Today after years of study by archaeologists, anthropologists, historians and geographers such as Jared Diamond, Professor of Geography at UCLA in Los Angeles, it appears that Easter Islanders destroyed themselves by cutting down all the many trees that originally grew on the island. Perhaps the natives appealed to the gods through the stone statues to restore the very land and food supply they were destroying in their unconscious ignorance. Pulitzer Prize-winning author and professor, Dr. Jared Diamond, was so stunned by what he learned about Easter Island that he focused an entire large chapter on the island's deterioration and extinctions in his latest book: Collapse, How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. (The 575-page book also examines many other failed human cultures, past and present.)

Treeless Easter Island once was covered with tall palm forests, woody bushes and 25 nesting seabird species. But after all the trees were cut down to transport and erect the stone statues,
the society collapsed. Photograph © Martin Gray.

Dr. Diamond writes: "No other site that I have visited made such a ghostly impression on me as Rano Raraku, the rock quarry on Easter Island where its famous gigantic stone statues were carved. To begin with, the island is the most remote habitable scrap of land in the world. The nearest lands are the coast of Chile 2,300 miles to the east and Polynesia's Pitcairn Islands 1,300 miles to the west."

Today, Easter Island is governed by Chile in South America. But modern DNA analysis of 12 skeletons found on Easter Island proved the Easter Island natives were Polynesian. Dr. Diamond concludes that Easter Island is "the closest approximation that we have to an ecological disaster unfolding in complete isolation."

Easter Island is a triangular-shaped island made entirely from three volcanic eruptions over the past few million years. The entire island is only 9 miles long north to south, is 1,670 feet high and covers only 66 square miles. Even the surrounding Pacific Ocean is too cold in temperature to sustain many fish species. There isn't much fresh water and the wind blows so steadily that the soil dries out. The only way to farm is to add rocks to dirt to retain moisture.

Yet, around 900 A.D., some people from Polynesia islands arrived by boat and found a subtropical forest of tall palm trees, woody bushes and at least 25 nesting seabird species which once made the island the "richest breeding site in all of Polynesia and probably in the whole Pacific." Eventually, as many as 20,000 to 30,000 people might have lived on Easter Island.

But only a few centuries later around 1500, there were no more birds, no more trees, and the natives were eating each other in cannibalism amid the tall stone statues produced by competing Easter Island political powers who wanted the biggest and best tributes to the ancestors and gods. One of the unfinished statues in the Rano Raraku quarry was 66 feet tall and weighed an estimated 300 tons.

Over time, the statues became more elaborate with large,
mysterious head dresses. Photograph © Cliff Wassman.