The site of the original Easter Island (or Rapa Nui) civilization is located approximately 2,350 miles west of Chile, in the South Pacific Ocean. While linguists estimate the arrival of the island’s first inhabitants at around AD 400, archeologists argue the island was originally settled between AD 700 and 800. In either case, the arriving population is generally agreed to have been of Polynesian descent. While the island was certainly small, just 66 square miles in area, it boasted dense forests of palm and other trees, and its many craters stowed plentiful water, fit for human consumption. Better still, as far as its new settlers were concerned, the island was rich in both obsidian stone for tool-making, and lapilli tuff, a softer volcanic rock ideal for the carving moias, the arriving culture’s massive stone statues to be dedicated to their sacred chiefs and gods.

While the new inhabitants had transported tools, food, plants and animals from their native land, they may still have envisioned the island’s expansive forestlands as a never-ending source of wood for homes, canoes and rope. The group immediately set to slashing and burning great sections of the isle for agricultural use and completed moia transportation, as they migrated further toward all ends of the tiny continent. Tremendous amounts of skilled labor and rope were dedicated to the creation and movement of the culture’s immense statues, to locations all over the island. Later, as the new society continued to multiply, the island’s ever-increasing wooded clearings eroded away much of the limited soils, negating any possibility of reforestation. Eventually timber became too scarce to build canoes, and the desperate community became virtually land-locked within a permanently altered ecosystem, void of resources required to sustain human life. Anthropologists’ reports disagree on its scale, but readily acknowledge that evidence of eventual cannibalism was identified at specific sites of the island.

On that note, the focus of concern shifts to the rainforests of the Amazon, which span more than a billion total acres, encompassing land in Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia and the Eastern Andean region of Ecuador and Peru. And just like Easter Island, but on a far greater scale, the Amazon rainforests are currently being deforested primarily for their timber and oil resources, by individuals, multi-national corporations, and governments. Of additional concern are the forests’ rapidly vanishing sources of plant-based, potential pharmaceuticals. According to Raintree Nutrition Inc., 25% of all current Western prescription drugs sold are derived from rainforest-based ingredients.

It’s important to recognize that the affects of the ‘slash and burn’ approach to clearing the rainforests mimics the results left following the cultural development of Easter Island: Vast areas of heavily-eroded soil, stripped of its life-giving nutrients, as well as thousands of indigenous animal species, fruits, drugs and oxygen-producing plants and trees. Within 40 years, we can now foresee the potential loss of this entire ecosystem, on a level that may impact all this planet’s occupants, in ways so far witnessed only in science-fiction horror films.

What can we learn from the small-scale annihilation of one ecosystem that may save us from ourselves, as we continue to cultivate the Amazon Rainforests? One answer lies in sustainable development, which, according to the World Commission on Environment and Development, may be defined as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” One particularly ingenious strategy implemented in the Amazon rainforest to promote environmental sustainability is the ‘debt for nature swap.’ In this arrangement, a debt owed by a government may be forgiven, or paid by a conservation group or other entity, in exchange for the environmental protection of a particular area. But to many of us, it seems the most important hurdle for achieving continuing sustainability depends on the success of involving the rainforests’ local inhabitants in its reforestation.

Approximately 60% of the Amazon rainforests’ current deforestation has been attributed to small farm cultivators. These inhabitants are continually forced by population growth and larger-gaining land-owners to keep moving their staked homesteads deeper into the jungles. Brazilian governmental development programs intended to re-settle the country’s homeless poor, and consolidate Amazonia into its economy, resulted in the deforestation of about 57 million acres of rainforest. Many agroforestry specialists are now involved in the replanting of some deforested Amazon areas, with a combination of quick-yielding, marketable food crops and longer-growing, timber-yielding trees. These projects serve as models for local area residents, who can follow the plans’ long-range guides to stabilize and re-strengthen their rainforest ecosystem. An obvious side-benefit to the local population involved with the replanting is the future income anticipated from growing and maintaining these new crops.

Many other individuals and organizations around the globe are also racing against time to at least partially-restore the Amazon’s fragile and limited ecosystem. As stewards of this plant, each of us possess the nature-given grace to dominate our environments, but also the unique responsibility of tending and enriching it for all the generations of living organisms still to come. Take the time to do some research on what you can do individually, or as a group, to re-forge environmental responsibility on our planet. There are so many ways a single individual can help, to return our depleted Amazon rainforest to the living, breathing, beating heart of our planet that nature intended it to be. There is no need for us to repeat the lessons of Easter Island, on a global scale, before realizing that we all play a part in stewarding our planet’s continuing health and well-being.