Where is Anuta Island

According to researcher Patrick Kirch, the island's history goes back to an astonishing 2,900 years, but there were uninhabitated eras that lasted up to 500 years. Part of Solomon Islands, Anuta is not without fellow countrymen, but the island is certainly remote. At such a long way from our neighbours in a wide sea, known for its cyclone, sustainability is not a "choice" as it is for us.

At about the same re-population of Anuta, another island in the South Pacific approached the end of its civilisation, as there was no regard for sustainable live. At Easter Island there are sculptures that we have all seen before. For all the saplings that were taken down so that the sculptures could be unrolled from the rocks, they were taken from there to selected places where they sat throughout their years.

While we don't really know why they had such an urge to make this moai while damaging the world around them, antropologists now point to Easter Island as an example of what happens to a community when they ignore the world around them in search of riches and stature. If you look at Easter Island today, you can see an island that was torn to the top.

They should be filled with palms and astonishing leaves and the strange fauna indigenous to the Pacific isles. They were supposed to have huge sea bird populations, but like the animals and tree population, the island inhabitants made them all extinct. While Easter Island was on its deathbed, some Tongans landed almost 6,000 leagues away on Anuta Island to begin a new way of living, a new population.

Now, that's the dia of Anuta Island. The Solomon Islands call it Te Fatu Sekeseke, "the sliding stone" because it is so small that it is a miracle to live there. About northwest of New Zealand and northeast of Australia on the Solomon Islands. The Anutans have built a community that appreciates the fragile equilibrium of the world.

Whilst the Easter Island people felled all the tree just to cut down the statue, the Anutans' outriggers have been considered inherited from time immemorial because they know how scarce the timber is. The aim is to prosper, and to this end the inhabitants of the island have a plan according to which they live: Being part of this way of living, they are living with a so-called "gift economy".

Anutan will never starve if his neighbour has something to eat. And even those who make a living, such as fishers who travel to neighbouring remote isles in order to fish, are sharing most of this income with others by buying finished products to be used by everyone on Anuta. Anyone who catches fish, slays wild animals or makes useful instruments is all too lucky to be able to share them with others without waiting for anything in exchange.

Somehow this small, half a nautical miles large island in the Pacific has everything they need. But, like Easter Island's Moai civilization, our air lanes are not sustained, the climate is no longer shifting, the economy has fallen apart, and much of the West is crawling to resolve our injustices and the associated environment problems.

When this small island can look at its immediate environment, which is all half a nile in width, and say, "We have everything we need," don't you think we can look at this great old Continent and teach us how to use it? By the time we get to know how to do this, we will see a prolonged procession of social scientists and humanists attending and learning about this small, fortunate community that somehow succeeded in turning a little mole hill into a heaven in the vast Pacific.

For those interested in seeing more of these two lectures on sustainable development, the BBC series South Pacific offers both in Feature 1.