Caroline was convinced, she said, that what had happened on Easter Island was what was happening right now, what we were doing to ourselves. Our whole planet, she said, was Easter Island. Here we were, she said, doggedly persisting in the practice of our idolatrous consumerism, heedlessly continuing in the way of life we knew to be causing total ecological collapse, knowing full well the gravity of its consequences, persisting until the last tree was gone, until the soil could no longer support life. “The way we build our gods,” she said, “is the way we build the apocalypse.”
