The ruins lie silent and abandoned in the heart of the jungle; blocks of stone surrendered to the vines, which twist and writhe over temples, plazas and pyramids. Weeds and forest creatures have colonized the inner sanctums; mahogany and cedar trees swallow what once were roads, blotting out the sun. This is Tikal, the ancient Mayan city of northern Guatemala. There was a time when tens of thousands of people lived here. The architecture and urban planning — there are epic monuments, boastful inscriptions and even courts for playing ball games — embody boundless human confidence.
“The imagination reels. There are reliefs, pyramids, temples in the extinguished city. The … sound of flapping wings trickle into the immense sea of silence,” wrote Miguel Angel Asturias, Guatemala’s Nobel laureate.
Shortly after its apogee, around 800AD, the Mayan civilization, the most advanced in the Western hemisphere, withered. Kingdoms fell, monuments were smashed and the great stone cities emptied. Tikal now stands as an eerie embodiment of a society gone wrong, of collapse. How it came to pass is a question that has long fascinated academics. Titles such as Ancient Maya: The Rise and Fall of a Rainforest Civilization fill faculty bookshelves.
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?
No one is suggesting that vines will start crawling up the concrete canyons of Wall Street, or that howler monkeys will chase pin-striped bankers through Manhattan. Mayan kings who screwed up were ritually tortured and sacrificed with the aid of stingray spines to pierce the penis; an emphatic application of moral hazard. In our era, the only thing slashed is a bonus.
There are, however, striking parallels between the Maya fall and our era’s convulsions.
“We think we are different,” said Jared Diamond, a US evolutionary biologist. “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 academics and commentators.
What, then, is the story of the Maya? And what lessons does it hold for us? Diamond’s thesis says 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 environment-driven crisis that its leaders failed to recognize 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,” Diamond wrote in a 2003 article called “The Last Americans: Environmental Collapse and the End of Civilization.”
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