Easter Island

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Easter Island

• Could This Happen to the Whole Planet?

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Island Geography

• Located in the Pacific Ocean
• 27 degrees south of the equator
• 2200 miles off the coast of Chile
• Sixty-three square miles
• 3 extinct volcanoes

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Island Inhabitants Arrived

• Easter Island are of Polynesian stock
• (DNA extracts from skeletons have confirmed this)
• Most inhabitants from the Marquesas or Society
  islands,
• Arrived as early as 318 AD

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Ecology before Islanders arrived

• Island was forested
• teeming with land birds
• productive breeding site for seabirds in the
  Polynesia region.

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Culture
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Culture

• Most famous features are enormous stone statues
  called moai
• 288 of which once stood
• Estimated that 50 to 150 people were needed to
  drag them across the countryside
• sleds and rollers made from the island's trees.

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What Happened?

• The resource needs of the growing population had
  outpace the island's capacity to renew itself
  ecologically.
• 1400s the forests had been entirely cut
• rich ground cover eroded away
• springs had dried up
• vast flocks of birds disappeared.

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• no logs to build canoes for fishing
• depleted bird and wildlife food sources
• declining crop yields because of the erosion of
  good soil
• nutritional intake of the people plummeted

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Culture Collapse

• First famine then cannibalism
• Island could not feed the chiefs, bureaucrats
  priests
• triggered a cultural collapse.
• 1700-population dropped between 1/4 and 1/10th
  its former number
• Many statues were toppled during clan wars of
  the 1600 and 1700s.

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• The social and cultural collapse continued
  following the arrival of the Europeans.
• European slavers
• raped and murdered the islanders,
• introduced small pox and other diseases
• brutally removed the natives to mainland South
  America

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Could this be our Future?

• Easter Island's treeless landscape is perhaps the
  most crucial piece of evidence
• theory of ecocide
• Is our planet committing ecocide?

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• Could the same thing that happened to Easter
  Island happen to the whole planet Earth?
• Are we committing ecocide?
• What are your thoughts and concerns?
• What are 3 more questions you have about Easter
  island?