Blog posts
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A Hackers Manifesto, verze 4.0, kapitola 4.
By samotar, 10 January 2023
Alfred ve dvoře čili Poznámka k pražské hetero-utopii
By samotar, 10 November 2022
Trnovou korunou a tankem do srdíčka
By samotar, 2 July 2022
Hakim Bey - Informační válka
By samotar, 26 March 2022
Jean-Pierre Dupuy: Do we shape technologies, or do they shape us?
By samotar, 6 March 2022
Václav Cílek: Záhada zpívající houby
By samotar, 15 February 2022
Guy Debord - Teorie dérive
By samotar, 21 January 2022
Jack Burnham – Systémová estetika
By samotar, 19 November 2021
Poznámka pod čarou k výstavě Handa Gote: Věc, nástroj, čas, fetiš, hygiena, tabu
By samotar, 13 July 2021
Rána po ránech
By samotar, 23 May 2021
Na dohled od bronzového jezdce
By samotar, 4 March 2021
Z archivu:Mlha - ticho - temnota a bílé díry
By samotar, 7 October 2020
Zarchivu: Hůlna-kejdže
By samotar, 7 September 2020
Center for Land Use Interpretation
By samotar, 18 June 2020
Dawn Chorus Day - zvuky za svítání
By samotar, 30 April 2020
Z archivu: Bílé Břehy 2012 a Liběchov 2011
By , 3 April 2020
Z archivu: Krzysztof Wodiczko v DOXU
By samotar, 26 March 2020
GARY SNYDER: WRITERS AND THE WAR AGAINST NATURE
By samotar, 20 March 2020
Podoby domova: hnízda, nory, doupata, pavučiny, domestikace a ekologie
By samotar, 17 March 2020
Michel Serres: Transdisciplinarity as Relative Exteriority
By samotar, 5 November 2019
Pavel Ctibor: Sahat zakázáno
By samotar, 22 September 2019
Emmanuel Lévinas: HEIDEGGER, GAGARIN A MY
By samotar, 19 September 2019
Atmosférické poruchy / Atmospheric Disturbances - Ustí nad Labem
By samotar, 13 September 2019
Erkka Laininen: A Radical Vision of the Future School
By samotar, 10 August 2019
Anton Pannekoek: The Destruction of Nature (1909)
By samotar, 21 July 2019
Co padá shůry - světlo, pelyněk, oheň a šrot
By samotar, 30 December 2018
2000 slov v čase klimatických změn - manifest
By samotar, 2 November 2018
Vladimír Úlehla, sucho, geoinženýrství, endokrinologie, ekologie a Josef Charvát
By samotář, 22 September 2018
Lukáš Likavčan: Thermodynamics of Necrocracy - SUVs, entropy, and contingency management
By samotar, 20 July 2018
Tajemství spolupráce: Miloš Šejn
By samotar, 27 June 2018
Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You) Trevor Paglen
By samotar, 2 June 2018
KŘEST KNIHY KRAJINA V POZORU: THE LANDSCAPE IN FOCUS.
By samotar, 18 May 2018
Případ zchudlé planety:Vojtěch Kotecký
By samotar, 22 April 2018
Rozhovor na Vltavě: Jak umění reaguje na dobu antropocénu?
