This lecture was presented as part of The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking.

The Statues Walked — What Really Happened on Easter Island

Thursday January 17, 02012 – San Francisco

Video is up on the Hunt and Lipo Seminar page for Members.

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Audio is up on the Hunt and Lipo Seminar page, or you can subscribe to our podcast.

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Easter Island reconsidered – a summary by Stewart Brand

In the most isolated place on Earth a tiny society built world-class monuments. Easter Island (Rapa Nui) is 1,000 miles from the nearest Pacific island, 3,000 miles from the nearest continent. It is just six by ten miles in size, with no running streams, terrible soil, occasional droughts, and a relatively barren ocean. Yet there are 900 of the famous statues (moai), weighing up to 75 tons and 40 feet high. Four hundred of them were moved many miles from where they were quarried to massive platforms along the shores.

Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo began their archeological work on Easter Island in 2001 expecting to do no more than add details to the standard morality tale of the collapse of the island’s ecology and society—Polynesians discovered Rapa Nui around 400-800AD and soon overpopulated the place (30,000 people on an island the size of San Francisco); competing elites cut down the last trees to move hundreds of enormous statues; after excesses of “moai madness” the elites descend into warfare and cannibalism, and the ecology collapses; Europeans show up in 1722. The obvious lesson is that Easter Island, “the clearest example of a society that destroyed itself“ (Jared Diamond), is a warning of what could happen to Earth unless we learn to live with limits.

A completely different story emerged from Hunt and Lipo’s archaeology. Polynesians first arrived as late as 1200AD. There are no signs of violence—none of the fortifications common on other Pacific islands, no weapons, no traumatized skeletons. The palm trees that originally covered the island succumbed mainly to rats that arrived with the Polynesians and ate all the nuts. The natives burned what remained to enrich the poor soil and then engineered the whole island with small rocks (“lithic mulch”) to grow taro and sweet potatoes. The population stabilized around 4,000 and kept itself in balance with its resources for 500 years until it was totally destroyed in the 18th century by European diseases and enslavement. (It wasn’t Collapse; it was Guns, Germs, and Steel.)

What was up with the statues? How were they moved? Did they have a role in the sustainable balance the islanders achieved? Hunt and Lipo closely studied the statues found along the moai roads from the quarry. They had D-shaped beveled bottoms (unlike the flat bottoms of the platform statues) angled 14 ° forward. The ones on down slopes had fallen on their face; on up slopes they were on their back. The archeologists concluded they must have been moved upright—”walked,” just as Rapa Nuians long had said. No tree logs were required. Standard Polynesian skill with ropes would suffice.

“Nova” and National Geographic insisted on a demonstration, so a 5-ton, 10-foot-high “starter moai” replica was made and shipped to Hawaii. After some fumbling around, 18 unskilled people secured three ropes around the top of the statue—one to each side for rocking the statue, one in the rear to keep it leaning forward without falling. “Heave! Ho! Heave! Ho!” they cry in the video, the statue rocks, dancing lightly forward, and the audience at Cowell Theater erupts with applause. Progress was fast, even hard to stop—100 yards in 40 minutes. A family could move one.

Stone statues to ancestors are common throughout Polynesia, but the enormous, numerous moai of Easter Island are unique in the world. Were they part of the peaceful population control and conservative agriculture regime that helped the society “optimize long-term stability over immediate returns” in a nearly impossible place to live?

During the Q & A, Hunt and Lipo were asked how their new theory of Easter Island history was playing on the island itself. Shame at being the self-destructive dopes of history has been replaced by pride, they said. Moai races are being planned. Polynesians were the space explorers of the Pacific. They completed discovering every island in the huge ocean by the end of the 13th century, colonized the ones they could, and then stopped.

Easter Island is not Earth. It is Mars.

