Rapa Nui and the classic rock of apocalyptic thinking

Moai "Hoa Hakananai'a"
from Rapa Nui  (Easter
Island), British Museum.
Photo by your humble
blogkeeper

Fashions change in apocalyptic villain-mongering as they do in clothes. Yesterday's communists or Japanese or American capitalists are today's Taliban or Chinese or American capitalists (though Jews are classic and always in style when it comes to scapegoating).

The Statues that Walked: Unraveling the Mystery of Easter Island (2011), by Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo, sets out (and succeeds, it says here) to debunk the theory that ecological catastrophe wiped out Easter Island's population, that the island was denuded of trees to make apparatus with which to haul the island's famous moai, one of which appears at right.

Rather, the archaeologist authors point out, based on geological and archeo-botanic evidence, deforestation began before humans populated the remote Polynesian island. In the process, they cite experiments demonstrating that the islanders could well have moved the massive stone statues by rolling them slowly on their bases a step at a time, the way one might move a refrigerator across a room. The resulting rolling and lurching movement, they suggest, supports folklore about the statues walked; hence, the book's title.

Hunt and Lipo argue that disease and other social ills brought by Europeans starting in 1722, rather than "ecocide" (the authors put that term between inverted commas, and I like to think they do so to mock its voguishness), decimated the island's population, driving it as low as 110 from possibly 3,000.  What's interesting is that the white-man-spreads-disease-and-exterminates-darker-skinned-peoples explanation topped the apocalyptic blame charts for so many years (never mind that the Black Death originated in China), displaced in recent years by fears of environmental apocalypse: You know, climate change, as if climate change were not and had not always been constant.

Hunt and Lipo take an unfashionably optimistic view of Rapa Nui's potential to meet their latest challenges, those posed by tourism and development. And their displacement of one culturally fashionable apocalypse scenario with another that was equally fashionable just a few years before. It's like those albums the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix kept releasing and topping the charts with for years after they died, broke up, or both.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014