By samotar, 10 March 2018
Skolt Sámi Path to Climate Change Resilience
By samotar, 10 December 2017
Brian Holmes: Driving the Golden Spike - The Aesthetics of Anthropocene Public Space
By samotar, 22 November 2017
Ohlédnutí/Revisited Soundworm Gathering
By samotař, 9 October 2017
Kleté krajiny
By samotar, 7 October 2017
Kinterova Jednotka a postnatura
By samotař, 15 September 2017
Ruiny-Černý trojúhelník a Koudelkův pohyb v saturnských kruzích
By samotar, 13 July 2017
Upsych316a Universal Psychiatric Church
By Samotar, 6 July 2017
Miloš Vojtěchovský: Krátká rozprava o místě z roku 1994
By milos, 31 May 2017
Za teorií poznání (radostný nekrolog), Bohuslav Blažek
By miloš vojtěchovský, 9 April 2017
On the Transmutation of Species
By miloš vojtěchovský, 27 March 2017
Gustav Metzger: Poznámky ke krizi v technologickém umění
By samotař, 2 March 2017
CYBERPOSITIVE, Sadie Plant a Nick Land
By samotař, 2 March 2017
Ivan Illich: Ticho jako obecní statek
By samotař, 18 February 2017
Dialog o primitivismu – Lawrence Jarach a John Zerzan
By samotar, 29 December 2016
Thomas Berry:Ekozoická éra
By samotař, 8 December 2016
Jason W. Moore: Name the System! Anthropocenes & the Capitalocene Alternative
By miloš vojtěchovský, 24 November 2016
Michel Serres: Revisiting The Natural Contract
By samotař, 11 November 2016
Best a Basta době uhelné
By samotař, 31 October 2016
Epifanie, krajina a poslední člověk/Epiphany, Landscape and Last Man
By Samotar, 20 October 2016
Doba kamenná - (Ein, Eisen, Wittgen, Frankenstein), doba plastová a temná mineralogie
By samotař, 4 October 2016
Hledání hlasu řeky Bíliny
By samotař, 23 September 2016
Harrisons: A MANIFESTO FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
By , 19 September 2016
T.J. Demos: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Gynocene: The Many Names of Resistance
By , 11 September 2016
Bratrstvo
By samotař, 1 September 2016
Neptunismus a plutonismus na vyhaslé sopce Bořeň
By , 14 August 2016
Murray Bookchin: Toward an Ecological Society/ K ekologické společnosti (1974)
By samotař, 31 July 2016
Metafory, endofyzika, manželé Themersonovi a Gordon Pask
By samotař, 15 July 2016
Anima Mundi Revisited
By miloš vojtěchovský, 28 June 2016
Simon A. Levin: The Evolution of Ecology
By samotař, 21 June 2016
Anna Remešová: Je možné představit si změnu?
By samotar, 20 June 2016
Jan Hloušek: Uranové město
By samotař, 31 May 2016
Josef Šmajs: Složí lidstvo zkoušku své racionální dospělosti?
By samotař, 20 May 2016
Manifest The Dark Mountain Project
By Samotar, 3 May 2016
Pokus o popis jednoho zápasu
By samotar, 29 April 2016
Václav Cílek: Antropocén – velké zrychlení světa
By Slawomír Uher, 23 April 2016
Nothing worse or better can happen
By Ewa Jacobsson, 5 April 2016
Real Reason we Can’t Stop Global Warming: Saskia Sassen
By , 18 March 2016
The Political Economy of the Cultural Commons and the Nature of Sustainable Wealth
By samotar, 12 March 2016
Jared Diamond - Easter's End
By , 21 February 2016
Felix Guattari - Three Ecologies (part 1)
By , 19 February 2016
W. H. Auden: Journey to Iceland
By , 9 February 2016
Jussi Parikka: The Earth
By Slawomír Uher, 8 February 2016
Brian Holmes: Extradisciplinary Investigations. Towards a New Critique of Institutions
By Stanislaw, 7 February 2016
Co číhá za humny? neboli revoluce přítomnosti
By Miloš Vojtěchovský, 31 January 2016
Podivuhodný osud polárníka a malíře Julia Payera
By , 23 January 2016
Red Sky: The Eschatology of Trans
By Miloš Vojtěchovský, 19 January 2016
#AKCELERACIONISTICKÝ MANIFEST (14. května 2013)
By samotar, 7 January 2016
The Forgotten Space: Notes for a Film
By , 7 January 2016
Rise and Fall of the Herring Towns:Impacts of Climate and Human Teleconnections
By , 25 December 2015
Hlubinná, temná, světlá i povrchová ekologie světa
By , 22 December 2015
Three short movies: Baroque Duchcov, New Lakes of Mostecko and Lignite Clouds
By Michal Kindernay, 21 December 2015
Lenka Dolanová: Umění mediální ekologie
By , 21 December 2015
Towards an Anti-atlas of Borders
By , 20 December 2015
Pavel Mrkus - KINESIS, instalace Nejsvětější Salvátor
By Miloš Vojtěchovský, 6 December 2015
Tváře/Faces bez hranic/Sans Frontiers
By Miloš Vojtěchovský, 29 November 2015
Josef Šmajs: Ústava Země/A Constitution for the Earth
By Samotar, 28 November 2015
John Jordan: The Work of Art (and Activism) in the Age of the Anthropocene
By Samotar, 23 November 2015
Humoreska: kočky, koulení, hroby a špatná muška prince Josefa Saského
By Samotar, 13 November 2015
Rozhovor:Před věčným nic se katalogy nesčítají
By Samotar, 11 November 2015
Lecture by Dustin Breiting and Vít Bohal on Anthropocene
By Samotar, 8 November 2015
Antropocén a mocné žblunknutí/Anthropocene and the Mighty Plop
By Samotar, 2 November 2015
Rory Rowan:Extinction as Usual?Geo-Social Futures and Left Optimism
By Samotar, 27 October 2015
Pavel Klusák: Budoucnost smutné krajiny/The Future of a Sad Region
By ll, 19 October 2015
Na Zemi vzhůru nohama
By Alena Kotzmannová, 17 October 2015
Upside-down on Earth
By Alena Kotzmannová, 17 October 2015
Thomas Hylland Eriksen: What’s wrong with the Global North and the Global South?
