What happened on Easter Island?
It took Mother Nature four billion years to create this tropical island paradise. But it took human settlers just 1,000 years to destroy it--a mere blink of the eye of history. Discovered by the Dutch on Easter Sunday in 1722, they named this once heavily forested paradise, Easter Island.
So what happened? The Rapa Nui who originally settled Easter Island (500 A.D.) were intelligent people with an advanced civilization--growing from a few hundred original settlers, who arrived by sea from Polynesia, to upwards of 15,000 people by 1500 A.D. on this 63 square-mile tropical island.
They were well organized and had the skills to build hundreds of giant stone Gods shown above, but they were unable to connect the dots when it came to understanding how their wasteful lifestyle was leading to the demise of their ecosystem and ultimately to the collapse of their civilization.
What did they do wrong? They started using certain finite resources like trees to build boats, houses, rope and provide fuel for cooking. As the tropical forest began to disappear, the birds and other species went away as their fragile ecosystem was destroyed--and, along with it, their civilization.
Sadly, we humans of today haven't learned from what happened to the Rap Nui. We're committing the very same crimes against nature--recklessly using up finite resources.
While we're harming our fragile ecosystem in a great many ways, the single best move we could make to get back on the right track to living in harmony with nature would be to move rapidly in the direction of eating plant foods instead of foods that come from animals.
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