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The overall picture for Easter is the most extreme example of forest destruction in the Pacific, and among the most extreme in the world: the whole forest gone, and all of its tree species extinct. Immediate consequences for the islanders were losses of raw materials, losses of wild-caught foods, and decreased crop yields.

Raw materials lost or else available only in greatly decreased amounts consisted of everything made from native plants and birds, including wood, rope, bark to manufacture bark cloth, and feathers. Lack of large timber and rope brought an end to the transport and erection of statues, and also to the construction of seagoing canoes. When five of Easter’s little two-man leaky canoes paddled out to trade with a French ship anchored off Easter in 1838, its captain reported, “All the natives repeated often and excitedly the word miru and became impatient because they saw that we did not understand it: this word is the name of the timber used by Polynesians to make their canoes. This was what they wanted most, and they used every means to make us understand this ...” The name “Terevaka” for Easter’s largest and highest mountain means “place to get canoes”: before its slopes were stripped of their trees to convert them to plantations, they were used for timber, and they are still littered with the stone drills, scrapers, knives, chisels, and other woodworking and canoe-building tools from that period. Lack of large timber also meant that people were without wood for fuel to keep themselves warm during Easter’s winter nights of wind and driving rain at a temperature of 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Instead, after 1650 Easter’s inhabitants were reduced to burning herbs, grasses, and sugarcane scraps and other crop wastes for fuel. There would have been fierce competition for the remaining woody shrubs, among people trying to obtain thatching and small pieces of wood for houses, wood for implements, and bark cloth. Even funeral practices had to be changed: cremation, which had required burning much wood per body, became impractical and yielded to mummification and bone burials.

Most sources of wild food were lost. Without seagoing canoes, bones of porpoises, which had been the islanders’ principal meat during the first centuries, virtually disappeared from middens by 1500, as did tuna and pelagic fish. Midden numbers of fishhooks and fish bones in general also declined, leaving mainly just fish species that could be caught in shallow water or from the shore. Land birds disappeared completely, and seabirds were reduced to relict populations of one-third of Easter’s original species, confined to breeding on a few offshore islets. Palm nuts, Malay apples, and all other wild fruits dropped out of the diet. The shellfish consumed became smaller species and smaller and many fewer individuals. The only wild food source whose availability remained unchanged was rats.

In addition to those drastic decreases in wild food sources, crop yields also decreased, for several reasons. Deforestation led locally to soil erosion by rain and wind, as shown by huge increases in the quantities of soil-derived metal ions carried into Flenley’s swamp sediment cores. For example, excavations on the Poike Peninsula show that crops were initially grown there interspersed with palm trees left standing, so that their crowns could shade and protect the soil and crops against hot sun, evaporation, wind, and direct rain impacts. Clearance of the palms led to massive erosion that buried ahu and buildings downhill with soil, and that forced the abandonment of Poike’s fields around 1400. Once grassland had established itself on Poike, farming was resumed there around 1500, to be abandoned again a century later in a second wave of erosion. Other damages to soil that resulted from deforestation and reduced crop yields included desiccation and nutrient leaching. Farmers found themselves without most of the wild plant leaves, fruit, and twigs that they had been using as compost.

Those were the immediate consequences of deforestation and other human environmental