By Samotar, 17 October 2015
Nýey and Borealis: Sonic Topologies by Nicolas Perret & Silvia Ploner
By Samotar, 12 October 2015
Images from Finnmark (Living Through the Landscape)
By Nicholas Norton, 12 October 2015
Bruno Latour: Love Your Monsters, Why We Must Care for Our Technologies As We Do Our Children
By John Dee, 11 October 2015
Temné objekty k obdivu: Edward Burtynsky, Mitch Epstein, Alex Maclean, Liam Young
By Samotar 10 October 2015, 10 October 2015
Czech Radio on Frontiers of Solitude
By Samotar, 10 October 2015
Beyond Time: orka, orka, orka, nečas, nečas, nečas
By Samotar, 10 October 2015
Langewiese and Newt or walking to Dlouhá louka
By Michal Kindernay, 7 October 2015
Notice in the Norwegian newspaper „Altaposten“
By Nicholas Norton, 5 October 2015
Interview with Ivar Smedstad
By Nicholas Norton, 5 October 2015
Iceland Expedition, Part 2
By Julia Martin, 4 October 2015
Closing at the Osek Monastery
By Michal Kindernay, 3 October 2015
Iceland Expedition, Part 1
By Julia Martin, 3 October 2015
Finnmarka a kopce / The Hills of Finnmark
By Vladimír Merta, 2 October 2015
Od kláštera Osek na Selesiovu výšinu, k Lomu, Libkovicům, Hrdlovce a zpět/From The Osek Cloister to Lom and back
By Samotar, 27 September 2015
Sápmelažžat Picnic and the Exploration of the Sami Lands and Culture
By Vladimir, 27 September 2015
Gardens of the Osek Monastery/Zahrady oseckého kláštera
By ll, 27 September 2015
Workshop with Radek Mikuláš/Dílna s Radkem Mikulášem
By Samotářka Dagmar, 26 September 2015
Czech Radio Interview Jan Klápště, Ivan Plicka and mayor of Horní Jiřetín Vladimír Buřt
By ll, 25 September 2015
Bořeň, zvuk a HNP/Bořeň, sound and Gross National Product
By Samotar, 25 September 2015
Já, Doly, Dolly a zemský ráj
By Samotar, 23 September 2015
Up to the Ore Mountains
By Michal, Dagmar a Helena Samotáři , 22 September 2015
Václav Cílek and the Sacred Landscape
By Samotář Michal, 22 September 2015
Picnic at the Ledvice waste pond
By Samotar, 19 September 2015
Above Jezeří Castle
By Samotar, 19 September 2015
Cancerous Land, part 3
By Tamás Sajó, 18 September 2015
Ledvice coal preparation plant
By Dominik Žižka, 18 September 2015
pod hladinou
By Dominik Žižka, 18 September 2015
Cancerous Land, part 2
By Tamás Sajó, 17 September 2015
Cancerous Land, part 1
By Tamás Sajó, 16 September 2015
Offroad trip
By Dominik Žižka, 16 September 2015
Ekologické limity a nutnost jejich prolomení
By Miloš Vojtěchovský, 16 September 2015
Lignite Clouds Sound Workshop: Days I and II
By Samotar, 15 September 2015
Recollection of Jezeří/Eisenberg Arboretum workshop
By Samotar, 14 September 2015
Walk from Mariánské Radčice
By Michal Kindernay, 12 September 2015
Mariánské Radčice and Libkovice
By Samotar, 11 September 2015
Tušimice II and The Vicarage, or the Parsonage at Mariánské Radčice
By Samotar, 10 September 2015
Most - Lake, Fish, algae bloom
By Samotar, 8 September 2015
Monday: Bílina open pit excursion
By Samotar, 7 September 2015
Duchcov II. - past and tomorrow
By Samotar, 6 September 2015
Duchcov II.
