KEY POINTS:
As the sun rises over the eastern shores of the tiny Polynesian island of Rapa Nui, the shadows of 15 stone monoliths stretch long across the grassy fields of Tongariki, towards the quarry from which they were mysteriously transported hundreds of years ago.
In the town of Hanga Roa, on the other side of Rapa Nui, commonly known as Easter Island, people are arguing about what effect there will be on the island after it was nominated as one of the new seven wonders of the world in a New 7 Wonders contest - a popular global competition to select the world's seven most awe-inspiring sites.
The argument centres on concern that even though it missed out on selection, just being nominated among the front runners could have unfortunate results for this fragile island.
More than 100 million people have voted by internet, phone and mail to select a new set of modern wonders from a list of 20 finalists, pared down from more than 200 nominations by a team of experts over a selection process that began in 2000.
Easter Island was in the top 10 in every round of preliminary results, but missed out on being named in the final seven.
Located some 7000km from Auckland and more than 3700km from its political centre in Chile, Rapa Nui is the most remote inhabited island in the world.
Despite the distance and its small size (166sq km), its tourism has doubled in the past three years alone - from 22,000 tourists in 2003 to about 50,000 last year.
The New 7 Wonders nomination certainly boosted the island's visibility.
"To be honest, we didn't know much about the island or its culture," admits Argentine tourist Augustin Amoretti, watching a Kari Kari ballet show.
"We only knew about the Moai [the large stone statues] and the fact that it was nominated to be one of the seven wonders of the world."
He said he had hoped Easter Island would be selected.
Tourism accounts for 80 per cent of the island's income, so many see a contest that would help to promote tourism even further as a godsend.
Before the voting finished, Fatima Hotus Hey, a librarian at the island's only public library said: "We, as Rapa Nui, wanted to be among the 7 Wonders because it will make us even more famous than we already are, and that will bring us even more tourists from around the world."
The library featured a half-dozen hand-painted signs urging visitors to vote for Easter Island in the contest. The public computers were even set to the website where they could vote.
But other island officials worry about the impact of increasing tourism on this already strained destination.
"Our island can't handle much more," says Edgard Hereveri, president of the Rapa Nui Chamber of Tourism. He says impact studies are routinely ignored by local authorities.
Mr Hereveri estimates the island could handle up to 70,000 or 80,000 tourists, as a best-case scenario - but only with an integrated tourism management plan and environmental regulations.
"If we are already unable to control the tourist traffic we currently have, how will we control it after all the publicity around this contest?" asks Mr Hereveri.
He is not alone in his opposition. Many locals say mass tourism is putting a strain on the island's culture and language, archaeological sites, resources, and overall environmental sustainability.
"We have more than 50,000 visitors during the year, which means more than 11 times the total population of the island," says tour guide Cristian Reyes, eyeing the turquoise waters of Anakena beach, on Rapa Nui's north shore.
"That's a bit stressful for the economy, for the environment, for the hospitals, the police, for every public service.
"We would prefer a high-quality tourism.
"Maybe not more people but people with more money asking for more professional services."
The island is also struggling to keep up its culture and language, Rapa Nui, which is facing extinction.
The island's total population is less than 4500 and, depending on who you speak to, roughly 2500 are ethnic Rapa Nui.
Of those, only half speak their language fluently, says Julio Hotus, head of the Department of Culture and Tourism for the Municipality of Rapa Nui.
"The language skills of our young people are getting worse," he explains. "During the dictatorship of General [Augusto] Pinochet, we were prohibited from speaking Rapa Nui because of a kind of paranoia characteristic of that form of government, which believed everything was espionage.
"That era broke the connection with our mother tongue, and it's hard for the bilingual teaching programmes we have in our school today to compensate."
Still, Mr Hotus believes the New 7 Wonders contest will have helped to promote Rapa Nui's culture and instil a sense of pride in being a national symbol for all of Chile.
Others see reviving the island's cultural traditions as key to its survival.
"Let's preserve the language and the living culture by creating artists of all kinds - singers, dancers, sculptors," says renowned Rapa Nui archaeologist Sergio Rapu.
"We need to do this because the moai are fading away."
His predictions are bleak for the future of the island's signature statues, as the constant battering of erosion and rain slowly eat away at the island's shores and the porous volcanic stone of its famed monoliths and petroglyphs.
