Easter Island – The Slow Injury of Cultural Pride

The whole Earth is my garden, as well. Green and blue, product of life and provider of all life. 

At Easter Island, according to A Green History of the World, a population of 7000 at peace with the environs evolved great rituals of statuary art that stripped their island bare and reduced their people to squalor. 

You see, they needed trees to roll the stones along, and vying between themselves to be the clan with the greatest stone monuments at the greatest centers of established power, they cut trees upon trees in tribute to this most crowning achievement of their highest cultural song.

Death of the environment which made their culture possible meant the death of their culture. 1200 years of well balanced chickens and sweet potatoes; a culminating roar of micro-empire in stone; and then dissolution from deforestation through folly.

And to wonder when the irreversible limit was reached… Was it when one tree was left standing? A hundred? 

Or was it when their cycle of greatness became so embedded and intractably compulsive within the gestalt of their cultural mind that the pendulum of downfall shifted fatally into the hemisphere of night? 

Perhaps it was failure of the imagination. What more could a culture do, one so gloriously entranced with the erection of the stone Gods? Perhaps it was more shaming to these human beings to cease and desist this most holy form of sport and expression than it was to watch their society dissolve and die. More difficult to shift from within their pride of aggrandizement than to slowly wither: the slow, long injury that over hundreds upon hundreds of years cut more deeply than any One's two eyes could ever see. 

– Michael Rain