By Samotar, 6 September 2015
Arrival at Duchcov I.
By Samotar, 6 September 2015
Poznámka k havárii rypadla KU 300 (K severu 1)
By Samotar, 19 August 2015
Jared Diamond - Easter's End
Among the most riveting mysteries of human history are those posed by vanished civilizations. Everyone who has seen the abandoned buildings of the Khmer, the Maya, or the Anasazi is immediately moved to ask the same question: Why did the societies that erected those structures disappear?
Their vanishing touches us as the disappearance of other animals, even the dinosaurs, never can. No matter how exotic those lost civilizations seem, their framers were humans like us. Who is to say we won’t succumb to the same fate? Perhaps someday New York’s skyscrapers will stand derelict and overgrown with vegetation, like the temples at Angkor Wat and Tikal.
Among all such vanished civilizations, that of the former Polynesian society on Easter Island remains unsurpassed in mystery and isolation. The mystery stems especially from the island’s gigantic stone statues and its impoverished landscape, but it is enhanced by our associations with the specific people involved: Polynesians represent for us the ultimate in exotic romance, the background for many a child’s, and an adult’s, vision of paradise. My own interest in Easter was kindled over 30 years ago when I read Thor Heyerdahl’s fabulous accounts of his Kon-Tiki voyage.
But my interest has been revived recently by a much more exciting account, one not of heroic voyages but of painstaking research and analysis. My friend David Steadman, a paleontologist, has been working with a number of other researchers who are carrying out the first systematic excavations on Easter intended to identify the animals and plants that once lived there. Their work is contributing to a new interpretation of the island’s history that makes it a tale not only of wonder but of warning as well.
Easter Island, with an area of only 64 square miles, is the world’s most isolated scrap of habitable land. It lies in the Pacific Ocean more than 2,000 miles west of the nearest continent (South America), 1,400 miles from even the nearest habitable island (Pitcairn). Its subtropical location and latitude--at 27 degrees south, it is approximately as far below the equator as Houston is north of it--help give it a rather mild climate, while its volcanic origins make its soil fertile. In theory, this combination of blessings should have made Easter a miniature paradise, remote from problems that beset the rest of the world.
The island derives its name from its discovery by the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen, on Easter (April 5) in 1722. Roggeveen’s first impression was not of a paradise but of a wasteland: We originally, from a further distance, have considered the said Easter Island as sandy; the reason for that is this, that we counted as sand the withered grass, hay, or other scorched and burnt vegetation, because its wasted appearance could give no other impression than of a singular poverty and barrenness.
The island Roggeveen saw was a grassland without a single tree or bush over ten feet high. Modern botanists have identified only 47 species of higher plants native to Easter, most of them grasses, sedges, and ferns. The list includes just two species of small trees and two of woody shrubs. With such flora, the islanders Roggeveen encountered had no source of real firewood to warm themselves during Easter’s cool, wet, windy winters. Their native animals included nothing larger than insects, not even a single species of native bat, land bird, land snail, or lizard. For domestic animals, they had only chickens.
European visitors throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries estimated Easter’s human population at about 2,000, a modest number considering the island’s fertility. As Captain James Cook recognized during his brief visit in 1774, the islanders were Polynesians (a Tahitian man accompanying Cook was able to converse with them). Yet despite the Polynesians’ well-deserved fame as a great seafaring people, the Easter Islanders who came out to Roggeveen’s and Cook’s ships did so by swimming or paddling canoes that Roggeveen described as bad and frail. Their craft, he wrote, were put together with manifold small planks and light inner timbers, which they cleverly stitched together with very fine twisted threads. . . . But as they lack the knowledge and particularly the materials for caulking and making tight the great number of seams of the canoes, these are accordingly very leaky, for which reason they are compelled to spend half the time in bailing. The canoes, only ten feet long, held at most two people, and only three or four canoes were observed on the entire island.
With such flimsy craft, Polynesians could never have colonized Easter from even the nearest island, nor could they have traveled far offshore to fish. The islanders Roggeveen met were totally isolated, unaware that other people existed. Investigators in all the years since his visit have discovered no trace of the islanders’ having any outside contacts: not a single Easter Island rock or product has turned up elsewhere, nor has anything been found on the island that could have been brought by anyone other than the original settlers or the Europeans. Yet the people living on Easter claimed memories of visiting the uninhabited Sala y Gomez reef 260 miles away, far beyond the range of the leaky canoes seen by Roggeveen. How did the islanders’ ancestors reach that reef from Easter, or reach Easter from anywhere else?
