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Green Was the Earth on the Seventh Day
Green Was the Earth on the Seventh Day
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Green Was the Earth on the Seventh Day is the fascinating, adventurous memoir of Thor Heyerdahl's days in the Marquesas Islands in the Pacific. It is a dynamic view into Heyerdahl's thoughts on the natural history, evolution, and colonization of early civilizations throughout this Pacific region. Heyerdahl's famed work Kon Tiki was the story about his expedition to sail a primitive raft from the coast of Peru to the Polynesian Islands in an effort to prove that Peruvians could have been the first settlers in Polynesia. The expedition proved that a reasonable possibility.
The events in Green Was the Earth on the Seventh Day take place before the Kon Tiki voyage, a time when Heyerdahl was still formulating his quasi-evolutionary, migratory theories. Throughout the book, he provides interesting descriptions of how the Kon Tiki project began to take shape in his mind and how this journey enabled him to develop his hypotheses.
Heyerdahl chronicles the year he and his wife spent living on a tiny island in Polynesia called Fatu-Hiva. Heyerdahl's plan was to find the most remote location on the planet and live an existence completely removed from technology and Western society. He wanted to understand and appreciate the natural world without the distraction of modern life.
After landing on the tiny island with only two small suitcases in their possession, Heyerdahl and his wife assumed the life of their native counterparts already living there. They spent their first months building a small ascetic bamboo hut, which served as home. They concentrated on gathering food, cooking, exploring the jungle, and working on theories of primitive migrations and the social structure of the island natives. Heyerdahl intermingles a diary of their days with his own thoughts on natural history and evolution.
With his memoir, Heyerdahl provides us with yet another provocative look at our existence on the planet and how we are affecting our own livelihood by our destructive habits. Green Was the Earth on the Seventh Day is part memoir, part philosophical treatise, and part historical text, spun into a wild Robinson Crusoe odyssey of intriguing stories and explanations.
Jim Merickel is a freelance writer in Atlanta, Georgia.
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