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The Long Now Foundation’s monthly

Seminars About Long-term Thinking

Chris Anderson on “The Makers Revolution”

TICKETS

Tuesday February 19, 02013 at 7:30pm Lam Research Theater at YBCA

Long Now Members can reserve 2 seats, join today! General Tickets $10

About this Seminar:

Chris Anderson’s book THE LONG TAIL chronicled how the Web revolutionized and democratized distribution. His new book MAKERS shows how the same thing is happening to manufacturing, with even wider consequences, and this time the leading revolutionaries are the young of the world. Anderson himself left his job as editor of Wired magazine to join a 22-year-old from Tijuana in running a typical Makers firm, 3D Robotics, which builds do-it-yourself drones.

Web-based collaboration tools and small-batch technology such as cheap 3D printers, 3D scanners, laser cutters, and assembly robots, Anderson points out, are transforming manufacturing. Suddenly, large-scale manufacturers are competing not just with each other on multi-year cycles, they are competing with swarms of tiny competitors who can go from invention to innovation to market dominance in a few weeks. Anybody can play; a great many already are; a great many more are coming.

“Today,” Anderson writes, “there are nearly a thousand ‘makerspaces’— shared production facilities— around the world, and they’re growing at an astounding rate: Shanghai alone is building one hundred of them.”

“Open source,” he adds, “is not just an efficient innovation method— it’s a belief system as powerful as democracy or capitalism for its adherents.”

“The Statues Walked — What Really Happened on Easter Island”

Thursday January 17, 02013 at the Cowell Theater, San Francisco

Archaeologists Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo study cultural evolution and diversity. Their research tries to answer questions about how small communities develop into complex societies, and how cultures change and spread over time. They’ve focused much of their work on the Southern Pacific, a big stretch of ocean, dotted by tiny islands, that poses somewhat of a conundrum to archaeologists and anthropologists: how did human populations ever manage to spread out across these isolated locales?

Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, is a particularly intriguing case. More than 2,000 miles removed from its nearest (inhabited) neighbor, the island is small and relatively poor in natural resources. Nevertheless, Rapa Nui was home – for a while at least – to an industrious society most known for its construction of nearly 900 giant statues, or moai. Scholars and researchers have pored over the mystery of how a small community was able to build such impressive statues, and why the population ultimately perished in the 18^th century.

According to conventional theories, the answers to those questions serve as a warning to our modern global population. Many scholars believe that the population depleted what little natural resources their island had in order to satisfy an ever-growing obsession with their society’s statue-building cult, thereby causing their own “ecocide.” In order to move these massive stone figures, people felled the palm trees that were once abundant on the island and turned them into logs. But with the disappearance of these trees, other species quickly went extinct as well. No longer able to sustain itself, Rapa Nui society collapsed into chaos and ultimately perished.

“It seemed obvious to researchers that Rapa Nui was a clear case of human recklessness, over-population, over-exploitation, and cultural collapse. Given contemporary concerns about our own environmental future, Rapa Nui offered the quintessential case of “ecocide,” as Jared Diamond (2005) dubbed it. The case for “ecocide” seemed consistent with some accounts from early European visitors, some of the oral traditions, Heyerdahl’s views of pervasive warfare and cultural replacement, and the emerging palaeo-ecological evidence. Rapa Nui provided a compelling story and environmental message that held relevance in today’s urgent global crisis (e.g. Kirch 1997, 2004).” (Hunt & Lipo 2007:85)

Nevertheless, Lipo and Hunt found reason in the archaeological record to question that theory. They traveled to Easter Island, where they ran a creative, hands-on experiment that put one simple assumption to the test: did the islanders really use logs to move their statues?

“When people are asked, how did your ancestors move the statues, the answer was always, ‘they walked’. … For the Rapa Nui, that was the answer, and … the foreigners asking the question, they thought, ‘oh, well that’s silly, you know, how crazy.’”

Hunt and Lipo built a precise, 15-ton replica of a moai from concrete, and asked a small group of people to see if they could make it “walk”: to move it forward in an upright position, using only ropes. A PBS feature documents their process of trial and error – and eventual success.

