Collapse & Easter Island

The most interesting aspect of the Easter Island history was the stone statues that the Easter Islanders, and the polynesians did. The chapter talks a lot about how the stones were made and even though there was a limited resource of what the people can do, such as transporting the statues, the people still gave a lot of concentration in it. Because on page 7, there was this statue operation that Ahu Tongariki was doing and that it required lots of food and a lot of trees and ropes to build Ahu's giantic statue. It shows how important these statues are to the Easter people and how much time and effort they would do to give in building the statues. I also wondered why they did the statue in the way they did it, because honestly, the statues look weird. As I keep reading, the Easter Islanders would also put eyes on the statues to create a "penetrating, blinding gaze". I think by adding eyes it will make the statue look more scarier rather than "awesome" (page 6). But I am impressed that with so little technology plus resources and people that they are able to build such huge and heavy statues.

A difference while reading this chapter was the way they treat the chickens, almost the only domestic animal in the land and how many of the food they eat are mostly plants and rather than water, they drink sugarcane juice. They build a lot of stone chicken houses, or hare mod, which has a small entrance for the chickens to run in and out. This is definitely different from our civilization because we trapped the chickens in a huge place without sunlight or an entrance to have some freedom to run around. For the isanders, even though they build a wall to prevent the chicens to run away or being stolent, the chickens still get to play and run around. And there is the lack of meat that they have while our civilization has so much meat and rather than drinking sugarcane juice, a reason why the islanders get their teeth full of cavaties by the age of 20, we have water that is as fresh as it can be. And the obvious differences is that we're more industrialized and that our resources of food and other things are greater than the islanders. We have "globalization, international trade, jet planes, and the internet, all countries on Earth today share resources and affect each other" but "when the Easter Islanders got into difficulties there was nowhere to which they could flee, nor to which they could turn for help".

Another connection that shows how we would have the same future as did the Easter Islanders is that we overexploit our resources too much, which can destroyed the society. Another point I want to make is that on page 13, the author said people see the collapse of Easter island society as a metaphor, a worst-case scenario, for what may lie ahead of us in our own future but are we really seeing what can really happened if we are not doing anything about it. Many of us is sitting around not realizing that we can someday be like the Easter island if we do not treat the resources we have more carefully and usefully.