Collapse Assignment 1

Easter island was described as a culture with little to no "technology" of any kind yet they still seemed like a fairly civilized community. They were able to build statues and find food and make a living for themselves and their family without the many mechanical aids we have in our society today. It is interesting to me that this society relates to ours in the sense that we (although having some tools) didn't have the amount of technology that we do today and we still managed to be a fully functioning and working community. The people of Easter island created all the forms of technology that they might need and therefore were successful, in the beginning.

The people of Easter island began to become more and more industrialized and also started to domesticate animals and this is when everything in their community started to collapse. The more they felt the need to industrialize, the more resources were being used and wasted. They felt obligated to make their chief happy and in turn their God and in order to do so, they built giant statues which destroyed nature and their resources. The need to fulfill culture and religious "obligations" seemed to be greater than the need to preserve what these people needed to survive. None of the residents of Easter island realized that they were going to run out of resources. This, plus epidemics and kidnappings that lead to slavery all contributed to the loss of this society as a whole, but I personally believe it all stemmed from the waste of resources.

Americans, I feel are in a similar situation. People in America before us have worked hard to create a life for us to have now and as time goes by, we slowly use all of these resources given to us and they will slowly decline. We use fossil fuels which will not only become obsolete, but also pollute the land which in turn helps in the pollution of all of our other resources. If Americans continue to use these same methods, we might end up like the people of Easter island.