A Recipe for Disaster?
Easter Island is the perfect precedent of what will happen to the world--if we don't stop it on time. The most valuable resources are being diverted into EXTRAVAGANT PROJECTS and WARS, while the REAL ISSUES--environmental damage, injustice, etc--are ignored. The WATER WELL IS DRYING UP before our very eyes. A recipe for disaster, I'd say...
"There were increasing conflicts over diminishing resources resulting in a state of almost permanent warfare."
***I recommend the movie "Rapa Nui." See review below***
'The little spot of land in the middle of endless sea is more-or-less in the same situation as our lonely little rock in dark cold universe, and in the ecologically induced class struggle between "Long Ears" and "Short Ears" we might see reflection of the escalating conflict between rich and privileged states of the First World and numerically increasing yet constantly impoverished multitudes of the Third World. Unlike other films that try to shove the Message down our throats by, RAPA NUI successfully shows how greed, ignorance and unbalanced approach towards environment can bring down entire civilisation.'
In this movie, the crisis is precipitated, not by the stupid Lion (the old King), but by the greedy Fox (the Priest) who advices him. In the end the King escapes in an iceberg, which he interpreted to be the divine message... (Will the Rich escape to the Moon?) The Priest though receives some truly divine fate--he's speared in the "Short Ears" revolt. What's new?
The Lessons of Easter Island
By Clive Ponting
(snip)
The history of Easter Island is not one of lost civilisations and esoteric knowledge. Rather it is a striking example of the dependence of human societies on their environment and of the consequences of irreversibly damaging that environment. It is the story of a people who, starting from an extremely limited resource base, constructed one of the most advanced societies in the world for the technology they had available. However, the demands placed on the environment of the island by this development were immense. When it could no longer withstand the pressure, the society that had been painfully built up over the previous thousand years fell with it.
It is not known how many settlers arrived in the fifth century but they probably numbered no more than twenty or thirty at most. As the population slowly increased the forms of social organisation familiar in the rest of Polynesia were adopted. The basic social unit was the extended family, which jointly owned and cultivated the land. Closely related households formed lineages and clans, each of which had its own centre for religious and ceremonial activity. Each clan was headed by a chief who was able to organise and direct activities and act as a focal point for the redistribution of food and other essentials within the clan. It was this form of organisation and the competition (and probably conflict) between the clans that produced both the major achievements of Easter Island society and ultimately its collapse. Settlements were scattered across the island in small clusters of peasant huts with crops grown in open fields. Social activities were centred around separate ceremonial centres, which were occupied for part of the year. The chief monuments were large stone platforms, similar to those found in other parts of Polynesia and known as ahu, which were used for burials, ancestor worship and to commemorate past clan chiefs.
What made Easter Island different was that crop production took very little effort and therefore there was plenty of free time which the clan chiefs were able to direct into ceremonial activities. The result was the creation of the most advanced of all the Polynesian societies and one of the most complex in the world for its limited resource base. The Easter Islanders engaged in elaborate rituals and monument construction. Some of the ceremonies involved recitation from the only known Polynesian form of writing called rongorongo, which was probably less a true script and more a series of mnemonic devices. One set of elaborate rituals was based on the bird cult at Orongo, where there are the remains of forty-seven special houses together with numerous platforms and a series of high-relief rock carvings.
The crucial centres of ceremonial activity were the ahu. Over 300 of these platforms were constructed on the island, mainly near the coast. The level of intellectual achievement of at least some parts of Easter Island society can be judged by the fact that a number of these ahu have sophisticated astronomical alignments, usually towards one of the solstices or the equinox. At each site they erected between one and fifteen of the huge stone statues that survive today as a unique memorial to the vanished Easter Island society. It is these statues which took up immense amounts of peasant labour. The statues were carved, using only obsidian stone tools, at the quarry at Rano Raraku. They were fashioned to represent in a highly stylised form a male head and torso. On top of the head was placed a `topknot' of red stone weighing about ten tons from another quarry. The carving was a time-consuming rather than a complex task. The most challenging problem was to transport the statues, each some twenty feet in length and weighing several tens of tons, across the island and the then erect them on top of the ahu
The Easter Islanders' solution to the problem of transport provides the key to the subsequent fate of their whole society. Lacking any draught animals they had to rely on human power to drag the statues across the island using tree trunks as rollers. The population of the island grew steadily from the original small group in the fifth century to about 7,000 at its peak in 1550. Over time the number of clan groups would have increased and also the competition between them. By the sixteenth century hundreds of ahu had been constructed and with them over 600 of the huge stone statues. Then, when the society was at its peak, it suddenly collapsed leaving over half the statues only partially completed around Rano Raraku quarry. The cause of the collapse and the key to understanding the `mysteries' of Easter Island was massive environmental degradation brought on by deforestation of the whole island.
When the first Europeans visited the island in the eighteenth century it was completely treeless apart from a handful of isolated specimens at the bottom of the deepest extinct volcano crater of Rano Kao. However, recent scientific work, involving the analysis of pollen types, has shown that at the time of the initial settlement Easter Island had a dense vegetation cover including extensive woods. As the population slowly increased, trees would have been cut down to provide clearings for agriculture, fuel for heating and cooking, construction material for household goods, pole and thatch houses and canoes for fishing. The most demanding requirement of all was the need to move the large number of enormously heavy statues to ceremonial sites around the island. The only way this could have been done was by large numbers of people guiding and sliding them along a form of flexible tracking made up of tree trunks spread on the ground between the quarry and the ahu. Prodigious quantities of timber would have been required and in increasing amounts as the competition between the clans to erect statues grew: As a result by 1600 the island was almost completely deforested and statue erection was brought to a halt leaving many stranded at the quarry.
