Parallels between Easter Island and the Present
In any civilization, the roles of natural resources are important as they help sustain populations who use them and ensure the health of the environment. However, these natural resources are vulnerable to overexploitation and can cause problems in today’s societies. In the past, Easter Island, at one point, was an Island that was full of forests like the other Polynesian Islands. But due to unsustainable practices of deforestation, Easter Island lost its natural resources and experienced a population decline. Today’s societies are also facing similar environmental problems such as Haiti where there are signs of poverty and widespread deforestation. Analogies exist between Easter Island and present …show more content…
In the year 1350, the population on Easter Island may have reached a peak maximum of 3,000 – 4,000 with a 3% growth rate since its early settlement. The population growth of the world currently is at a 1.13% growth rate with 7.4 billion people. Since Easter Island is an island covering only 64 miles, it can not sustain a very large population with its limited amount of natural resources. The idea is that with more population growth, more resources will be needed to sustain the population. As a result, this may lead to extensive resource exploitation practices such as on fertile soil for the production of food, which may negatively impact the environment and wildlife. On Easter Island, as people cleared forests and changed the landscape for farmland, native animal species became extinct. Dwindling amount of resources also led to food shortages and more resource exploitation. In today’s societies, signs of resource exploitation can be seen in energy production such as the exhaustion of fossil fuel reserves, which are not renewable resources. For example, USA consumed 20,071 thousands of barrels of oil per day in the year 2004. While USA is not a major producer of oil, it is a major consumer of oil for energy production. Population growth results in resource exploitation and stress on natural …show more content…
On Easter Island, early settlers had access to plentiful palm trees and began to use them for timber, charcoal-making, and canoe construction. In addition, people cleared the forests for suitable soil to grow crops, and charcoal- making showed signs of slash and burn techniques. The problem of deforestation is that it allows for soil erosion by weather, and it can lead to soil and nutrient loss. Most of Easter Island’s forests have now become grasslands. In today’s society, deforestation and soil erosion are still an ongoing phenomenon that puts environments at risk of landscape degradation and desertification. The 2010 Global Forest Resources Assessment reported that in the last decade, 13 million hectares of forests were lost from natural disasters as well as from anthropogenic activity such as the conversion of tropical forest to agricultural land. In 2014, widespread deforestation occurred in the Amazon Forest as 2,000 square miles were lost for farmland. Environmental concerns included changes in the water cycle and potential drought globally. Deforestation, which results in the conversion of forests to farmland, increases soil erosion and resource