Easter Island’s most famous feature is its huge stone statues, more than 200 of which once stood on massive stone platforms lining the coast. At least 700 more, in all stages of completion, were abandoned in quarries or on ancient roads between the quarries and the coast, as if the carvers and moving crews had thrown down their tools and walked off the job. Most of the erected statues were carved in a single quarry and then somehow transported as far as six miles--despite heights as great as 33 feet and weights up to 82 tons. The abandoned statues, meanwhile, were as much as 65 feet tall and weighed up to 270 tons. The stone platforms were equally gigantic: up to 500 feet long and 10 feet high, with facing slabs weighing up to 10 tons.
Roggeveen himself quickly recognized the problem the statues posed: The stone images at first caused us to be struck with astonishment, he wrote, because we could not comprehend how it was possible that these people, who are devoid of heavy thick timber for making any machines, as well as strong ropes, nevertheless had been able to erect such images. Roggeveen might have added that the islanders had no wheels, no draft animals, and no source of power except their own muscles. How did they transport the giant statues for miles, even before erecting them? To deepen the mystery, the statues were still standing in 1770, but by 1864 all of them had been pulled down, by the islanders themselves. Why then did they carve them in the first place? And why did they stop?
The statues imply a society very different from the one Roggeveen saw in 1722. Their sheer number and size suggest a population much larger than 2,000 people. What became of everyone? Furthermore, that society must have been highly organized. Easter’s resources were scattered across the island: the best stone for the statues was quarried at Rano Raraku near Easter’s northeast end; red stone, used for large crowns adorning some of the statues, was quarried at Puna Pau, inland in the southwest; stone carving tools came mostly from Aroi in the northwest. Meanwhile, the best farmland lay in the south and east, and the best fishing grounds on the north and west coasts. Extracting and redistributing all those goods required complex political organization. What happened to that organization, and how could it ever have arisen in such a barren landscape?
Easter Island’s mysteries have spawned volumes of speculation for more than two and a half centuries. Many Europeans were incredulous that Polynesians--commonly characterized as mere savages--could have created the statues or the beautifully constructed stone platforms. In the 1950s, Heyerdahl argued that Polynesia must have been settled by advanced societies of American Indians, who in turn must have received civilization across the Atlantic from more advanced societies of the Old World. Heyerdahl’s raft voyages aimed to prove the feasibility of such prehistoric transoceanic contacts. In the 1960s the Swiss writer Erich von Däniken, an ardent believer in Earth visits by extraterrestrial astronauts, went further, claiming that Easter’s statues were the work of intelligent beings who owned ultramodern tools, became stranded on Easter, and were finally rescued.
Heyerdahl and Von Däniken both brushed aside overwhelming evidence that the Easter Islanders were typical Polynesians derived from Asia rather than from the Americas and that their culture (including their statues) grew out of Polynesian culture. Their language was Polynesian, as Cook had already concluded. Specifically, they spoke an eastern Polynesian dialect related to Hawaiian and Marquesan, a dialect isolated since about A.D. 400, as estimated from slight differences in vocabulary. Their fishhooks and stone adzes resembled early Marquesan models. Last year DNA extracted from 12 Easter Island skeletons was also shown to be Polynesian. The islanders grew bananas, taro, sweet potatoes, sugarcane, and paper mulberry--typical Polynesian crops, mostly of Southeast Asian origin. Their sole domestic animal, the chicken, was also typically Polynesian and ultimately Asian, as were the rats that arrived as stowaways in the canoes of the first settlers.
What happened to those settlers? The fanciful theories of the past must give way to evidence gathered by hardworking practitioners in three fields: archeology, pollen analysis, and paleontology.
Modern archeological excavations on Easter have continued since Heyerdahl’s 1955 expedition. The earliest radiocarbon dates associated with human activities are around A.D. 400 to 700, in reasonable agreement with the approximate settlement date of 400 estimated by linguists. The period of statue construction peaked around 1200 to 1500, with few if any statues erected thereafter. Densities of archeological sites suggest a large population; an estimate of 7,000 people is widely quoted by archeologists, but other estimates range up to 20,000, which does not seem implausible for an island of Easter’s area and fertility.
