Saving Easter Island (pg. 2)

Kelsey knew from the start that helping survey Easter Island wouldn't sell much software for his employer, but he figured that the complexity of developing a plot of land that's both extremely isolated and absolutely rife with archaeology could teach Autodesk about working in other fragile and rapidly developing environments like India, China, and South Africa.

This is the unlikely story of how a middle-aged self-taught scientific researcher and a mild-mannered tech junkie came together to try to help a mysterious faraway island that they both adore. Their tale involves a fascinating and complicated history of disease, torture, and cannibals - and a reclusive energy and cruise line magnate named Fred Olsen, who is known both as the "Norwegian Howard Hughes" and the inspiration for the Montgomery Burns character on The Simpsons. But it starts with a powerful realization. The mysterious island didn't just need to be surveyed. It needed to be saved.

If people know anything about Easter Island, they know about the Moai, the massive statues carved out of compressed volcanic ash, or tuff, around 900 years ago. If they know anything else, it's that Rapa Nui served as a keystone in Jared Diamond's bestselling book "Collapse." Haoa's ancestors committed ecocide, devastating the island and all but destroying themselves in the process. Diamond identified the plight of Easter Islanders as a roadmap - an especially relevant metaphor given the global wane in natural resources - to societal implosion.

Best guesses are that the island was settled between 400 and 800 A.D. by Polynesians who were probably horribly lost at sea. Squat palm trees covered the landscape, along with plenty of obsidian for making tools, and fresh water. The settlers prospered, and the population peaked near 15,000. Then things got crazy. Sometime around the 12th century, they started carving Moai in Rano Raraku, a quarry on a corner of the triangle-shaped island that still holds hundreds of statues in various stages of completion.

Tribesmen would drag ever larger statues around the island and erect them near their villages in homage to ancestors. How they transported the totems is anyone's guess. Most likely they rolled them on the enormous palms. One thing is certain: For whatever reason, the natives chopped down all the trees, ending their ability to fish (no boats, poles, or spears) and hastening erosion, which halted traditional farming. Having eaten all the birds, the ancients turned to cannibalism. Some historians think they even ate their young.

A Dutch explorer landed in 1722 on Easter Sunday (hence the name), and over the next 200 years Western ships kidnapped the islanders, infected them with smallpox, and decimated the population, which dropped to 111. In the 19th century a Scottish sheep company took over, enslaved the natives, and imported 70,000 sheep, which grazed the island bare. When locals weren't doing slave work, they were being tortured by the Chilean government.

Haoa's parents were born in caves, and, in 1954, gave birth to her in a small hut. Children of the 1960s on Rapa Nui had a unique upbringing: electricity for two hours a day and little in the way of entertainment. "You don't have nothing to play," she remembers. "So you make a doll. You put five or six rocks together for the legs or the arms; you make the big rock for the face." The only school stopped at sixth grade. After that Haoa departed alone for high school, boarding the once-yearly supply ship heading back to Chile.

Lacking an advanced degree, Haoa doesn't consider herself an archaeologist. But she has plenty of experience, two co-authored peer-reviewed scientific papers, and a Smithsonian exhibit to her credit. Shortly after returning home in the late '70s, she assisted famed archaeologist William Mulloy in restoring and re-erecting the Moai, which had all been toppled by warring tribes. In the mid-'80s she traveled for five years with Norwegian ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl, most famous for writing the book "Kon-Tiki." They studied pyramids and the effect of deforestation, respectively, in northern Peru and the Polynesian island of Mangareva. In the early 1990s the Chilean government issued her a grant to survey Rapa Nui.

Haoa soon realized that pastures covered densely with broken lava were often accompanied by one or more outcroppings of boulders. She surmised that they were "production rocks," quarries where her ancestors heated, split, and distributed the rocks. Far from being natural or random, most of the stones that blanket the island once constituted man-made gardens.

This is Haoa's key contribution to scientific knowledge: Living on a vastly eroded island, the ancient Rapanui people made the most of their last remaining resource. They learned to grow plants from rocks, grouping them together to trap enough humidity to provide moisture and grow food. It turns out Haoa's ancestors were not unique. There's evidence that rock gardens flourished in the southwestern U.S., as well as in Israel, New Zealand, and Peru. But Haoa didn't know that at the time. No trained archaeologist had made the connection. At one point she abandoned her work for two years, thinking she was crazy. "Who will believe you if you don't have a master's or a doctorate?" she remembers asking herself repeatedly. "I don't want them to think I am stupid, so I keep quiet."

