Easter's End

Easter’s End

                In Jared Diamond’s article, Easter’s End, he is concerned with how our society is becoming like the Polynesian Easter Island. To think how the island started out abundant, then evolving to an extinct society and land is thought provoking. In fact, it makes me question how our fate will be. From high-powered machinery, chemicals, and with the largest trucks, SUVs, and other cars; how can we do less damage that the Polynesians? They only had their bodies and muscles to wipe out their island.

                It’s amazing to me how “the islanders…were totally isolated, unaware that other people existed” (page 427). Actually, thinking about how they had the means to survive on birds, porpoises, and sea snails and they exhausting their use is astonishing since there really weren’t that many people on the land. But, resulting to survive by cannibalism? It gives me the chills just to think of that! However, as a personal connection to the article, something similar happened to my own neighborhood—minus the extinction of food sources and cannibalism. When I moved into Murray in third grade, my street had many big beautiful trees. I remembered tem being so tall and spacious along the road in people’s front yards. However, when I entered junior high, many families started to move away, and it’s eerily quiet now. The new neighbors that have now moved in are the kind of people who either stay inside their houses all day, smoke pot and other drugs they create from their homes, and have cut down all their trees in their yards. It’s such a difference now, but it happened like how Easter Island did. “It vanished slowly over decades” (page 430). Overall, I think Diamond is right. I think we will eventually end up like Easter Island natives did. Except, I don’t think we’ll result to being cannibals, but who knows? It seems like anything is possible. Therefore, I conclude that we all need to watch how we are treating out planet, and we have no excuses to not know what we are doing to our planet because of the history we have learned and how other places have depreciated, due to carelessness of resources.