Archeologists have also enlisted surviving islanders in experiments aimed at figuring out how the statues might have been carved and erected. Twenty people, using only stone chisels, could have carved even the largest completed statue within a year. Given enough timber and fiber for making ropes, teams of at most a few hundred people could have loaded the statues onto wooden sleds, dragged them over lubricated wooden tracks or rollers, and used logs as levers to maneuver them into a standing position. Rope could have been made from the fiber of a small native tree, related to the linden, called the hauhau. However, that tree is now extremely scarce on Easter, and hauling one statue would have required hundreds of yards of rope. Did Easter’s now barren landscape once support the necessary trees?
That question can be answered by the technique of pollen analysis, which involves boring out a column of sediment from a swamp or pond, with the most recent deposits at the top and relatively more ancient deposits at the bottom. The absolute age of each layer can be dated by radiocarbon methods. Then begins the hard work: examining tens of thousands of pollen grains under a microscope, counting them, and identifying the plant species that produced each one by comparing the grains with modern pollen from known plant species. For Easter Island, the bleary-eyed scientists who performed that task were John Flenley, now at Massey University in New Zealand, and Sarah King of the University of Hull in England.
Flenley and King’s heroic efforts were rewarded by the striking new picture that emerged of Easter’s prehistoric landscape. For at least 30,000 years before human arrival and during the early years of Polynesian settlement, Easter was not a wasteland at all. Instead, a subtropical forest of trees and woody bushes towered over a ground layer of shrubs, herbs, ferns, and grasses. In the forest grew tree daisies, the rope- yielding hauhau tree, and the toromiro tree, which furnishes a dense, mesquite-like firewood. The most common tree in the forest was a species of palm now absent on Easter but formerly so abundant that the bottom strata of the sediment column were packed with its pollen. The Easter Island palm was closely related to the still-surviving Chilean wine palm, which grows up to 82 feet tall and 6 feet in diameter. The tall, unbranched trunks of the Easter Island palm would have been ideal for transporting and erecting statues and constructing large canoes. The palm would also have been a valuable food source, since its Chilean relative yields edible nuts as well as sap from which Chileans make sugar, syrup, honey, and wine.
What did the first settlers of Easter Island eat when they were not glutting themselves on the local equivalent of maple syrup? Recent excavations by David Steadman, of the New York State Museum at Albany, have yielded a picture of Easter’s original animal world as surprising as Flenley and King’s picture of its plant world. Steadman’s expectations for Easter were conditioned by his experiences elsewhere in Polynesia, where fish are overwhelmingly the main food at archeological sites, typically accounting for more than 90 percent of the bones in ancient Polynesian garbage heaps. Easter, though, is too cool for the coral reefs beloved by fish, and its cliff-girded coastline permits shallow-water fishing in only a few places. Less than a quarter of the bones in its early garbage heaps (from the period 900 to 1300) belonged to fish; instead, nearly one-third of all bones came from porpoises.
Nowhere else in Polynesia do porpoises account for even 1 percent of discarded food bones. But most other Polynesian islands offered animal food in the form of birds and mammals, such as New Zealand’s now extinct giant moas and Hawaii’s now extinct flightless geese. Most other islanders also had domestic pigs and dogs. On Easter, porpoises would have been the largest animal available--other than humans. The porpoise species identified at Easter, the common dolphin, weighs up to 165 pounds. It generally lives out at sea, so it could not have been hunted by line fishing or spearfishing from shore. Instead, it must have been harpooned far offshore, in big seaworthy canoes built from the extinct palm tree.
In addition to porpoise meat, Steadman found, the early Polynesian settlers were feasting on seabirds. For those birds, Easter’s remoteness and lack of predators made it an ideal haven as a breeding site, at least until humans arrived. Among the prodigious numbers of seabirds that bred on Easter were albatross, boobies, frigate birds, fulmars, petrels, prions, shearwaters, storm petrels, terns, and tropic birds. With at least 25 nesting species, Easter was the richest seabird breeding site in Polynesia and probably in the whole Pacific.
Land birds as well went into early Easter Island cooking pots. Steadman identified bones of at least six species, including barn owls, herons, parrots, and rail. Bird stew would have been seasoned with meat from large numbers of rats, which the Polynesian colonists inadvertently brought with them; Easter Island is the sole known Polynesian island where rat bones outnumber fish bones at archeological sites. (In case you’re squeamish and consider rats inedible, I still recall recipes for creamed laboratory rat that my British biologist friends used to supplement their diet during their years of wartime food rationing.)
