The sacred statues of Easter Island have been around for at least 600 years.
For centuries, the 1,000 or so stone anthropomorphic monoliths, called “moai,” on the craggy island off the coast of Chile have battled fierce elemental enemies. Their porous volcanic rock is susceptible to sun, rainwater, wind, lichen and airborne seeds that worm their way into the structure and cause expansion and crumbling. Not to mention the damage caused by birds.
But now, per “60 Minutes,” conservators are coping with an even bigger threat: a massive increase in tourism. Besides the threats to the fragile infrastructure and artifacts, historian Cristian Moreno Pakarati notes the disruption to local culture. The more the island caters to tourists, he adds, the less like home it is for the 5,700 local residents, including people whose ancestors built the moai.
The increase in visitors has been exponential.
“When I went to Easter Island for the first time in ’81, the number of people who visited per year was about 2,500,” archaeologist Jo Anne Van Tilburg told UCLA. Last year, the 63-square-mile island — officially known as Rapa Nui but given its holy-holiday moniker after Dutch explorers put eyeballs on it on Easter morning in 1722 — received 150,000 visitors. The uptick is due in part to an increased number of flights as well as docked cruise ships whose passengers jump off for a short period of time to buy souvenirs and snap a selfie.
Van Tilburg founded the Easter Island Statue Project in 1982 for field and museum inventory of all the island’s monolithic sculpture. In 1995, UNESCO named Easter Island a World Heritage Site, with much of the island protected within Rapa Nui National Park.
While the increased foot traffic alone has hindered conservation efforts, according to Van Tilburg, these days visitors to the sacred sites can behave in a vulgar, disrespectful fashion by trampling prohibited spaces, sitting on graves and climbing on the moai themselves in the service of getting pictures picking their noses.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BfXCWlQAi5c/It’s just the latest in a series of visitors destroying attractions in the name of Instagram. This year, in the Netherlands, tulip growers had to plead with visitors to stop trampling the flowers in search of the perfect selfie, which causes thousands of dollars of damage. The Dutch tourism board launched a campaign for “tulip-friendly selfies” with the hashtag #watchyourfeet.
And earlier this spring, the craze over the “super bloom” in California caused authorities to shut down Walker Canyon in Lake Elsinore as selfie-takers flocked to capture the vibrancy. Its poppies were just too popular.