BRATTLEBORO — Most of us have heard of Easter Island, that remote place in the South Pacific where giant-headed stone statues stare forlornly out to sea. In its story, there may be a message for us today.
Archeologists and paleontologists, using carbon dating and pollen analysis, determined that the island was first settled about 400 A.D. Settlers arrived in a subtropical paradise with abundant resources.
By about 1400, the island was deforested. With deforestation went the wood needed for cookfires, shelter, seafaring canoes, and the transport of those statues. Without canoes, fishing ended. Without forests, game birds and animals became extinct. Eventually, civil warfare and cannibalism devastated the population.
By the time Jacob Roggeveen, a Dutch explorer, “discovered” the island on Easter Day, 1722, he reported that its wasted appearance could give no other impression than of a “singular poverty and bareness.”
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A similar fate is not impossible for all of us on Earth Island. We too are depleting resources and compromising nature's life-support systems.
About half the world's tropical forests (the lungs of our ecosystems) are already gone. By 2030, perhaps only 10 percent will still be standing. Half the world's wetlands (the kidneys of our ecosystems) were destroyed in the 20th century.
We are polluting our lakes, rivers, and oceans. Dead zones are appearing in oceans at river deltas. Patches of plastic garbage exist in both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Three million tons of plastic containing Bisphenol A, an endocrine disrupter, are produced each year. An average square mile of ocean contains 46,000 pieces of plastic trash.
Every day, 2 million tons of sewerage and industrial and agricultural waste are discharged into the planet's water supplies. As a result, 80 percent of the world's rivers are now in decline, potentially affecting some 5 billion people. By 2030, global demand for safe, clean water will exceed supply by 40 percent.
Petroleum, natural gas, and uranium reserves around the world will one day be exhausted (or the materials too expensive to extract). Many ocean fisheries are collapsing from overfishing. Reservoirs and aquifers are shrinking.
The 80,000 industrial chemicals currently in use are mostly untested on the most vulnerable among us. Babies are born with dozens of industrial chemicals already incorporated into their bodies. Polar bears test positive for flame retardants. Industrial agriculture exposes millions of acres to wind so that topsoil blows away, which then requires using even more petrochemical fertilizers.
The 400 nuclear reactors in the world are aging and are susceptible to accident and sabotage. Another Chernobyl or Three Mile Island disaster is probably just a matter of time. War zones from the Balkans to Afghanistan are contaminated with DU (“depleted” uranium) from the firing of munitions. DU has a radioactive half-life of 4.5 billion years.
Carbon dioxide and other man-made greenhouse gases are accumulating in the atmosphere. Oceans are acidifying, and coral reefs (incubators of sea life) are dying as a result of global warming. Weather is becoming more erratic. Storms are more severe.
Twenty million people in Pakistan were recently displaced by flooding. (In Vermont, it's not unheard of to see three or four thunderstorms in one day, or a period of drought punctuated by 8 inches of rain.) Plant and animal species are going extinct worldwide at a rate not equaled in 65 million years.
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Who can deny that humans are waging war against the Earth? This war is largely as a result of the fantasy of unending economic growth (on a planet of limited resources) and the pursuit of short-term profit. It's also a function of the gospel of consumerism, where Americans, at 5 percent of the world's population, consume roughly 25 percent of the Earth's resources and produce 25 percent of the waste. Meanwhile, the country that came out on top in a recent study of “happiness” was Costa Rica. The U.S. was ranked at No. 114.
Coincidentally, human population is largely out of control. We are outdistancing the earth's carrying capacity, sentencing billions of our fellows to lives of desperation. Given the depletion of resources, especially water, conflict is on the rise. Civil war, ethnic cleansing and violence against immigrants, gays, the homeless, and persons of differing religions are rampant.
The penchant of some advanced countries to lord it over weaker ones has resulted in the United States and Russia each having 2,000 to 2,500 nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert. Flocks of birds mistaken by radar to be hostile attacks have come close to triggering nuclear missile exchanges and “nuclear winter.” Even a Pentagon think tank has called climate change a “dangerous threat multiplier” that could lead to resource wars.
Again, who can deny that we are waging war on ourselves?
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When similar calamities befell the Easter Islanders, there was nowhere to escape. Isn't there a lesson here that we get honest with ourselves about what we're doing to Spaceship Earth and to each other, and that there are things we must do before we ourselves have nowhere to go?
• Maybe by respecting Mother Earth and humbly accepting our place in the web of life, knowing that what we do to that web, we do to ourselves?
• Maybe by directing our society away from arrogance, greed, and warfare toward compassion, equality, and peace?
• Maybe by substituting the Gross Domestic Product with a “National Happiness Index?”
• Maybe by seriously funding safe, clean, renewable energy; and energy-efficient homes, businesses, and transportation?
• Maybe by wholeheartedly supporting the international assistance programs of the United Nations (helping earthquake, tsunami, and flood victims), the Kyoto Protocol, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Earth Charter, and the Peoples Agreement from the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth?
Sadly, humans are capable of self destruction. It happened on Easter Island. Isn't there now sufficient proof that we're heading in the same direction?
Isn't it time to take this threat seriously? Or will space travelers one day “discover” this blue planet in the Milky Way Galaxy, and find a barren and polluted wasteland devoid of life except for a primordial soup of bacteria and microbes?