Ecocide: The Rapa Nui Cannibalism

The Rapa Nui Ecocide Hundreds of years ago, Europeans arrived on what is now known as Easter Island. To their surprise and confusion, only 3,000 Rapa Nui Polynesians inhabited the island. Little did the European visitors know, at one point the island was home to 15,000 Rapa Nui people. However, what once was a utopia soon became a cannibalistic, war-plagued society. The Rapa Nui people were so detrimentally competitive that they destroyed all of their natural resources, leading to cannibalism and civil war. In 300-400 A.D., the Rapa Nui Polynesians arrived on Easter Island (Easter Island). They traveled in canoes that carried livestock and various seeds. Upon arrival, the Rapa Nui were stunned with the abundance of trees and rich soil spread

Once there were no trees, all of the nutrient-filled topsoil was washed away due to the fact there were no tree roots to hold it down (Dangerfield). Without soil to grow crops and no wood to build canoes- the Rapa Nui people turned on each other. As the people of the island slowly began to starve, they were forced to become cannibalistic. Human bones were found in large pits where other food waste was thrown, providing further evidence that the islanders were forced to resort to cannibalism (How Easter Island Works). If the trees had never been destroyed in the first place, the Rapa Nui people never would have had to resort to this inhuman behavior. The way that the Rapa Nui people came to an end should be a warning to those of us who are alive today. According to the article “Humans have destroyed a tenth of Earth's wilderness in 25 years – study”, “...if current trends continue there could be no globally significantly wild areas left in ‘less than a century’” (Vaughan). This statistic sounds eerily familiar to the history of the Rapa Nui people. Humans need to learn from past mistakes such as these and learn to preserve the environment in a way that it can sustain life for