By confirming this simple hypothesis – that the Rapa Nui did not need logs to move their moai – Hunt and Lipo are able to offer a new theory about how the islanders interacted with their environment, and what caused their eventual decline. In their book, The Statues That Walked: Unraveling the Mystery of Easter Island, they take their insight as the basis for a new view of cultural evolution in the Southeastern Pacific: rather than a symbol of reckless environmental destruction, the Easter Island statues are a testament to human innovation and creative use of the environment. Hunt and Lipo argue that the islanders were actually inventive ‘users’ of their island’s resources, and adept at maximizing its agricultural capacities. Rather than a dangerous, self-destructive obsession, the statues were in fact instrumental to a culture of sustainability. The eventual demise of the Easter Island population was caused by a confluence of complicated factors, with an important role played by European conquerors and the foreign pests and diseases they brought with them. Easter Island still serves as an object lesson – but now of the complex and globally interwoven dynamics of cultural and ecological change.

Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo discuss their findings and the lessons we might learn from the fate of Rapa Nui on January 17^th at the Cowell Theatre. You can reserve tickets, get directions, and sign up for the podcast on the Seminar page.

The Long Now Foundation’s monthly

Seminars About Long-term Thinking

Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo on “The Statues Walked — What Really Happened on Easter Island”

TICKETS

Thursday January 17, 02013 at 7:30pm Cowell Theater at Fort Mason

Long Now Members can reserve 2 seats, join today! General Tickets $10

About this Seminar:

Was it ecocide? The collapse of the mini-civilization on Easter Island (Rapa Nui) has long been considered one of the great Green morality tales. Once the people there cut down the last tree, story goes, they were doomed. Their famous statues were an arms race that completed the exhaustion of their all-too-finite resources. Moral of the story: Easter Island equals Earth Island: we must not repeat its tragedy with the planet.

It’s a satisfying tale, but apparently wrong. The reality is far more interesting.

In fact the lesson of Rapa Nui is how to get ecological caretaking right, not wrong. Its people appear to have worked out an astutely delicate relationship to each other and to the austere ecology of their tiny island and its poor soil. They were never violent. The astonishing statues appear to have been an inherent part of how they managed population and ecological balance on their desert island. (Their method of moving the huge statues was clever and surprisingly easy—they walked them upright. See the amazing demonstration video!) The famous collapse came from a familiar external source—European diseases and enslavement, the same as everywhere else in the Americas and the Pacific.

All this is in a thoroughly persuasive book by an archaeologist and an anthropologist who did extensive fieldwork and historical study on Easter Island— THE STATUES THAT WALKED: Unraveling the Mystery of Easter Island, by Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo. The authors present their case live in January’s SALT talk.

This lecture was presented as part of The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking.

Enchanted by the Sun: The CoEvolution of Light, Life, and Color on Earth

Wednesday November 28, 02012 – San Francisco

Video is up on the Warshall Seminar page for Members.

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Audio is up on the Warshall Seminar page, or you can subscribe to our podcast.

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Light and beauty – a summary by Stewart Brand

“The naturalist’s task,” Warshall began, “is to observe without human-centered thoughts and human-centered agendas, to observe with a Gaian perspective and with the perspective of the organisms you’re watching. The naturalist considers all species in space/time as equally beautiful.” There’s a connection between art and science—between the poetic organization of thought and the pragmatic organization of thought. Light operates at a distance. That inspires anticipation, which becomes yearning, which becomes desire, which becomes hope, which generates transcendence. When an image becomes transcendent for you, it becomes part of how you perceive. “The Sun is the initiator of all sugars.”

