 The Human Population Explosion Out of House and Home by Peter Tyson Can what happened on one small island in the South Pacific serve as a cautionary tale for the entire planet? To see just how clearly a growing human population relies on and impacts its natural environment, one need look no farther than Easter Island, the South Pacific isle with the famous stone statues known as moai. I have been doing a lot of reading about the fate of Easter in preparation for an upcoming trip, and, as the geographer John Flenley and archeologist Paul Bahn write in The Enigmas of Easter Island, "it is a story with an urgent and sobering message for our own times." Easter Island is the most isolated piece of inhabited land in the world. A speck of volcanic rock only about twice the size of Manhattan, it lies roughly 2,250 miles northwest of Chile and 1,300 miles east of Pitcairn Island (of Mutiny on the Bounty fame). When, as most scholars believe, the first Polynesian settlers arrived from the west about the middle of the first millennium A.D., they found a pristine tropical island. Covered in a palm forest, it resounded with the cries of 25 or more species of nesting seabirds and at least six land birds. Though its soils were low in nutrients, the island bore a wide coastal plain well suited for cultivation of the taro, yam, sweet potato, and other crops these pioneers brought with them and which became their staples. The population grew slowly at first, then more quickly, reaching a peak around the middle of the second millennium A.D. of anywhere from 10,000 to 20,000 people. By this time, the Rapanui, as the islanders are known, had developed a complex society of chiefdoms and elaborate stone architecture epitomized by the moai. Beginning around 1600, however, Rapanui civilization began to fall apart, and by the mid-19th century, it had all but disappeared. After decades of painstaking work, a host of archeologists, ethnographers, and other specialists have painted a comprehensive picture of what transpired on Easter Island. And the parallels between what happened there and what is occurring today in the world at large—albeit more slowly and on a much vaster scale—are, as the evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond has put it, "chillingly obvious." NOVA | World in the Balance | Out of House and Home | PBS |