The questions this all leaves us with are best expressed in the epilogue to the book Easter Island, Earth Island, written by the archaeologists John Flenley and Paul Bahn,

“[The islanders] carried out for us the experiment of permitting unrestricted population growth, profligate the use of resources, destruction of the environment and boundless confidence in their religion to take care of the future. The result was an ecological disaster leading to a population crash. […] Do we have to repeat the experiment on a grand scale? […] Is the human personality always the same as that of the person who felled the last tree?”

This question can be answered in terms of human nature — or, better, human psychology. We are simply not made for rationally thinking about the long-term consequences of our actions, but instead value short-term benefits higher. Our brains are essentially the same as they were two hundred thousand years ago, when there was little need to be concerned about the future. This is why perfectly reasonable people with a good environmental consciousness still go on living in and working for the system that destroys the world around them.

The people of Rapa Nui could see clearly that they razed all trees from their small island, they could easily comprehend what that meant for the continuation of human life, yet this didn’t stop them from enacting a strategy based on nothing but short-term benefit and belief in magical relief in the future.

There is little need to point out the obvious similarities to our present-day global civilization. We all are scattered on islands surrounded by sea, even though those islands are considerably bigger — therefore supporting more people and yielding more resources. Nonetheless, our resources, too, are limited and finite. We, too, are separated by ranks of status and power. We, too, have a rivalrous cult of building ever more extravagant totems that require an increasing amount of resources and energy. We call the objects of worship technology, the underlying episteme supporting and justifying it science, and the cult itself progress.

We, too, put all our faith into this worship: we desperately hope and frantically believe that it will solve the problems of the present and particularly the future — although this belief is the very reason those problems came into existence the first place. We, too, dismiss the imminent shortages of essential resources such as oil, gas, coal, phosphorus, uranium, gold, copper, cobalt, indium, tantalum, titanium, antimony, neodymium, sand, timber, farmland and fresh water as minor obstacles that our object of worship, technology, will easily deal with in the future. We, too, witness the destruction of entire ecosystems, but still happily participate in the same murderous system.

For Kelly, humans are merely “the reproductive organs of technology.”

The exact same fanaticism employed by the inhabitants of Rapa Nui is seen among today’s techno-optimists, transhumanists, Silicon Valley hipsters and technocratic thinkers (Ray Kurzweil, Peter Kareiva, Kevin Kelly, Elon Musk, Stewart Brand, Mark Zuckerberg, Stephen Hawking and Steve Jobs, just to name a few individuals of considerable influence and power), to whom every problem has a technological solution, and it is only a question of time, resources, money and manpower to invent and build those dazzling new gadgets and machines. No thought is given to any unintended consequences or naturally imposed limits of what can be achieved. Rationality is no longer the key aspect — it is fanatic religious belief, with all its inherent naivety and credulity.

The “Technium”, as Kevin Kelly lovingly calls it, will save us, and all those seeking salvation have to devote themselves to serve, worship, and honor it. Dead matter, ripped from mountainsides or from deep under the Earth’s core, melted and molded into humming and beeping machines, is to replace the natural.

This technocentric religion is of course, like its predecessor from Rapa Nui, utterly anthropocentric — and it slowly creeps into our consciousness that our world, and in fact the entire universe, doesn’t work like that. If you take a good look at the bigger picture, what you’ll see is that we humans don’t matter. We might go extinct, but the world keeps spinning, life keeps evolving, stars keep on dying and being reborn, and the universe keeps expanding, just like it always did and always will. All the importance we ascribe to ourselves with overwhelming pride is based on nothing but deeply biased, wishful imagination.

We are not the ‘end product’ or the ‘final result’ of evolution, since evolution obviously didn’t halt after humans came into existence. There is no ‘pyramid’ or ‘chain of being’ outside of our own arrogant imagination, and if there would be, humans wouldn’t be on top.

Humans are not the “best” species, and it is erroneous to even think that there might be something like a best species. After all, we are not separated from the rest of living and non-living matter. We humans are only as good as the air we breathe, since it would be impossible for us to exist without it. We are only as good as the water we drink to avoid dying from thirst, for without this water, there would be no life. We are only as good as the food we eat, since without the myriad organisms that make up our diet we wouldn’t be here today. We are not better than the forests surrounding us, since without them there wouldn’t be any air to breathe or rain to water our crops. We are not better than the bees who pollinate those crops. We are not even better than the multitude of microorganisms in our own digestive tract, since without them the digestive process would become so ineffective that it couldn’t supply our bodies’ energy requirements.

We are neither the best at smelling, nor seeing, hearing, or even thinking. We are not remarkably strong, fast, or persevering. From an objective point of view, we might not even be good-looking.