Starting 250 million years ago, life rebelled and began generating its own light. There are 40 different kinds of bioluminescence, used for mate attraction, for baiting prey, for deceit. “Danger and beauty always go together. Deceit—not truth—is beauty. A term some art critics use is ‘abject beauty.’” Humans began the second light rebellion by harnessing fire a million years ago. Then came electric lights in the 1880s, and we transformed the light regime and hence behavior of many species. Artists like James Turrell shifted art from reflected light to emitted light, and that is increasingly the norm as we spend our days with screens radiating information into our eyes.

Our eyes are pockets of ocean that let us perceive only a portion of the Sun’s spectrum of light. Bees, with their crystal eyes, see in the ultraviolet. Snakes perceive infrared, and so do some insects that can detect the heat of a forest fire from 40 miles away.

Bowerbird males create elaborate art galleries, even devising forced perspective, to impress females. Young male bowerbirds watch the process for four years to learn the art. Throughout nature, watch for bold patterns of white, black, and red, which usually signal danger.

Every day there is a brief time without danger. At twilight—as daylight shifts to night—all life pauses. “That moment has a contemplative beauty that we cherish. It is a moment of Gaian aesthetic.”

Warshall’s talk, and his life, have been a convergence of art and science. Asked about how scientists could learn more about art, Warshall suggested they go to an art class and learn how to draw. As for how artists can learn more of science, he had two words:

“Outdoors. Look.”

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Former SALT speaker Philip Tetlock spoke with Edge recently about his research into forecasting. In 02005, he published Expert Political Judgement: How Good is it? How Can We Know?, for which he spent over a decade recording and assessing the predictions made by public policy experts. He found them to be not much better than coin-flipping, but was also able to specify that “Hedgehogs” (those holding a single grand theory and fitting events into its framework) did much worse than “Foxes” (skeptical, flexible thinkers).

In his conversation with Edge, he expands on what makes Foxes better predictors, using Nate Silver as a jumping off point, and offers an update on his work since Expert Political Judgement:

Perhaps the most important consequence of publishing the book is that it encouraged some people within the US intelligence community to start thinking seriously about the challenge of creating accuracy metrics and for monitoring how accurate analysts are–which has led to the major project that we’re involved in now, sponsored by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activities (IARPA). It extends from 2011 to 2015, and involves thousands of forecasters making predictions on hundreds of questions over time and tracking in accuracy.

Exercises like this are really important for a democracy. The Nate Silver episode illustrates in a small way what I hope will happen over and over again over the next several decades, which is, there are ways of benchmarking the accuracy of pundits. If pundits feel that their accuracy is benchmarked they will be more careful about what they say, they’ll be more thoughtful about what they say, and it will elevate the quality of public debate.

By the way, the forecasting contest he mentions is accepting submissions.

“Lost Landscapes of San Francisco, 7″

Tuesday December 11, 02012 at the Castro Theater, San Francisco

Guerrilla archivist and “media archaeologist” Rick Prelinger has built his career on uncovering, preserving, and sharing alternative takes on American cultural history. He is the founder of the Prelinger Archives , a massive collection of “ephemeral films”: non-fiction video made for educational, industrial, or promotional purposes. Though these films are typically made for short-term usage with a very specific intent, Prelinger sees in this material a window into “secret histories” and untold perspectives on American life.

“I was amazed by these films’ dual character … How they both recorded appearances and sold persuasion – how to behave, what to buy and do. They showed the way things were and the way things were supposed to be. Quite unlike feature (commercial narrative) films, which tended to have a much more synthetic, artificially-constructed world.” – SF360.org

In 02002, when the collection had amassed upwards of 60,000 films, Prelinger sold the Archives to the Library of Congress. Yet his goal is not just to preserve these films: he seeks to share them with the public, in hopes that these arcane “celluloid fossils” become part of our collective cultural history and seed the growth of new stories.

“Art, culture and science are almost always built upon work that’s come before, and we want to provide access to historical materials so as to enable new authorship.” – aiga.org

Prelinger provides stock footage to filmmakers and companies, but is also dedicated to making his collection freely available in the public domain. To that end, Prelinger opened an “acquisition-friendly” library in San Francisco’s South of Market district in 02004. Open to the public on Wednesdays, it houses a collection of ephemera in both print and video, and encourages creative re-use of the materials in its collection.