When she finally revealed her theory, the scientific community was stunned. Archaeologists had been fascinated by the enormous Moai while trampling all over another interesting and innovative aspect of Rapa Nui's past. "It's huge," says Christopher Stevenson, an archaeologist for the Virginia Department of Historical Resources. "It changed the whole emphasis of Easter Island archaeology."

Meanwhile Rapa Nui had grown increasingly connected to the rest of the world. In the mid-'80s, NASA built a backup runway for the space shuttle, enabling wide-body jets to land. Ten years later the island saw its first road. Today there are more than a thousand cars on the island, plus daily flights from Santiago. Most tourists come to see the Moai, but there are plenty of surprises to behold. There's still a dearth of vegetation and birds. Parts of the island are now so eroded that they resemble Martian terrain. About 4,000 humans live alongside three times as many wild horses, some mangy, some Kentucky Derby handsome.

In the midst of obvious poverty and a strained infrastructure, modernity has crept in. There's cellphone coverage and Wi-Fi (albeit at dial-up speeds). There's not a Starbucks or a McDonald's in sight, but there's plenty of fresh ceviche and even a few cappuccino makers, including one at the swank 30-room hotel Explora, which opened a year ago. The resort has a swimming pool, massage rooms, world-class food, and a decent wine list.

Development was complicated by rough seas and by Haoa. She found a cave in the middle of the building site, which forced the contractors to redesign. It was worth the effort. Room rates start around $700 per night, and Explora is booked solid during peak season. Now copycats are coming. A sprawling 100-room oceanside resort, Hanga Roa, is slated to open in July, and a handful of other projects are on the books.

The island's mayor, Petero Edmonds, proud owner of an iPhone and a Louis Vuitton briefcase, has no shortage of ambitious ideas. In 2006 he championed plans for a casino (it was nixed by the Chilean government). Now he's talking about a second airstrip, a deepwater port, a modern health-care system, and medical tourism resorts. During a visit to his office he touts a study that says Rapa Nui can accommodate 150,000 people - nearly three times the number of annual visitors today. "The island is strategically located between San Francisco and Sydney. We are five miles off the international routing for cargo and tourism ships," Edmonds says. "There's opportunity for everybody - and lots of it."

There's a perch atop a sheer cliff on Rapa Nui called Orongo where one can see the curvature of the earth along the 360-degree horizon. At the water's edge things get uglier. Kelsey and I look over a raging stream that dumps red mud into the bay. Just below on the beach, a stray dog gnaws on the skull of a freshly dead horse.

Scenes like this brought Kelsey to an inescapable conclusion on his first visit: Rapa Nui can barely support its current population. There will be no opportunity without a major infrastructure overhaul. A large percentage of the island's drinking water, for instance, comes from a collapsing reservoir housed in a caldera situated precariously above a landfill. One diesel generator produces all the electricity. Drastic erosion continues to deposit topsoil into the sea. Even the Moai are suffering, their eyes, noses, and lips fading with every passing year.

So Kelsey convinced his bosses to send him back on Autodesk's dime and create a base map that would allow the municipality to create a planning scheme, fix what's broken, track the erosion, encourage sustainable development, and think about where to move the landfill. Of course, all that would mean teaching the locals to use his software, so he'd need to set up a training regimen. "I'm supposed to want to pave the whales," Kelsey jokes. "But this was different. I told my superiors we have the opportunity to do something special."

On his second visit, in October 2007, Kelsey brought a team of eight, plus a half-million dollars in laser-scanning equipment, and stayed for almost a month. He rounded up a colleague and a crew of three from laser-scanning company Metco Services. Another Autodesk partner, Leica Geosystems, sent two people to help with data acquisition and analysis.

The plan was to secure GPS coordinates and scans of significant artifacts and then overlay them on a map with Haoa's data, cadastral information from the municipality, topographical charts, and satellite imagery. Once everything was digital, Haoa could use the map to discern patterns that even her expert eyes hadn't noticed. The national parks department could monitor erosion; the municipality could simulate extremes in the drainage system or the effect of proposed development; and the mayor's people could plot world domination - sustainably.

NEXT: Saving Easter Island (pg. 3)

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