Monsters We Met2003

Narrator:
[Last lines, about the Polynesians of Easter Island] Easter Island the remotest scrap of land on Earth, lost in the Pacific Ocean. Here proud monoliths lie in neglect abandoned by a Polynesian society in ruins. The forests felled the birds gone the soil eroded by farming and the wind. When the Polynesian arrived here in four hundred AD the island was covered in dense forest steadily was cleared to plant great gardens build canoes and erect these magnificent statues. Within a thousand years a culture that created the only written Polynesian language vanished collapsing into warfare cannibalism and environmental ruin. Here is the paradox of humans we are capable of such heroic and triumphant creations and yet we are also highly capable of perpetrating such horror on the rest of the natural world.