PotW - July 12, 2011

[gstark]

My turn once more, and as always, choosing the picture of the week is a task that is both difficult yet most pleasurable.

Over that last few months, several of our members have made treks to shores both foreign and very bloody cold. As well as taking in Antarctica, many took the opportunity to also visit other places, and Murray Foote returned with this rather interesting image of Ahu Hanga Kio'e from Easter Island.



I think that there's a great contrast between the animals in the background, and the inanimate statue in the foreground. The silhouette treatment, coupled with the sepia effect and the reverse vignetting have all helped to make this the standout image for me this week.

Here's the original thread.

[dviv]

Beautiful picture.

Well shot and well selected :-)

[Mr Darcy]

Damn you Murray. Well done.
Note to self. Must get on my backside and post some of my pics.

[surenj]

Murray, this is the most unusual landscape shot I've seen for a while! Great stuff.

[radar]

Well done Murray and great pick Gary.

[Murray Foote]

Thanks very much, everyone. That's very gratifying.

It was a dawn shot. The low light lends itself to a monochrome image, even though the dawn colours are very prominent in the colour image.

There were no images inherently associated with my final blog post for Easter Island, which is a list of special topics, posts and a bibliography. Since it needed some, I decided to do monochrome conversions of selected Easter Island images. The POTW was one of those.

While I was preparing the six monochrome images for that post, I receved an email from an international monochrome portfolio competition that closed at 8AM two days later. So I also entered the images in that competition as well. (Of course, whether I get selected may well be another matter but gotta be in it....)

(Hmm. Links don't seem to work here but a link to the new blog post is in the original thread Gary linked to).

[biggerry]

Great shot and well done Murray

[Murray Foote]

Thanks, Gerry

[glamy]

In a class of its own, the composition, the treatment... Congratulations Murray. Good pick Gary.

[Murray Foote]

Thanks very much Glamy

[aim54x]

I am not a fan of this heavy vignette normally, but this image works really well. Congrats Murray, good pick Gary

[Murray Foote]

Thanks Cameron. I don't think I've ever done a vignette like tis before but as you say, it works here.

[Willy wombat]

Well done! Would love to visit one day

[Murray Foote]

Thank you. It's an amazing place and you need quite a lot of time.

[colin_12]

Nice one Murray.

[PiroStitch]

Congratulations Murray and excellent choice Gary! Love your work!

[Murray Foote]

Many thanks, PiroStitch

[zafra52]

Congratulations, it is a very good picture.

[ozimax]

Nice image Murray. Well deserved POTW. As for reverse vignetting, it is interesting.

[Matt. K]

A fine image and well deserved POTW. Well done Murray! For those who don't know...Easter Island was once a paradise to live in and held a thriving population. Unfortunately, they cut down all the trees...from which they gained sustinance and then the whole population died out. They starved to death. What, I wonder, were they thinking when they cut down the very last tree?

[sirhc55]

A fine image and well deserved POTW. Well done Murray! For those who don't know...Easter Island was once a paradise to live in and held a thriving population. Unfortunately, they cut down all the trees...from which they gained sustinance and then the whole population died out. They starved to death. What, I wonder, were they thinking when they cut down the very last tree?

Oh! F*ck

Great pic and well deserved POTW

[Mr Darcy]

[quote="Matt. K"]For those who don't know...Easter Island was once a paradise to live in and held a thriving population. Unfortunately, they cut down all the trees...from which they gained sustinance and then the whole population died out. They starved to death. What, I wonder, were they thinking when they cut down the very last tree?[/quote]

Not true.
There was an ecological crisis over the trees. True. But they recovered and switched to a farming ecology.
Then the Europeans came and introduced hitherto unknown diseases. Another population crash.
Then the Peruvians (Spanish descent) came and captured most of the remainder and took them away as slaves.
They were returned, bringing with them another round of new diseases.
Then the Chileans came and claimed the island. They herded the remnant population (about 100) into one poor corner of the island & turned the rest into a sheep station to support the naval base they built there.
They were released in the (I think) 1960s. There are about 2000 now.

[Murray Foote]

Thanks very much, Ozi, Matt and Chris.