"The moai are dying by natural causes," explains Mr Rapu. "The stone they were made of erodes quickly when the water penetrates and dissolves the organic material.
"The prehistoric Rapa Nui people noted that it would take 300 to 400 years approximately for those statues to become completely eroded such that the features of the face would no longer be recognised," Mr Rapu said.
Add to that the number of tourists stepping on or touching these fragile archaeological sites. Stopping at the Ahu Akivi site, tour guide Cristian Reyes has to heckle more than one tourist to get off the not-so-clearly marked altar.
Mr Rapu says there are methods of preserving the moai, such as slowing the erosion process with chemical resins to seal the stone, as well as stabilising the ahu, or altar platforms, where the moai stand, many of which are slowly falling into the ocean.
But at a cost of at least US$500 ($639) for a smaller statue, for the almost 1000 monoliths scattered across the island, it's a price no one has offered to pay.
But Mr Rapu says the 7 Wonders contest has given him hope.
He said he had been told the publicity from the contest would bring contributions from around the world. The Unesco world heritage body was careful to distance itself from the contest, organised by Swiss film producer, author and philanthropist Bernard Weber.
According to the New 7 Wonders website: "Half the profits from the campaign will be donated to global good causes in monument and building restoration and preservation."
Mr Rapu said just being among the finalists gave the island political bargaining power, at least with Chile.
"We can say to the Government: 'Millions of people have voted for Easter Island, so can you please create a budget or corporation or endowment, because we must preserve these things, because everybody else believes they should be preserved'.
"When Rapa Nui became one of the candidates ... it was also an [alarm] bell for the authorities to say, 'Wake up and look at what's going on around. The moai are dying and eventually the people will finish in terms of their culture and environment'."
Rapa Nui's own history is a dark parable cited in environmental textbooks. It tells of a culture that overextended itself and brought about its own ecological self-destruction.
The population is thought to have declined drastically before the arrival of European explorers in 1722 - from overpopulation, deforestation and depleting its limited natural resources.
Researchers say the Rapa Nui chopped down all their trees to make wooden frames to hoist up their moai, in a frenzied competition to revere their ancestors and get one up on rival tribes.
Unable to build canoes for fishing or grow food because of the ensuing desertification, starvation began, eventually descending into civil war and cannibalism.
"Right now, we are repeating at a global scale and a local scale the same misbehaviour that the Rapa Nui did to their own island," says Mr Reyes.
"These people are now destroying the environment and their own ruins."
He says the rise in tourists has created several environmental stresses, including a mountain of garbage that's either thrown into open pits or burned with no treatment.
Mr Hereveri says there are also problems with sewage contamination, since the island's liquid waste is disposed of in underground pits and can seep into the wells where locals get their drinking water.
He says solid waste from the unmanaged dumps can also percolate into groundwater.
"The municipality claims that it doesn't have responsibility over managing dumps, and health officials say the same thing," says Mr Hereveri. "So they blame each other and in the end nobody does nothing."
Energy consumption is also a problem. During the annual Tapati festival in February last year there was such an increase in energy use due to the tourist boom that the island had to implement brown-outs.
Chilean media reported that a night-time soccer championship had to be suspended.
But a semi-private, company that uses diesel fuel to generate electricity has a monopoly on the island.
Locals say they would prefer renewable sources like wind, wave, or solar power - all abundant on the island - but were hampered by the lack of technicians or funding to implement such technologies.
Various fish species are also being depleted, including the famous Easter Island tuna - which scientists say disappeared from the Rapa Nui diet in 1560, when they ran out of wood to build boats.
Lobster, which was used to feed prisoners in the 1970s, is also running scarce.
The cries for sustainable tourism have inspired local entrepreneurs to seek answers abroad.
Mr Hereveri plans to visit Ecuador's Galapagos Islands next month to see how they recently managed to implement a regulation limiting the number of tourists each year.
Mr Rapu agrees with such mechanisms, saying a head tax would help to reduce the flow of tourists.
But before trying to avoid tourism, he says Rapa Nui must try to manage its tourism and improve its infrastructure.
"When you look around at the infrastructure that you have here we're not in good shape to withstand the pressure or demand of the visitors.
"If we haven't learned anything from the past - the good and the bad - then we're blind."
