I´m told the campsite we stay at is estimated to be between 1,000 and 4,000 years old, used by the Anishnabe who have been in the region for some 5,000 years. It´s beautiful and pretty much pristine. I´ve asked myself what our culture is capable of using and keeping in original condition for several thousand years and the only thing I can think of is nuclear waste.
The largest white and red pines in the area are as tall as eight and ten story buildings and they´re older than the political entity known as Canada. Each tree is worth several thousand dollars to the logging industry which puts continuous pressure on the government to log the area. By contrast, I give an offering of about $20 a day - much less than I would like but in accordance with my current means - to the native gentleman who homesteads the land I visit. You can guess whose economic interests trump whose.
The logging industry has technology that can take down an nine story tall tree in about five minutes. The largest trees in the area are almost 400 years old.
We´re living in an age - the evidence appears to overwhelmingly suggest it´s an age of hyper-accelerated decline - that pretty much resembles that of the Stone Head Cult of the Easter Island. And while the Easter Islanders built giant stone heads as objects of worship, we´re a cult of entropy, worshipping trucks the size of school buses and tract houses that are nothing more than drywall barns, designed to be nothing more than tear-downs of nominal value in 20 years.
As James Howard Kunstler might put it, we are beholden to a geography of nowhere, a geography of fast food outlets and parking lots connecting big box stores chock full of cheap, disposable stuff. To paraphrase punk rock impresario Malcolm McLaren in a recent CBC radio interview, things have never been so available and so meaningless.
As consumers and employees working in the office buildings and cubicles that are nothing more than our culture´s version of the quarry of the Stone Head Cult, do we have a duty - a moral one - to question the Stone Head Cult? I suggest we do if you accept the premise that we don´t inherit the world from our parents so much as we borrow it from our unborn children.
Let´s face it, many if not most companies make products of limited or questionable value. Too many companies make products that actually detract from quality of life as opposed to raising it. The problem is, we confuse quantity of life with quality of life and Madison Avenue is always ready to shill just one more box of chock-full-o-nubbins and a Mission Accomplished photo-op masquerading as a victory for a non-negotiable way of life.
The average Canadian replaces his cell-phone every 18 months; the forced conversion in 2009 to HDTV will obsolesce some estimated 300 million tv sets in the US; Steve Jobs is now apparently saying he wants people to replace their iPods every year.
As workers in industry, what responsibility do we have to ensure we don´t bequeath a planetary garbage midden to our children?
Quantity of life masquerading as quality of life. We´re starving to death from abundance in our own Stone Head Cult.
Lying in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, Easter Island is one of the most remote places on earth. Colonized by Polynesians several thousand years ago, Easter Island culture became quite sophisticated, or at least sophisticated enough to erect some 600 stone heads carved from stone in a quarry and dragged - actually rolled - to places around the 150 square mile island.
Lacking draft animals, the Islanders resorted to dragging the stone heads across the island using tree trunks as rollers. As the population grew, the stone heads - built to commemorate clan chiefs and as objects of worship and ritual - proliferated. Sometime around the late 1500´s, the last tree was cut down. The society collapsed as wood was no longer available for houses, cooking fires and canoes and deforestation accelerated soil erosion, making agriculture almost impossible.
When found by the Dutch in 1722, the remaining Easter Islanders lived in squalid reed huts and caves, engaged in perpetual warfare over the remaining resources on the island. Later asked by the Europeans how the stone heads were moved from the quarry, the islanders said they "walked", in a "great forgetting" reminiscent of the great forgettings Jane Jacobs wrote about in her last book, Dark Age Ahead. According to Jacobs, at least one characteristic of dark ages is our forgetting of how things are done.
Easter Island was once a little green emerald floating in the expanse of the Pacific. How much like our own fragile garden planet floating in the expanse of space.
If I were an Easter Islander, faced with the ecological collapse of my world, with no way to escape and desperately trying to get a message out to the outside world, maybe I could have sent a message in a bottle, corking it up and hoping it could find its way across the expanse of the ocean.
On that tiny little scrap of paper, I would have written, "if only I could have shown you what my eyes have seen".
