In 1722, a Dutch admiral landed on Easter Island, a tiny isolated piece of land nearly 2,000 miles off the west coast of South America.  As the first visitor from the western world, the admiral estimated the indigenous population to be about 3,000 inhabitants.  These inhabitants, he noticed, were living in conditions of constant warfare, finding housing in caves and resorting to atrocities like cannibalism. However, later generations would discover that these people had not always lived in such hostile conditions.

Archeologists have been able to determine that when man first arrived on the island around the year 400, it was heavily forested and contained a rich diversity of plants and a few animals.  These first visitors, the Rapanui, had a highly advanced culture.  The primary source of food on the island was yams, which took very little time to cultivate. Because the work was not labor intensive, the Rapanui used their excess time working on their now famous Moai statues.  The growing human population of the island increased the demand on the land and forests.  They used more and more land and lumber for projects such as transporting the island’s Moai statues.  Eventually, they had cut down all the trees and could no longer build adequate housing. They also had created widespread erosion control problems and could no longer leave the island because they could not build large boats.  The exact details are unclear, but by 1722, the structure of the civilization had collapsed under hunger and war.

Sustainability is a core value at Community Energy and is factored into decisions on everything from the paper we buy to the coffee we drink.  The lesson of Easter Island is one the world would be wise to learn from.  We face similar challenges given our environmental impact and our rate of resource consumption.  We have a limited number of resources and are confined to an isolated island, in this case the planet, but we have the whole of human history to learn from.