Porpoises, seabirds, land birds, and rats did not complete the list of meat sources formerly available on Easter. A few bones hint at the possibility of breeding seal colonies as well. All these delicacies were cooked in ovens fired by wood from the island’s forests.
Such evidence lets us imagine the island onto which Easter’s first Polynesian colonists stepped ashore some 1,600 years ago, after a long canoe voyage from eastern Polynesia. They found themselves in a pristine paradise. What then happened to it? The pollen grains and the bones yield a grim answer.
Pollen records show that destruction of Easter’s forests was well under way by the year 800, just a few centuries after the start of human settlement. Then charcoal from wood fires came to fill the sediment cores, while pollen of palms and other trees and woody shrubs decreased or disappeared, and pollen of the grasses that replaced the forest became more abundant. Not long after 1400 the palm finally became extinct, not only as a result of being chopped down but also because the now ubiquitous rats prevented its regeneration: of the dozens of preserved palm nuts discovered in caves on Easter, all had been chewed by rats and could no longer germinate. While the hauhau tree did not become extinct in Polynesian times, its numbers declined drastically until there weren’t enough left to make ropes from. By the time Heyerdahl visited Easter, only a single, nearly dead toromiro tree remained on the island, and even that lone survivor has now disappeared. (Fortunately, the toromiro still grows in botanical gardens elsewhere.)
The fifteenth century marked the end not only for Easter’s palm but for the forest itself. Its doom had been approaching as people cleared land to plant gardens; as they felled trees to build canoes, to transport and erect statues, and to burn; as rats devoured seeds; and probably as the native birds died out that had pollinated the trees’ flowers and dispersed their fruit. The overall picture is among the most extreme examples of forest destruction anywhere in the world: the whole forest gone, and most of its tree species extinct.
The destruction of the island’s animals was as extreme as that of the forest: without exception, every species of native land bird became extinct. Even shellfish were overexploited, until people had to settle for small sea snails instead of larger cowries. Porpoise bones disappeared abruptly from garbage heaps around 1500; no one could harpoon porpoises anymore, since the trees used for constructing the big seagoing canoes no longer existed. The colonies of more than half of the seabird species breeding on Easter or on its offshore islets were wiped out.
In place of these meat supplies, the Easter Islanders intensified their production of chickens, which had been only an occasional food item. They also turned to the largest remaining meat source available: humans, whose bones became common in late Easter Island garbage heaps. Oral traditions of the islanders are rife with cannibalism; the most inflammatory taunt that could be snarled at an enemy was The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth. With no wood available to cook these new goodies, the islanders resorted to sugarcane scraps, grass, and sedges to fuel their fires.
All these strands of evidence can be wound into a coherent narrative of a society’s decline and fall. The first Polynesian colonists found themselves on an island with fertile soil, abundant food, bountiful building materials, ample lebensraum, and all the prerequisites for comfortable living. They prospered and multiplied.
After a few centuries, they began erecting stone statues on platforms, like the ones their Polynesian forebears had carved. With passing years, the statues and platforms became larger and larger, and the statues began sporting ten-ton red crowns--probably in an escalating spiral of one-upmanship, as rival clans tried to surpass each other with shows of wealth and power. (In the same way, successive Egyptian pharaohs built ever-larger pyramids. Today Hollywood movie moguls near my home in Los Angeles are displaying their wealth and power by building ever more ostentatious mansions. Tycoon Marvin Davis topped previous moguls with plans for a 50,000-square-foot house, so now Aaron Spelling has topped Davis with a 56,000-square-foot house. All that those buildings lack to make the message explicit are ten-ton red crowns.) On Easter, as in modern America, society was held together by a complex political system to redistribute locally available resources and to integrate the economies of different areas.
Eventually Easter’s growing population was cutting the forest more rapidly than the forest was regenerating. The people used the land for gardens and the wood for fuel, canoes, and houses--and, of course, for lugging statues. As forest disappeared, the islanders ran out of timber and rope to transport and erect their statues. Life became more uncomfortable-- springs and streams dried up, and wood was no longer available for fires.
