After reading the Easter Island article, I thought it was really interesting. One thing that stuck out to me the most was the thirst of competition and the need to be the best. These people chopped down huge trees and wasted natural resources just so they can build the biggest statues. But after wasting all their natural resources, their lifestyles began to crumble. This is because they used the trees to build canoes, and without the trees, their canoes became leaky and were not able to sustain the weight of the civilian’s bodies. This stuck out to me because it made me think of America’s past. Every war that was ever fought, every person that has ever died to protect America’s honor, happened because of this need for power. This need to be the best, even if it means sacrificing something or someone to have it. Like the civilians who lived in Easter Island, the civilians in America’s history wanted to be the best. Americans kicked out the Native Americans for their land, manipulated and killed them to get their way. As the saying goes, history repeats itself, and when reading that the people of Easter Island competed for power and connecting it to America’s history, I realized that yes indeed, history does repeat itself. Another thing that stuck out to me while I was reading about Easter Island is that they had social classes. The rich people, who ran the large-scale plantations, got to live right in the middle of the inland, while the poor people had to live on the coast of Easter Island and had to walk miles back and forth to the inland each day. In today’s culture, we also have social classes. We have the rich, the middle-class, and the poor. Although it might have been worse to be of the poor class back then, living in Easter Island, because you would have to walk several miles each day just to get to the inland, the connection between these two points in history is that social classes are existent. Even before A.D 900, there were still social classes. The rich got to live in luxury, the poor got to live in trash. It’s funny to see that nothing has changed over the course of time.
After reading this article, I realized that if Americans kept living the way we do, we might also have a collapse. Although not many people are aware of this, we too are using up natural resources, and at an increasingly fast rate. We see ads talking about global warming and the demolition of our earth, but we don’t think too much about it because we don’t think it will directly affect us. This however is not true. Every time a car buys gas from a gas station, we are taking fossil fuels from the earth. Fossil fuels and oil are natural resources, and cannot be replenished. If we continue to use up these resources, America as we know it might collapse, and on a larger scale, the world as we know it might collapse. People think buying hybrids is their present to the earth, as a way to say “hey I’m giving back to the earth by going hybrid”, but they don’t realize that little things help as well. We can use energy-saving products, such as the special light bulbs, and learn to recycle more. You don’t need to spend a lot of money to go green, just change some of the ways of your lifestyle.
On the top is an image of how easter island use to look like...before it's collapse
On the right is an image of how America looks like right now...before it's possible collapse
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