Читать книгу Like a Tree - Jean Shinoda Bolen - Страница 25

In Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond's description of what happened to Easter Island could be a scenario for planet Earth if we continue to cut down or lose the trees and the population increases. (Diamond, a professor of geography at UCLA, was awarded the Pulitzer prize for Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies.) Easter Island is an all-by-itself island in the Pacific Ocean. Chile is 2,500 miles (4,020 kilometers) to the east; the Pitcairn Islands are 1,300 miles (2,090 kilometers) to the west. It is small, only 66 square miles (226 square kilometers), a mere dot in the vast ocean. It is now a barren place, famous for numerous mysterious and massive strange stone statues. These are look-alike huge heads with long ears and prominent noses and chins on legless male torsos carved from volcanic rock.

When Polynesian settlers arrived around 900 CE, Easter Island was covered with dense forests. There were twentytwo different kinds of trees, including the largest palm tree ever to exist in the world. We know about the species of trees from palynology, the study of pollen. Samples are obtained by boring out a column of sediment, the age of each layer is dated by radiocarbon methods, and then through tedious microscopic work, pollen is examined, counted, identified, and compared with pollen of known species. We know about the palm tree from fossil nuts that turned out to be very similar, but larger than those of the world's largest existing palm tree, the Chilean wine palm, which grows up to sixtyfive feet (about twenty meters) tall and three feet (.9 m) in diameter. Fossilized casts of the Easter Island palm trunks and root bundles found buried in the lava flow from a few hundred thousand years ago proved that the Easter Island palm, with a trunk that was twice the girth of the Chilean palm, would have dwarfed it. While it existed, the biggest, most magnificent palm tree in the world could be found on Easter Island. Reading this brings to mind the threat to the old growth redwood trees in California, which are the tallest and largest trees in existence now.

The Polynesians who settled on Easter Island found trees that provided lumber to build houses, thatch for roofs, and strong rope. There were big trees whose trunks could be made into seagoing canoes, hardwood trees from which harpoons were made, trees that provided wild fruit and nuts, and the wine palm whose sap could be fermented. The islanders had all they needed to live well. They prospered, and as they grew in numbers, they used more wood and cut down their forests to clear land to grow crops as well.

Like Shel Silverstein's Giving Tree, the trees of Easter Island kept giving and giving until there was no more that could be taken. Once trees go, further loss follows. Through the hydrologic cycle, trees transpire water into the atmosphere and attract rain. Trees provide a habitat for birds, animals, insects, fungi, and microscopic life. Trees protect soil from erosion by wind and rain, and make more soil as their roots break rock into gravel and their leaves compost into organic matter.

The growth of the economy and the population growth based on what trees provided on Easter Island could not be sustained. Diamond describes how deforestation and wind led to a disastrous erosion of the topsoil. Six hundred years after the first settlers arrived, the population of Easter Island had grown to between six thousand and thirty thousand and there were more mouths to feed than food. Widespread starvation led to a descent into cannibalism and the population died off.

When the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen came upon the almost deserted and barren island on Easter Sunday, April 5, 1722, the few human survivors and the mute, mysterious, and monumental stone heads (the moai) were all that remained. The trees had all been cut down. Since Roggeveen first sighted Easter Island, there has been fascination, speculation, and fairly extensive study about the moai. There had apparently been competition between priests or chiefs to outdo each other in erecting larger and larger stone heads, as the size of the moai increased over time. There were hundreds in various stages of completion in the volcanic quarries, some were found as if abandoned near the roads, and every single one of those that had been erected had been toppled, many deliberately felled so that they would break at the neck. The moai were erected on elaborate, large platforms built of stone (ahu) and always faced inland. It's a surprise to learn that the heads that we see in photographs of Easter Island were re-erected much later, and never faced the sea as they do in the pictures.