What we arguably excel at is manipulating our environment. The one thing it all boils down to is that humans are the best at using their eyes to coordinate their hands to shape their environments to best fit their “needs”, whatever that means. That’s it. That’s all the magic of human uniqueness.

Evolution is not ‘survival of the strongest’ — how would you explain the continuing existence of ‘weak’ and transient bacteria, fungi or insects? — otherwise that would mean that life is an endless interspecies war at whose end stands one single winner. We think this is how evolution works (at least that’s what our culture tell us), and so we intuitively work towards doing exactly this: eliminating as much as one species per hour (!) in a total war on everything and everyone that has no direct use to us humans.

Nevertheless, modern humans, especially the 'techies', regularly boast themselves as being “better” than other animals — and in some ways we are, to say the least, peculiar. For us, and only for us, ideology can have a higher priority than the actual physical world surrounding us. Only we can see and participate in the destruction of vital life-enhancing planetary systems going on around us, and still continue to destroy because our ideology tells us it is necessary for our ‘survival’. For technology’s sake we dam up rivers, cut down forests and strip-mine the Earth’s surface. The machines are hungry for vast amounts of fossil fuels and electricity, and there ought to be more machines every day, so modern humans devote their lives to blindly follow an ideology that compels them to destroy their environment in order to stay alive.

Anthropologists call this an “ideological pathology”.

The lesson that the moai teach us is not how to avert collapse, since this is impossible. The lesson is that humans will continue to follow whatever belief system they personally favor, until their very last breath.

You and I might have an adequately clear understanding of what’s going on in this world, but in the end, we are but a small minority, miniscule in the face of the mad masses blindly following the call of the 'Technium' — wherever it will lead them.

Maybe Nature allowed us strange, naked primates a little too much control over our own destiny when we started replacing biological with cultural evolution. And maybe we’re about to pay for this mistake with our own blood.

Maybe in the end we even eliminate ourselves for good.

But this shouldn’t be too much of a reason to grieve — life continues nonetheless. The world would be fine without us, and the same atoms and molecules that now make up our bodies would be recycled back into the giant eternal transformation that is this universe, forming new plants, animals, clouds, soils, sediments, rocks, continents, planets, and stars.

On the other hand, all this doesn’t necessarily mean that humans inevitably go extinct. After all, the people of Rapa Nui are not extinct. Some descendants of the few survivors of the collapse, who dwelled in caves and lived on little more than what their leftover chicken provided them, live on up until this day. Their numbers were greatly reduced, and they went through unbelievable pain and suffering, but a few made it. The ecology of their little world was altered for thousands of years to come, but they found a way — mostly by staying within the carrying capacity and minimizing their ecological footprint (it is important to note that both of these strategies were not adopted by choice but by force).

Some humans still are well adapted to their environment and live by its limits. Thousands of primitive tribal people are still living a sustainable life in tune with the ecosystem that keeps them alive. They have survived worse, and adapted. They survived the ice ages and several bottleneck events that killed all but a few hundred or thousand individual humans, so it is likely that they will continue to thrive after our culture’s self-destruction.

But modern, industrial, city-dwelling humans, with their pathetic perceived dependence on technology and fossil fuels, will die like flies once the lights go out for the last time. And maybe, in a strange way, this is justice being served, time-displaced, for exploiting and killing off entire ecosystems and their inhabitants. I can’t shed the notion that the story of Rapa Nui somehow seems fair and well-deserved, so why, in retrospect, would our story be different?

Of course it seems unfair to punish us for sins that our great-great-grandparents committed, but yet we are clearly living a life of privilege and material wealth that we owe directly to the crimes against Nature committed by your ancestors, contemporaries and by ourselves. Everyone born into this culture is to some extend guilty, whether we like this fact or not.

Since we now know that it is futile to try to change the course our culture is taking, what is there left to do? Is there any hope to survive the collapse that slowly unfolds all around us?

There is.

We cannot save our culture or our civilization, and any attempt to do so would be nothing but a waste of time and energy. We can’t even save most of humanity. But we can save ourselves, and the ones close to us, by spreading the word and by acting directly and immediately. We can withdraw, retreat, move to the countryside, plant trees, cultivate and forage for food, create refuges and communities, learn long-forgotten skills, rediscover an Earth-based spirituality that arises concomitantly with this kind of lifestyle, and live lives within the borders and laws dictated by our land base. This may sound odd, naïve or unrealistic, but it’s by far the best chance we have.

We can’t stop the inevitable, but we can learn from the mistakes of the past and recover the only truly sustainable lifestyle: a simple, egalitarian, small-scale, low-tech, subsistence farming and/or foraging community that will have considerably better chances to survive whatever the next few decades hold.

We can remember and retell the story of Rapa Nui, so that — after the looming population bottleneck — our children may live to be a little more sapient and responsible than we have been.