The Traps of Progress

A mind-boggling sight greeted a group of Dutch sailors on Easter Day 1722. On an unknown, scarcely populated island in the South Seas stood hundreds of gargantuan stone idols. Massive and bizarre, some of the ones mounted atop rock altars were 10 metres high and weighed 73 tonnes. And at those dimensions, the most inexplicable aspect of the Polynesian moai or statue figures was their setting: a treeless and desperately eroded landscape, barren of any materials by which these giants could have been lifted and moved. Moreover, the island had hardly two inhabitants for each of the more than 1,000 monuments, a remnant populace later seen by Captain James Cook as scrawny and miserable, many living in caves.

Answers to the mystery of Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, would come only with scientific study much later. Examination of the island’s crater lakes would reveal that Rapa Nui once supported lush woods springing from a rich, volcanic soil. The island is now...