The Easter in Us

The only civilization in the history of the world that has never been entirely subjugated is China. Every other civilization that has ever existed has, at one point or another, been conquered by germs, guns, or steel. Some have re-emerged. Some have not.

But what is it that makes empires fall? Generally speaking, great civilizations fall by devouring themselves. Sometimes they are devoured by their own ideas (Nazi Germany), sometimes they are devoured by their lack of ideas (Soviet Russia), but usually they are devoured by consuming all of their natural resources, in a drawn-out orgy of self-indulgence.

The stone heads of Easter Island are iconic talismans of the ancient past. But the Easter Islands are not like Stonehenge or the Pyramids; something different happened here.

The pyramids and Stonehenge were never "discovered", because people have lived with them since they were built. The Easter Island statues, by contrast, had to be re-discovered, because the civilization that built them disappeared.

How did this happen? The islanders exhausted their most important resource, thereby devouring themselves. What was that resource? Trees.

Needless to say, the islanders were very sophisticated people. If they were able to build the statues, they obviously understood that every time a tree is cut down, the resource it represents is gone until a new tree can be grown in its place.

Despite this, the islanders cut down every last tree on the island. Why? They needed the trees as construction material for their statues.

These statues were obviously profoundly important to the islanders. You can't eat statues, so the islanders clearly placed great value in them. Even to the point where every last tree was sacrificed, this sophisticated civilization just had to have its statues.

And they got their statues. But the price was extinction.

It strikes me that the American empire is on the same course. We can easily look back on the Easter Islanders with disdain, deigning them primitives, savages, incapable of managing their own resources. We look back and say, "how could they have been so stupid?"

But what will people say in 1,000 years of the American Empire, which tied its ankles willingly and knowingly to a resource that everyone knows is utterly non-renewable?

Unlike the islanders' trees, oil cannot be regrown. It is non-renewable. Yet we, "sophisticated" and "civilized" and "rational" as we are, have done just what the Easter islanders did. We just have to have our statues.

Our statues are not quite as aesthetic as those of the islanders; our statues are highways, McDonalds, aircraft carriers, and pesticides.

From 9/11 to the Iraq War to the ongoing oil spew, what recent catastrophe of ours has not been in some way a function of our dependence on oil? Oil brings us these catastrophes when it is plentiful; what hell are we in for when it becomes scarce?

"Respect your elders" is a phrase I always take to heart in my personal life. This adage should apply not just to individuals, but to civilizations. The Easter islanders may seem ridiculous to us now, but at least they got some good sculpture out of their suicide.