It was about the demise of the people of Easter Island and one of the things suggested was that its decline and untimely death was due to failure to manage finite resources. To give those who did not see the Programme an understanding:
The people of Easter Island loved to build statues to worship, they were statues of their ancestors and it was thought that the statues would watch over the people and bring them good fortune.
I'm sure you're all familiar with the statues, but because i like them lots, here's a picture of them:
[img]http://www.polynesia.com/pix/maps/island_easter_main.jpg[/img]
To build the statues involved a lot of rock, lots of wood to move and erect the statues, and a lot of roads to carry the carved statue from a quarry to its plateau. The roads were made from trees, cut down from the island, and no attention was paid to the declining numbers of trees.
As time progressed and the statues kept being built, competition beween tribes started to produce bigger and grander statues, and this required more wood from ever dwindling resources.
So you can spot what happened, eventually the wood ran out! The Islanders turned on their Gods and toppled many of the statues, fighting between tribes broke out and their society collapsed.
Their main diet was fish and so they also used the wood to make boats, without this wood, they could not eat and just to make matters worse, they were also trapped on the island.
This is not actually the end of the story of Easter Island, after the warring stopped, those that survived formed a new society and a new religion/cult, that of the birdman. Using what resources remained, i.e. birds, a small number of islanders lived on, in peace, but never regained the type of society they had once had.
It was pointed out in the programme that on this earth, the Human race is using vast amounts of resource without thought for the future. We are also trapped on our island in space with no means of escape beyond our resources.
I would like to pose the question, do you think that this model of Easter Island can apply to our world as a whole, are we as ultimately stupid and greedy as they were?
We seem to live, in the West at least, in a culture that is not proactive, and only respond to issues once it's too late to prevent a tragedy. Do you think it is possible that our culture can change to prevent this happening?