Easter Island Resources

Case-study: Osterinsel - Population against resources

"Today Easter Island (also known as Rapa Nui) is a predominantly pasoral (grassland) island in the southeastern Pacific, about 3,600 kilometers western of Chile..... Polynesians who travelled across the Pacific Ocean reached Easter Island around 800 AD. Its inhabitants flourished for several hundred years, with an estimate of 10,000 to 15,000 inhabitants at its apex.

Sometime in its story, probably around 1600, the populace began to fall, its number quickly sank to around 2,000. Favourite theorem is that the island inhabitants fell all tree trunks in order to use them as fuels and construction material and to bring the gigantic stone sculptures from the stone pit to their position on the island.

In addition to the exploitation of all the fine timber deposits, logging led to an acceleration in ground degradation. When the breakdown went on, they were hit by a civilian struggle for resources, Kannibalism and towards the end of the last few centuries their diminishing civilization in the nineteenth world.

But the precise cause of the island's abrupt breakdown and how the fellowship has exceeded its ability to survive has remain a puzzle. He and his co-workers believe that it is possible that land degradation may coincide with a peak of the island's people.

When the same happens today, the people would either move away from the island or become clothed in fertiliser. Researchers from New Zealand, Australia and the USA will use a variety of science to recreate the bio-geochemistry of the breakdown to see if it was occurring in the ground at the same moment as the degradation of nutrients.

They will gather about a decade of nuclei of sedimentary sediments for further study in New Zealand in crater settlements. It is the goal to exactly define the time of changes in plants, animals and humans as well as changes in ground-fertilisation. They want to know if the Easter Island crash is a lesson for contemporary societies.

"If the Easter Islanders exceed the bearing capacities of their land, there is a stark analogy to the present economic downturn, in which Wall Street has exaggerated the yield on the residential market." Proof that Thomas Malthus' theory of the population was right.