People also found it harder to fill their stomachs, as land birds, large sea snails, and many seabirds disappeared. Because timber for building seagoing canoes vanished, fish catches declined and porpoises disappeared from the table. Crop yields also declined, since deforestation allowed the soil to be eroded by rain and wind, dried by the sun, and its nutrients to be leeched from it. Intensified chicken production and cannibalism replaced only part of all those lost foods. Preserved statuettes with sunken cheeks and visible ribs suggest that people were starving.
With the disappearance of food surpluses, Easter Island could no longer feed the chiefs, bureaucrats, and priests who had kept a complex society running. Surviving islanders described to early European visitors how local chaos replaced centralized government and a warrior class took over from the hereditary chiefs. The stone points of spears and daggers, made by the warriors during their heyday in the 1600s and 1700s, still litter the ground of Easter today. By around 1700, the population began to crash toward between one-quarter and one-tenth of its former number. People took to living in caves for protection against their enemies. Around 1770 rival clans started to topple each other’s statues, breaking the heads off. By 1864 the last statue had been thrown down and desecrated.
As we try to imagine the decline of Easter’s civilization, we ask ourselves, Why didn’t they look around, realize what they were doing, and stop before it was too late? What were they thinking when they cut down the last palm tree?
I suspect, though, that the disaster happened not with a bang but with a whimper. After all, there are those hundreds of abandoned statues to consider. The forest the islanders depended on for rollers and rope didn’t simply disappear one day--it vanished slowly, over decades. Perhaps war interrupted the moving teams; perhaps by the time the carvers had finished their work, the last rope snapped. In the meantime, any islander who tried to warn about the dangers of progressive deforestation would have been overridden by vested interests of carvers, bureaucrats, and chiefs, whose jobs depended on continued deforestation. Our Pacific Northwest loggers are only the latest in a long line of loggers to cry, Jobs over trees! The changes in forest cover from year to year would have been hard to detect: yes, this year we cleared those woods over there, but trees are starting to grow back again on this abandoned garden site here. Only older people, recollecting their childhoods decades earlier, could have recognized a difference. Their children could no more have comprehended their parents’ tales than my eight-year-old sons today can comprehend my wife’s and my tales of what Los Angeles was like 30 years ago.
Gradually trees became fewer, smaller, and less important. By the time the last fruit-bearing adult palm tree was cut, palms had long since ceased to be of economic significance. That left only smaller and smaller palm saplings to clear each year, along with other bushes and treelets. No one would have noticed the felling of the last small palm.
By now the meaning of easter Island for us should be chillingly obvious. Easter Island is Earth writ small. Today, again, a rising population confronts shrinking resources. We too have no emigration valve, because all human societies are linked by international transport, and we can no more escape into space than the Easter Islanders could flee into the ocean. If we continue to follow our present course, we shall have exhausted the world’s major fisheries, tropical rain forests, fossil fuels, and much of our soil by the time my sons reach my current age.
Every day newspapers report details of famished countries-- Afghanistan, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, the former Yugoslavia, Zaire--where soldiers have appropriated the wealth or where central government is yielding to local gangs of thugs. With the risk of nuclear war receding, the threat of our ending with a bang no longer has a chance of galvanizing us to halt our course. Our risk now is of winding down, slowly, in a whimper. Corrective action is blocked by vested interests, by well-intentioned political and business leaders, and by their electorates, all of whom are perfectly correct in not noticing big changes from year to year. Instead, each year there are just somewhat more people, and somewhat fewer resources, on Earth.
It would be easy to close our eyes or to give up in despair. If mere thousands of Easter Islanders with only stone tools and their own muscle power sufficed to destroy their society, how can billions of people with metal tools and machine power fail to do worse? But there is one crucial difference. The Easter Islanders had no books and no histories of other doomed societies. Unlike the Easter Islanders, we have histories of the past--information that can save us. My main hope for my sons’ generation is that we may now choose to learn from the fates of societies like Easter’s.
Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, is a professor of geography at UCLA who began his scientific career in physiology and then expanded into evolutionary biology and biogeography. He has set himself, he has said, "the modest task of trying to explain the broad pattern of human history, on all the continents, for the last 13,000 years." Diamond has received a lot of attention for asking some very basic questions. His latest book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, explores the reasons that some societies fall apart, whereas others survive for centuries or even millennia. (Read an excerpt from the prologue.) It also assesses the dangers facing our modern, global society and offers some suggestions for avoiding an environmental catastrophe of our own making.
http://149.142.237.180/faculty/diamond.html