Twilight at Easter [Original Draft]

Just based on this chapter, there are some quite noticeable similarities and differences between the society we live in today and the society that was once present on Easter Island. One obvious difference would be the rock farms. As stated in its name, rock farms are farms involve the use of rocks, which were placed on top of soil while growing crops. The purpose of this was to not allow the moisture to escape the soil, as well as attract more heat. One difference in this would be that in America, we do not have rock farms, nor would we need it. For now, each farm has more than enough water, whether that be from rain (another difference between America and Easter Island) or from their money. Heat is also not an issue for us. Whenever there isn't enough or too much, that can be solved by a light bulb, or by simply choosing another crop to grow. The existence of rock farms points out that, while other civilizations, past or present, adjust to nature and its resources, we make nature adjust to us and neglect it when that isn't an option. On this topic, it was quite interesting to see that even when a society takes works with nature and makes decent use of it, it can still crumble. Jared Diamond says that even then, the resources were being exploited, but perhaps it also has to do with how their resources are spent. The fall of this civilization (as well as, the last paragraph of this chapter) led me wondering how much longer can we last, being that we are a country that exhausts the land and carry on wasteful actions.

While reading this chapter, I couldn't help but compare these stone statues to almost everything we value in our society (e.g. money, cars, big houses, etc). These things require a lot of labor to produce, which comes hand-in-hand with required resources to fuel it. However, in the end the stone statues will not provide us with what is necessary to survive, and neither will money. It seems that in both of our societies, we are spending our resources and time on such questionable objectives, that I would say, leads to a meaningless life (if not, even lower than that). In our lives, we like to say that we earned something valuable and accomplished something great. We only see that as greatness because we made it so. But what exactly are we doing with our lives outside of society, and into the world?