Easter Island’s destruction holds lessons for the world

EASTER ISLAND — This remote speck in the South Pacific is famous for its colossal stone statues, nearly 1,000 of them towering over the landscape like guardians.

Who built them? How did they get there? And who fitted some of them with giant red stone hats weighing up to 12 tons each?

When I was a kid, a huge nonfiction best seller by Erich von Daniken called “Chariots of the Gods” argued that they were evidence that UFOs had visited Earth. Von Daniken, whose nonfiction and fiction books have sold a staggering 63 million copies worldwide, argued that only space aliens could have carved, transported and erected these monuments.

The puzzle arises because when Jacob Roggeveen discovered the island (on Easter Day, 1722, hence the name), it was a wasteland with no trees and a small, starving population. The Polynesian inhabitants had only small and leaky canoes, so it was unclear how they had ever reached the island, let alone built such colossal figures.

“The stone images at first caused us to be struck with astonishment,” Roggeveen wrote, because the land was of such “singular poverty and barrenness.”

Scientists and historians have since solved the mystery. The statues, or moai, were built over hundreds of years by Easter Islanders themselves.

What destroyed this civilization was apparently deforestation in the 1500s and 1600s. The islanders cut down trees for cremation, for firewood, for canoes, for homes and perhaps for devices to move the statues. Rats and beetles may also have contributed to the deforestation.

Once the trees were gone, there were no more fruit and nuts, and it became impossible to build large canoes to hunt porpoises and to fish for tuna. Hungry villagers also ate up the land birds, such as herons, parrots and owls, until they were gone, too.

Deforestation caused erosion that led crops to fail, and this advanced society disintegrated into civil war.

“Easter’s isolation makes it the clearest example of a society that destroyed itself by overexploiting its own resources,” Jared Diamond wrote in his 2005 book, “Collapse.” “The parallels between Easter Island and the whole modern world are chillingly obvious.

“Those are the reasons why people see the collapse of Easter Island society as a metaphor, a worstcase scenario, for what may lie ahead of us in our own future.”

Easter Islanders themselves aren’t thrilled about being reduced to a metaphor. They rightly feel great pride in their earlier history and see the collapse as more complex and uncertain.

That brings us to climate change, to the chemical processes we are now triggering whose outcomes we can’t fully predict. The consequences may be a transformed planet with rising waters and hotter weather, dying coral reefs and more acidic oceans.

Of course, maybe it’ll be fine. Perhaps the perils of climate change will turn out to be overblown, or perhaps we’ll develop geoengineering solutions to reflect sunlight and cool the planet.

But I can’t help imagining the farmer here on Easter Island who cut down the last palm tree. “More will grow,” he may have said. “It’ll be fine.”

But when the last tree toppled, his people were doomed.

I hope that some day far in the future, tourists don’t swim through Midtown Manhattan and similarly reflect on the hubris and recklessness of early 21st-century Americans.