Prelinger’s work is available online, as well. He has collaborated with the Internet Archive to provide public access to over 2000 films from his collection. Take a look, for example, at A Trip Down Market Street, filmed from the front of a San Francisco street car, just days before the earthquake of 01906:

Also available is Panorama Ephemera, a feature-length film that Prelinger released in 02004, made with footage from his collection. More recently, he has been working on a series of archival compilation films about San Francisco. Comprising seven annual installments, the Lost Landscapes of San Francisco tell a cultural history of the city through the eyes of home-video makers and ephemeral film footage. In collaboration with The Long Now Foundation, Prelinger has screened installments of the Lost Landscapes at theaters in San Francisco for four consecutive Decembers.

Rick Prelinger shows the 7th installment of his Lost in San Francisco series on December 11th at the Castro Theater in San Francisco. You can reserve tickets, get directions and sign up for the podcast on the Seminar page.

Subscribe to the Seminars About Long-term Thinking podcast for more thought-provoking programs.

This lecture was presented as part of The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking.

Preservation without Permission: the Paris Urban eXperiment

Tuesday November 13, 02012 – San Francisco

Video is up on the Kunstmann and Lackman Seminar page for Members.

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Audio is up on the Kunstmann and Lackman Seminar page, or you can subscribe to our podcast.

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Preservation Without Permission – a summary by Stewart Brand

Their video showed clandestine urban “infiltration” (trespassing) at its most creative. Paris’s Urban Experiment group (UX), now in their fourth decade, have a restoration branch called Untergunther. They evade authorities to carry out secret preservation projects on what they call “nonvisible heritage.”

Being clandestine, they do not reveal their activities except for instances that become publicized in the media; then they reveal everything to set the record straight (and embarrass the media along with the authorities). In the video presented by Untergunther member Lazar Kunstmann and translator Jon Lackman, we see a hidden underground screening room and bar beneath the Trocadero in Paris’s Latin Quarter. When police discover it and shut it down, the equipment is surreptitiously removed to a site deeper in the city’s vast network of underground passages, where film showings continue to this day. One year the group’s annual film festival was staged and performed overnight in one of Paris’s great monuments, the Panthéon, built in 1790. In the video (excerpt here) we see a small boy slipping through newly crafted underground passageways, picking a lock, opening the cupboard with all the Panthéon‘s keys, and gliding on his skateboard beneath the great dome across the ornate marble floors by Foucault’s original pendulum as film enthusiasts set up a temporary theater and have a clandestine film festival—gone without a trace by dawn.

Elsewhere in the Panthéon the explorers found a neglected old clock displaying stopped time to the public. In 2005 they decided to repair it. They converted an abandoned room high in the monument into a clock shop and hangout. With clockmaker (and UX member) Jean-Baptiste Viot they spent a year completely reconditioning the 1850 works of the clock. Now that it worked again, they thought it should keep time and chime proudly, but someone needed to wind it. They approached the Director of the Panthéon, Bernard Jeannot, who didn’t even know that the monument had a clock. At first dumbfounded, Jeannot publicly embraced the project and applauded Untergunther.

Jeannot’s superiors at the Centre des Monuments Nationaux accordingly fired him (early retirement) and brought suit against Untergunther. The court determined that fixing clocks is not a crime, and in France trespassing on public property is, in itself, not a crime. Case dismissed. Spitefully, the new Director of the Panthéon has made sure the clock remains unwound, and he disabled it by removing an essential part.

Lazar Kunstmann explained (through Jon Lackman) Untergunther’s perspective on cultural heritage, particularly “minor” heritage—the countless objects that embody cultural continuity but don’t attract institutions to protect them. Who is responsible for such “nonvisible” heritage? The protectors should be local, self-appointed, and nonvisible themselves, because exposure of the value of the objects attracts destructive tourists. Preservation without permission works best without visibility.

