by Rory Carroll
Population explosion, ecological disaster and weak leadership ... that's what probably killed off the Maya at the height of their powers. Are the modern-day parallels too close for us to ignore?
Recent events have injected a jarring note into Mayan studies: a sense of anxiety, even foreboding. Serious people are asking a question that at first sounds ridiculous. What if the fate of the Maya is to be our fate? What if climate change and the global financial crisis are harbingers of a system that is destined to warp, buckle and collapse?
There are, striking parallels between the Maya fall and our era's convulsions. We think we are different. In fact . . . all of those powerful societies of the past thought that they too were unique, right up to the moment of their collapse. The Maya, like us, were at the apex of their power when things began to unravel, he says. As stock markets zigzag into uncharted territory and ice caps continue to melt, it is a view increasingly echoed by scholars and commentators.
And what lessons does it hold for us? The ancients built a very clever and advanced society but were undone by their own success. Populations grew and stretched natural resources to breaking point. Political elites failed to resolve the escalating economic problems and the system collapsed. There was no need for an external cataclysm or a plague. What did for the Maya was a slow-boiling environmental-driven crisis that its leaders failed to recognise and resolve until too late.
Because peak population, wealth, resource consumption, and waste production are accompanied by peak environmental impact - approaching the limit at which impact outstrips resources - we can now understand why declines of societies tend to follow swiftly on their peaks.
To explain the mysterious collapse some scholars posit an invasion, or disease, or shifting trade routes, or a drought. There is wide agreement, however, that a leading cause was environmental pressure. The carrying capacity of the ecosystem was pushed to its limits. Lakes became silted and soils exhausted. Tilling and man-made reservoirs provided more food and water but population growth outstripped technological innovation.
Complex and organised it may have been but Mayan society resembled a frog who stays in slowly boiling water. Things were brewing within the system that were not picked up until too late. When the political elites did react they made things worse by offering greater sacrifices to the gods and plundering neighbours. The kingdoms were interdependent and there was a ripple effect. They did not respond correctly to a crisis which, in hindsight, was as clear as day.
The environmental trouble built up over centuries and was partly concealed by short-term fluctuations in rainfall patterns and harvest yields. But when the tipping point came, events moved quickly. Their success was built on very thin ice. Kings were supposed to keep order and avoid chaos through rituals and sacrifice. When manifestly they couldn't do it people lost confidence and the whole system of kingship fell apart.
Which brings us to modern parallels. Consider the fall of the Enron Corporation in 2001. That was the first tremor. Human beings are always surprised when things collapse just when they seem most successful. We look around and we think we're fat, we're clever, we're comfortable and we don't think we're on the edge of something nasty. Hubris? No: ignorance."
In common with the Maya, we're not very rational in how we think about how the world works. They had their rituals and sacrifices. Magic, in other words. And we also believe in magic: that money and innovation can get us out of the inherent limits of our system, that the old rules don't apply to us.
This is a modish view these days but it was considered cranky luddism back during the 1980s stockmarket boom and the 1990s dotcom bubble. That was when masters of the universe bestrode Wall Street and Francis Fukuyama caught the triumphalist liberal economic zeitgeist with his book The End of History and the Last Man. That era, to borrow from Star Wars, feels a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Now Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers are history and governments are taking over banks and propping up markets.
Several commentators have argued that the financial crisis is but a squall compared with the ecological hurricane they say is coming. A European study estimates deforestation alone is causing a loss of natural capital worth between $2 trillion and $5tn annually. The two crises have the same cause. In both cases, those who exploit the resource have demanded impossible rates of return and invoked debts that can never be repaid. In both cases we denied the likely consequences.
Eventually pressure on scarce resources will overwhelm technology - and do for us as it did for the Maya.
The gloom may be misplaced. Reports of capitalism's death have been exaggerated before and it has stubbornly survived Karl Marx, the Great Depression, world wars and oil shocks. And in contrast to the Maya, it is possible our technology will prevail over population and environmental pressures. Malthusian doomsayers have consistently underestimated the capacity of better irrigation, pesticides, new strains of crops and other technologies to boost food yields. The rate of population growth is slowing and human numbers are expected to peak at around 9.2 billion by 2050 before declining.
If the gloomy environmental prognosis is correct, and global warming is set to wreak major havoc, what are the chances we will respond better than the Maya? Electing Bush instead of Al Gore suggests limited wisdom in picking kings, and emasculating the Kyoto treaty was perhaps as sensible as burning corn harvests to appease the gods. When Republicans chant, "Drill, baby, drill!" it is not much of a stretch to picture them, barefoot and in traditional huipil shirts, rooting for another sacrifice.
Civilisations rise - and collapse - for many different reasons. No civilisation lasts for ever. Most go for between 200 and 600 years. The Maya, Romans and Angkor of Cambodia lasted 600.
And us? Western civilisation began with the Renaissance, so we're already hitting 600years.