==> ==> ==>[quote="Matt. K"]A fine image and well deserved POTW. Well done Murray! For those who don't know...Easter Island was once a paradise to live in and held a thriving population. Unfortunately, they cut down all the trees...from which they gained sustinance and then the whole population died out. They starved to death. What, I wonder, were they thinking when they cut down the very last tree?[/quote] (why does the quote not work?)

Matt, your comments are not totally accurate.

The original settlers landed on an island covered in thick forest with trees over one hundred feet high and the island was a massive bird colony, mainly seabirds and some land birds. It was probably the largest avian colony in the Pacific and perhaps in the World.

In the first few hundred years, they cleared much of the forest for agriculture and as much as 85% of the island came to be under cultivation. Somewhat later they developed their remarkable classic culture.

To achieve this there was a hierarchical yet communal society and a significant agricultural surplus. Yet problems slowly developed. The volcanic soil was very porous and did not retain water well. Over a long period they slowly cut down the remainder of the forest. This lead to loss of wild food stocks including birds & eggs, tuna & dolphin and forest fruit & nuts. They still had chickens and various crops, particularly kumara but loss of forest cover also lead to erosion and reduced agricultural capacity. Firewood for heating also became scarce. At the same time the ecological base was shrinking, the population was expanding and a crisis developed.

There was a period of famine, war between clans and even cannibalism. By the time the first Europeans arrived, the population had declined by about 50% to 70% and the situation had stabilised somewhat. The Europeans had firearms, textiles and huge wooden ships whereas the Rapanui could no longer build ocean going canoes. I think the guarantees of the classic society looked increasingly hollow and this lead to the overthrow of the priests, the moai and the ahu, though in a slow process lasting over a century.

European contact was diastrous for the Rapanui who were devastated by diseases including syphilis. This culminated in the early 1860s when Pervian slave traders carried away a large part of the remaining population and the few survivors brought back smallpox. The population had fallen from something like 10,000 to 110.

Yet they survive. The population of Easter Island is around 5,000 today, about 60% Rapanui.

More detail on this and other aspects of Easter Island in the Blog. Refer Gary's link at the top of the thread.

"Unfortunately, they cut down all the trees..."
"What, I wonder, were they thinking when they cut down the very last tree?"
The Rapanui cut down the last of the two species of trees they used for making canoes, probably some time between 1400 and 1600. European farmers probably cut down the last giant palm in the nineteenth century (though there can't have been many left). The last toromiro tree was identified in 1917 and cut down for firewood in 1962(!). Fortunately, Thor Heyerdahl had collected some seeds about two years before and sent them to Kew Botanical Gardens in England. Efforts to re-introduce it have not been very successful but there is at least one toromiro tree now on Easter Island. Efforts to reintroduce Chilean palms, similar to the extinct Easter Island palm, have been more successful but not very.

"the whole population died out. They starved to death."
Many Rapanui did starve in the conflict period but the population fell by 50% to 70% "only". They still had chicken and various crops, especially kumara (sweet potato). By the late nineteenth century, the savagery of European contact had made the popluation fall by 99%.

There are parallels to the present in the story of Easter Island and we would do well to reflect on them.

The Carbon Tax is an important first step in dealing with climate change. If we do nothing there is likely to be a climate tipping event that could overwhelm us like the Europeans and their dieases overwhelmed the Rapanui.

So this is good. However, the Carbon Tax does not address sustainable economic development. As with the Rapanui, we are undermining our ecology and overpopulating relative to our sustainable agricultural capacity.
(1) We need a Population policy to determine what our safe population levels are, how to determine them and what infrastructure that requires.
(2) We also need a CSIRO-like organisation to identify what resources we are in danger of destroying and to recommend policies to overcome this.
(3) We need to increase overseas aid to something like 5% to promote sustainable development in poor countries rather than merely disaster recovery (this is the hard one politically). We cannot isolate ourselves from the outside world and unless we do something like this, their problems will become our problems.

I think it is very important to understand these problems because there is a lot of cynical political opportunism going on as well as pressure from entrenched interest groups. With more widespread understanding we can develop a public consensus to drive positive and constructive change.

[Matt. K]

UHhhh...my comments from a misty memory. Never had a full knowledge of the facts but thought it was briefly something like that .Mea culpa. I'm not gonna tell you why we named the holiday Easter and how the sweet potato became chocolate.

[zafra52]

Please, do tell! This forum thrives
in controversy and good discussions.