Since 2005, Untergunther’s new precautions against discovery have successfully kept its ongoing preservation projects hidden. As for the Panthéon clock, that essential part the Director removed to disable it has been purloined to safekeeping with Untergunther. Someday authorities may allow the clock to tick again. In the meantime it is in good repair.

Subscribe to our Seminar email list for updates and summaries.

“Enchanted by the Sun: The CoEvolution of Light, Life, and Color on Earth”

Wednesday November 28, 02012 at the Cowell Theater, San Francisco

Peter Warshall’s work is aimed at helping people understand the cultural and ecological systems in which they’re embedded. He studied biology at Harvard, anthropology under Claude Lévi-Strauss, and has worked in communities and companies the world over, consulting on conservation and helping build consensus among groups with diverse and often conflicting environmental needs.

He was an editor and contributor to the Whole Earth Review, where he often expressed his deep understanding of ecology and human nature through poetic, interdisciplinary essays. In 1998, he offered a brief exploration of the similarities between painting and ecology, discussing, for example, trends in composition and color and how they relate to the analysis of ecosystems:

Henri Matisse (in his cutout phase), Gustav Klimt, and Paul Klee experimented tirelessly with configurations of patches of color: different sizes, the shape of each patch, the orientation of “floating” patches with the canvas’s straight edges and with other patches inside the artwork’s boundaries. Landscape ecologists similarly ponder patches such as beaver ponds in a watershed or forest groves dotted among evenly textured farmlands. The “right” configuration can bring harmony to either canvas or landscape. To conservation biologists, for instance, the size and shape of a patch of forest may mean the difference between protection of a rare warbler’s home or nest parasitism by cowbirds. Informed intuition serves both painters and naturalists well.

- Art as Landscape/Landscape as Art

To bolster one’s informed intuition about place, he offers a quiz that Kevin Kelly once declared a Cool Tool. It starts with a simple declaration to “Point North,” and concludes by asking if you can “Name two places on different continents that have similar sunshine/rainfall/wind and temperature patterns to here.”

Warshall leads us on a journey from inside our brains out into nature and on up to the Sun on November 28th at the Cowell Theater. You can reserve tickets, get directions and sign up for the podcast on the Seminar page.

Subscribe to the Seminars About Long-term Thinking podcast for more thought-provoking programs.

The Long Now Foundation’s monthly

Seminars About Long-term Thinking

Rick Prelinger on
“Lost Landscapes of San Francisco, 7″

TICKETS

Tuesday December 11, 02012 at 7:30pm Castro Theater

Long Now Members can reserve 2 seats, join today! • General Tickets $10

About this Seminar:

Rick Prelinger, a guerrilla archivist who collects the uncollected and makes it accessible, presents the 7th of his annual Lost Landscapes of San Francisco screenings. You’ll see an eclectic montage of rediscovered and rarely-seen film clips showing life, landscapes, labor and leisure in a vanished San Francisco as captured by amateurs, newsreel cameramen and studio filmmakers.

New sequences in this year’s high-definition feast will include the Japanese-American community in the Western Addition before redevelopment; shipwrecks off the Northern shoreline; 1930s demonstrations for China Relief; even more Sutro Baths scenes; family films from the Mission, Richmond, Sunset and Excelsior Districts; rediscovered films of San Francisco transit; and newly discovered, never-shown documentary footage of the Tenderloin and waterfront. Much of the show will be scanned from Kodachrome and original 35mm material.

As usual, this year’s Castro Theatre screening is an interactive experience: audience members will BE the soundtrack, identifying places and events, asking questions, loudly discussing San Francisco’s past and future as the film unreels.

Finally, if you have family or historical films of San Francisco, it’s not too late to help out — please contact Rick through The Long Now Foundation, and we’ll arrange to have your films scanned and possibly included in this year’s show!