Rapa Nui — Easter Island — lies in the southeastern Pacific, approximately 3,500 kilometres from the coast of Chile and approximately 2,000 kilometres from the nearest inhabited Polynesian island. It is among the most remote permanently inhabited locations in the world. The Rapanui people, the indigenous Polynesian inhabitants, number roughly 4,000. The total population of the island, including Chilean settlers and military personnel, is approximately 7,750.
The Rapanui are Polynesian. The island is Chilean. The political relationship between the two facts has been complicated for the entire period since Chile annexed the island in 1888. The complication is the substance of most of the island's recent history.
In 2018, after a campaign led by the Rapanui themselves, the Chilean government declared a marine protected area of approximately 720,000 square kilometres around the island — at the time among the largest in the world. The protection covers the waters within Chile's Rapa Nui exclusive economic zone. The provisions of the protection were specifically negotiated with the Rapanui community and incorporate Rapanui traditional rights of subsistence and ceremonial fishing. Industrial fishing within the protected area is prohibited. Recreational and subsistence fishing by Rapanui is permitted, under traditional management.
The protection inside the EEZ has held. The waters within the protected area are, by every available scientific measure, healthy relative to comparable Pacific waters subject to industrial pressure. The Rapanui management has not produced collapse; it has produced fish populations that the community can continue to fish at sustainable levels.
The enforcement of the boundary against industrial fleets operating immediately outside the EEZ is a different question. The South Pacific distant-water fleet — primarily Chinese, with significant Spanish, Korean, and Taiwanese components — operates along the boundary of the Rapanui EEZ in the international waters just beyond it. The species being extracted in those waters do not honour the line. The jumbo squid, the jack mackerel, the migratory tuna, the pelagic species generally — they move freely across the boundary. The fish that the Rapanui protect inside the line are reduced in number by the fishing that happens immediately outside it.
The Rapanui have described the situation as a betrayal — protection inside the line, extraction immediately outside, the species not honouring the line either way. The framing is accurate. The protection that was won was real. The protection that was needed was larger. The political work required to expand effective protection into international waters has not yet been done, by Chile or by the multilateral fisheries bodies that govern the South Pacific. Whether it will be done is a question that depends partly on the kind of regional governance work that the Melanesian Ocean Summit and similar efforts are attempting to construct, several thousand kilometres to the west.
What Rapa Nui offers, to a visitor or to a reader, is the experience of a Polynesian community on the eastern edge of the Pacific that has continued to be itself across all the political pressures of the past two centuries. The famous stone moai are present and visible. The language is taught. The marine relationships are intact within the waters that the community can defend. The world that the Rapanui live in is the world they have continued to make.
What Rapa Nui also offers, less comfortably, is a demonstration of the limits of national-scale marine protection in an ocean where industrial-scale extraction operates internationally. The two pictures coexist on the same island and in the same waters. The publication notices both.