Smash and Grab
The Mayan people believed that man was just one part of the natural order on Earth, a natural order that needed to remain in balance. When their practice departed calamitously from this tidy theory, their civilisation declined.

The Maya loved mathematics and astronomy, a legacy that persists today in Mayan children, who in school are fascinated by numbers and are skilful in arithmetic. Over a thousand years ago, Mayan enthusiasm for astronomy, time and mathematics came to dominate over their theory of ecological balance, with catastrophic results. Their huge temples and monuments, representing astronomical and chronological meanings, required large numbers of craftsmen and labourers to build and maintain them, and so socially and occupationally complex cities, such as Tikal in northern Guatemala, surrounded the monuments. The cities absorbed too much of the Mayans’ collective energy, and demanded too much food, fuel and construction materials from the rural hinterlands. The forest was felled, interrupting the water cycle. Less rain fell.

As their water, food and fuel resources dwindled, Mayan tribes fought intense wars to try and seize as much as they could of the remaining supplies. So much for the ideal of natural harmony! The knock-out blow at Tikal was a 30-year drought around 1000AD. The occupants of Tikal walked away, and many of their descendents – still poverty-stricken — live in the western highlands of Guatemala, on steep, infertile land which the conquering European families and the multinational corporations have not wanted.

The relationship between trees and human survival is too often overlooked. Jared Diamond, in his 2005 book Collapse: how societies choose to fail or survive, points out that forests

“….function as the world’s major air filter removing carbon monoxide and other air pollutants, and forests and their soils are a major sink for carbon, with the result that deforestation is an important driving force behind global warming by decreasing that carbon sink. Water transpiration from trees returns water to the atmosphere, so that deforestation tends to cause diminished rainfall and increased desertification. Trees retain water in the soil and keep it moist. They protect the land surface against landslides, erosion, and sediment runoff into streams. Some forests, notably tropical rainforests, hold the major portion of an ecosystem’s nutrients, so that logging and carting the logs away tends to leave the cleared land infertile.”
– p.469 in the 2006 Penguin edition of Collapse: how societies choose to fail or survive

This is what happened at Tikal, and at innumerable settlements all over the world, from Norse Greenland to Haiti in the Caribbean, from Easter Island in the Pacific to Rwanda in Africa. Deforestation ends societies, even civilisations.

Free of human interference, the jungle returned to Tikal and clothed the monuments, which slept undisturbed for centuries. Spanish invaders conquered the Mayans, who over the intervening years have been dragged unwillingly into a capitalist economy.

There is a facet of Mayan culture that annoys western entrepreneurs: Mayans are relatively indifferent to consumer culture.

“An enormous disadvantage for this country is that the Indians [the Mayans] won’t work more than just enough to fill their basic needs, and these are very few. The only way to make [a Mayan] work is to advance him money, then he can be forced to work. Very often, they run off, but they are caught and punished very severely.”
– from the story of a German who emigrated to Guatemala in 1892, told in Daniel Wilkinson’s Silence on the Mountain: stories of terror, betrayal and forgetting in Guatemala, p.38. Silence on the Mountain was published in 2004 by Duke University Press.

This German immigrant, Friedrich Endler, ran a coffee plantation. The plantations struggled to find enough labour, so the government instituted a form of slavery, the labour draft. What made the Mayans go to work on the plantations? Daniel Wilkinson explains:

“The labor drafts. Upon the request of a plantation owner, the governors of each department would round up a work gang of fifty to one hundred Indians and send them to work on the plantation. An 1894 law provided Indians with one way to escape this form of forced recruitment: become an indebted worker for a plantation.”
– Silence on the Mountain p.76-77.

The pass laws, so hated in South Africa later in the 20th century, already existed in Guatemala:

“ ‘We were slaves because of the law of Ubico,’ recalled the next elderly peasant we talked to. He was referring to President Jorge Ubico, who had governed the country from 1930 to 1944, and the ‘slavery’ he described was not debt peonage but the vagrancy laws that had replaced it. ‘We had to carry a booklet, like an identity card, which showed what plantation we worked in and how many hours we had worked that year. If you didn’t carry it, the government could jail you and make you work without pay’.”
– Silence on the Mountain p.97.

Even if the Mayans’ obsession with monuments had not led them to environmental destruction, and they had protected their forests, their later history may not have been markedly different. The Spanish invaders had superior weapons and a disregard for the rights of indigenous peoples, who were enslaved and forced to live by the rules of the conquering ‘culture’. Why should the future be any different? Can we change the pattern of history by opting to co-operate and to share resources, instead of grabbing what we can? If we save our trees, won’t others come and cut them down?