The deforestation of the island was not only the death knell for the elaborate social and ceremonial life it also had other drastic effects on every day life for the population generally. From 1500 the shortage of trees was forcing many people to abandon building houses from timber and live in caves, and when the wood eventually ran out altogether about a century later everyone had to use the only materials left. They resorted to stone shelters dug into the hillsides or flimsy reed huts cut from the vegetation that grew round the edges of the crater lakes. Canoes could no longer be built and only reed boats incapable of long voyages could be made. Fishing was also more difficult because nets had previously been made from the paper mulberry tree (which could also be made into cloth) and that was no longer available. Removal of the tree cover also badly affected the soil of the island, which would have already suffered from a lack of suitable animal manure to replace nutrients taken up by the crops. Increased exposure caused soil erosion and the leaching out of essential nutrients. As a result crop yields declined. The only source of food on the island unaffected by these problems was the chickens. As they became ever more important, they had to be protected from theft and the introduction of stone-built defensive chicken houses can be dated to this phase of the island's history. It became impossible to support 7,000 people on this diminish ing resource base and numbers fell rapidly
After 1600 Easter Island society went into decline and regressed to ever more primitive conditions. Without trees, and so without canoes, the islanders were trapped in their remote home, unable to escape the consequences of their self-inflicted, environmental collapse. The social and cultural impact of deforestation was equally important. The inability to erect any more statues must have had a devastating effect on the belief systems and social organisation and called into question the foundations on which that complex society had been built. There were increasing conflicts over diminishing resources resulting in a state of almost permanent warfare. Slavery became common and as the amount of protein available fell the population turned to cannibalism. One of the main aims of warfare was to destroy the ahu of opposing clans. A few survived as burial places but most were abandoned. The magnificent stone statues, too massive to destroy, were pulled down. The first Europeans found only a few still standing when they arrived in the eighteenth century and all had been toppled by the 1830s. When they were asked by the visitors how the statues had been moved from the quarry, the primitive islanders could no longer remember what their ancestors had achieved and could only say that the huge figures had `walked' across the island. The Europeans, seeing a treeless landscape, could think of no logical explanation either and were equally mystified.
***
RAPA NUI (1994)
reviewed by
Dragan Antulov
The plot of this film is based on the legends and historical speculations about Easter Island in Southeast Pacific, the most remote part of the world that was ever settled by human beings. Dutch explorers, upon discovering those islands in 1722, found impressive statues but the the local population, made of stone-age cannibalistic savages, seemed incapable of erecting them. The movie tries to give the explanation for this by setting the story few decades before the arrival of Europeans. The island is so far away from the other lands and that the descendants of Polynesian settlers forgot their roots and believe that they are the only people in the world. Lack of external conflicts doesn't mean that there aren't tensions within the community - the society is divided into two classes based on racial features - aristocratic "Long Ears" and plebeian "Short Ears". The class and racial tensions has begun to escalate because of the population explosion; the island is simply too small to provide the needs for the people. Old and senile king Ariki-mau (played by Eru Potaka-Dewes) is less concerned with those problems, because he thinks only of erecting bigger and bigger statues in order to placate gods. His grandson Naro (played by Jason Scott Lee) has other things on his mind, since he fell in love in "Short Ear" girl Ramana (played by Sandirine Holt). Love that crosses class divide happens in worst of all times, since "Short Ears" like Make (played by Esai Morales) are less and less enthusiastic about "Long Ears" rule, which slowly but inevitably paves the way for brutal civil unrest.
RAPA NUI definitely belongs to the same category as multitude of other films with strong environmental message, which used to be made during the zenith of Hollywood's "political correctness" in early to mid 1990s. What distinguishes this film from those films is the manor in which the message is delivered to the audience. Namely, filmmakers wisely chose to set the plot in a time before arrival of Europeans, thus sparing the viewers from "politically correct" cliches of evil European civilisation destroying the nature. RAPA NUI shows that less advanced native cultures, which are supposed to be more "in tune" with the nature, can be equally or even more deadly to the environment than their modern-day equivalents. What is even more remarkable about this film is the fact that the whole story can be seen as powerful allegory about the current state of human civilisation as a whole,. The little spot of land in the middle of endless sea is more-or-less in the same situation as our lonely little rock in dark cold universe, and in the ecologically induced class struggle between "Long Ears" and "Short Ears" we might see reflection of the escalating conflict between rich and privileged states of the First World and numerically increasing yet constantly impoverished multitudes of the Third World. Unlike other films that try to shove the Message down our throats by, RAPA NUI successfully shows how greed, ignorance and unbalanced approach towards environment can bring down entire civilisation.
Unfortunately, most of the viewers have to digest this message in the context of plot, characters and situations that sometimes look too cliched or simplistic, or simply out of place. One of the examples is the triathlon scene, which looks like it was added into the film only to provide some testosterone- filled action in otherwise depressive movie. The writer and director Kevin Reynolds nevertheless manages to keep things under control, helped by ethnically diverse and very capable cast. Despite many flaws, RAPA NUI is a film that can leave a strong impression on any viewers, and after WTC bombings, when the future of our world seems so uncertain, this impression is definitely going to be even stronger.
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