft-sand beach of the Easter Island origin legend. Merry and I stood and felt the wind howl across abandoned stone circles. We were awed by the Orongo crater and the starkness of the place: a ruin of human effect, a wreck of damaged nature. Merry asked if I wanted to walk down to the reedy basin in the crater. The fat which I had packed onto my flesh in the preceding year clung to my body like lead: a monument to over-consumption and a lack of effort to make things right. The grotesque moral of decay embodied in La Isla de Pascua was not relegated to a faraway island, it was in my very flesh.
[2.49 metric tons of CO2 round trip from LAX to Santiago]
[1.10 metric tons of CO2 round trip from Santiago to Easter Island]
[0.03 metric tons of CO2 drive in a Jeep around Easter Island — 50 miles]
[0.59 metric tons of CO2 drive from Santiago to Punta Arenas — 700 miles]
[0.12 metric tons of CO2 flight from Punta Arenas to Santiago]
[4.33 metric tons of CO2 — total emissions for the Chilean adventure.]
