Statues instead of trees,
by Clifford Thurlow
leer en español When Europeans first landed on what would become known as Easter Island in 1722, there wasn’t a single tree to be seen. Although, it became apparent that the island had once been a luxuriant quilt of forest and foliage.The islanders had begun cutting down the trees to use the trunks to roll the giant statues called Moai across the island from the stone quarries to the sea. They hauled the effigies upright and placed them in melancholic rows on the coast as if waiting for ships to come. Or, perhaps, the return of alien spacecraft, as Erich von Daniken speculated in his book ‘Chariots of the Gods.’The islanders used the wood to build canoes, cook food and cremate their dead. They slashed through the forest as if the resource was infinite and kept cutting down the trees u...
