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12/24/2004: "When Trees Were Oil"

One of the most important resources for Easter Islanders was the huge Easter Island palm, a close relative of the Chilean wine palm. It can be argued that this tree was the very basis for their entire civilization, in the same way that petroleum is the economic basis for ours. It was ideal for constructing the strong canoes necessary for hunting one of their major food staples, the porpoise. It had edible nuts and sap from which sugar, syrup, honey, and wine could be made. It was clearly essential for the massive building projects – huge stone faces – for which the island is best known. It was huge, 80 feet tall and 6 feet in diameter. Somewhere around the year 1400 AD, about 1,000 years after the first human being arrived on the island, someone cut down the very last Easter Island palm. I was struck by the vision of that event, the harvesting of that last tree - presumably for its wood - knowing that there would never be another. Their culture had existed for a millennium, witnessing throughout the successive devastation of their isolated home, yet they didn’t have the wisdom or the discipline to recognize that the last few trees had far greater value as the basis for regeneration. They apparently took the valuable resource these palms represented so much for granted that they couldn’t stop themselves from “business as usual” exploitation, even though reversal of the decline through basic forest husbandry would have been very straightforward. Will we be similarly foolish? I see the recent election as a referendum on this question.