Viajando a la historia

Well, it’s been quite a while since I’ve posted on here. Since last post, I spent a weekend in El Salvador (maybe more on that later), got back Monday night, and left for San Pedro Sula the next morning. We visited a maquila, a workers rights organization, a Chiquita banana plantation, and Honduras’s oldest union of banana workers (for sure more on that in the next couple days). From there we went to Copan, where we visited the archeological remains of one of the biggest political and artistic centers of the Mayan civilization.

The last time I was at Copan, I didn’t really have much sense of worth for the ruins, temples, and stelas that were around us. It just seemed to me that the Mayan people had lived and died without really changing the course of my history. Yes, it was true that they made incredible advances in astronomy and science, but it wasn’t as if they had significantly altered the rate at which the rest of the world learned science. The building they built are quite impressive architectural feats, especially considering they were without the wheel, but again these temples had little pull on world building styles. However, after reading the Collapse article, I was able to look at everything with new eyes this time. The reality is that the Mayan people were not that much different from Americans of present day. They were very interested in consumption and in the expansion of their culture and style, to the point of excessiveness. The sobering piece of it is that these things caused the collapse of the Mayan culture. The environmental crisis that is looming over us right now is not a brand new event that the earth has never had to deal with before, the reality is that the Mayan people faced a similar environmental crisis. Massive deforestation of the mountainsides around Mayan cities supplied the stucco to build elaborate palaces and courtyards, but it also allowed for the extreme erosion of Mayan farms and loss of soil fertility. Thus decreased food production occurred at the very same time as the Mayan population reached even higher levels. Adding to all this the decreased water retention in the eroded soil, through a series of 4 droughts, 99% of the Mayan population disappeared in a matter of 40 to 60 years. Unlike I had insistently told my friends when we visited Copan 2 years ago, the Mayan civilization is not merely dead, gone, and meaningless to us. Unfortunately, this civilization gives a very real, very dramatic example of what over consumption and disregard for the environment can lead to. I’m thinking this would be a good point in history to study in an effort to avoid repeating.