Environmental Issues in the Mundo Maya
by Victoria Schlesinger

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For millennia farmers of the Maya area have weathered an ebb and flow of available land and resources. Today, just as during the Terminal Classic period when populations reached unmanageable heights and the forests were all but leveled, Maya farmers find themselves grappling with issues of land shortage and environmental destruction. However, now the environmental situation is dire compared with what it was during the Terminal Classic period. In A.D. 800 the Maya were limited to the use of stone axes and were part of a relatively contained economy; 1,200 years later we have bulldozers, flatbed semi-trailers, processing plants, a global economy, and over six billion people on the planet. The instinct toward human progress has not changed since ancient times, but the number of people, technology, and demand for resources have.

According to one assessment, "In 1960, woodlands blanketed nearly 60 percent of Central America. Today less than one-third of the original forests remain standing; the rest have vanished" (Faber 1993). In particular, the tropical and montane forests of Central America continue to be destroyed at a frightening speed. Between 1961 and 1991 over half of the forests in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador were cut down -- a rate of deforestation that applies to Central America as a whole. At this pace the world, within decades, will be left with little more than a few parks and reserves as vestiges of the great ecosystems of Central America.

Deforestation during the twentieth century in Central America is fueled by several sources. On an individual level, poor farmers continually cut down forests in order to work the land. On a larger corporate and agency level, lucrative agribusiness, supported by the international market, continues to control the best farmland in the region and to raise cattle on depleted tracts of land, taxing the soil until it becomes an unfertile.

Since World War II the United States and international financial groups have fueled the development of Central America's beef production, not only by funding technology but also by purchasing the inexpensively priced meat. Raising cattle in the United States is more expensive than in Central America, where wages remain low and, with the tropical climates, a year-round supply of grass makes feeding the herds inexpensive. From the industry's perspective, Central American beef stands at a quarter of the price of U.S. beef.

The cattle industry puts money in the pockets of a few people while doing little for the long-term economic and environmental sustainability of the region. As the beef boom began in the 1950s and 1960s, the acquisition of cattle-grazing pastures often involved displacing subsistence farmers from their land. Wealthy ranchers have long had the political backing of the military government and used whatever means necessary -- imprisonment, legal manipulations, torture, massacres -- to force small-scale farmers off the desirable land (Faber 1993). Just as in the Maya's ancient past, farmers today are greatly affected by the greed and political maneuvers of ruling powers.

Subsistence farmers, once evicted from their land, may move to the city to find jobs, work on plantations (picking coffee or cotton and cutting sugar cane), take up arms of resistance, or find new areas to farm and continue their subsistence lifestyle. Unclaimed land in Central America typically sits high up on hillsides or farther inland where pine-oak, cloud, and tropical forest must be cut down and burned to convert it into workable land. The region's most fertile farming lands, along the Pacific coasts and valley bottoms, have long been owned by a few wealthy families or by foreign investors.

Tropical forests grow on nutrient-poor soil, which cannot support long-term farming. People may farm a plot of land for two or three years at most, and then must allow it to rest for five to ten years, during which time the farmer and his family leave or sell the land in order to fell more tracts of forest, beginning the process again. Cattle ranchers often acquire the plots of depleted soil and seed the area with non-native grasses for their herds. Over time the land yields less and less fodder, requiring more acreage of meager feed per head of cattle. Ultimately the expanses of land cannot produce even grass; it lies fallow, unable to absorb water or nutrients, hardened through excessive use. Second-growth forest does not spring to life from this compacted earth as it does after just a few years of slash-and-burn farming. Rain falls onto the brick-hard land and quickly flushes away, taking soil with it. The ground becomes more and more closed with each fluctuation between heat and rain, finally sealing into a plane of cementlike clay.

Muddy rainwater drains into rivers and streams, which eventually empty into the ocean. Along the Caribbean coast, and particularly in Honduras, runoff sediment clouds the naturally clear seawater, diminishing the coral reef's ability to photosynthesize. Also detrimental to the reef ecosystem, as well as to plantation workers, are pesticides used in farming, which seep into the water table. Some of the most controversial are those applied on banana plantations, owned by companies such as Chiquita, Del Monte, Fyffe. Chiquita has been accused of using pesticides that U.S. government agencies have determined to be potentially cancer-causing in humans and toxic to fish and wildlife ("Pesticides in the Banana Ecosystem" 1998).

The barrier reef that follows the coasts of Yucatan, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras is the second largest in the world and is threatened by a host of other environmental problems: municipal waste contamination; overfishing of conch, finfish, and lobster; oil tankers carrying more than one million tons of crude oil annually from the port of Santo Tomas del Castillo in Guatemala; and the destruction of coastal habitats with the development of tourism and other ventures.

Oil drilling in tropical forests is also of major concern. Mexico's Lacandon forest, a true rain forest found in the very northern region of the Maya area, has been surveyed for oil and natural gas reserves by the Mexican government, the United States, and PEMEX, one of Mexico's largest national oil companies. Oil extraction pollutes and destroys surrounding ecosystems, and in the Lacandon it is also deeply intertwined with the rights of native communities. In the Mexican state of Tabasco pollution from PEMEX operations has destroyed local farming economies and caused serious health problems. In 1996 thousands of Chontal Indians in the Mexican state of Tabasco peacefully protested the operations and presence of PEMEX, demanding that drilling cease and communities receive indemnity for damage to their land and health (Chethik 1996).

Many, the Zapatistas of Chiapas among them, feel that the advent of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade agreement signed between Canada, the United States, and Mexico in 1994, has contributed to the amount of environmental destruction caused by large companies. In Mexico a group called Action for Community and Ecology in the Rainforests of Central America (ACERCA) and other organizations monitor initiatives by large corporations that affect communities and their environments, including subsidized eucalyptus plantations, government-funded shrimp farms, development of the biotech industry and genetic engineering, highway construction, gold mining, and large-scale irrigation projects. NAFTA will soon extend into Central America under the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA); negotiations have been conducted since 1994 with plans to come to a final agreement in 2005.

However one explains the massive decline of Maya civilization during the Classic period, it is worth contemplating that many of the forests in the area were cut down by the time of the Classic period collapse. It is also clear that as a result of the collapse, many lowland Maya migrated to new areas and capitalized on new resources, reestablishing their lives and carrying on much as they always had. In the twenty-first century our answers to social and environmental problems cannot be so simple, and yet despite the cries of scientists, Nobel peace prize recipients, and activists around the world and despite evidence that great civilizations of the past may have fallen at least in part from depletion of their natural resources, we continue to tax our environment at an unsustainable rate. During my travels in the Maya area, I found the parallel between past and present frightening and fascinating -- the ability of humanity to advance wildly and yet be fundamentally driven by the same nature.

Travel

The most important action you can take as a traveler in another country is the willingness to meet the place you are visiting on its own terms. Be open to experiencing a community as it exists rather than demanding and patronizing only places that offer western amenities. For example, many remote areas in the Maya area have electricity for only a limited number of hours each day. While this may differ from western standards, and in some instances might be viewed as a disadvantage, it also has many positive aspects. Early lights-out means less electricity used and a brilliant sky full of stars. Expecting around-the-clock electricity, hot water, and western food in places where the residents do not have these things can add to the environmental stress on an area and distance you from the people and culture you have come to experience. Travel is about participating in new worlds and ecosystems. It is a chance to broaden your view of the world -- and your host country's as well -- and to support businesses that support the environment.

This article is excerpted from Animals and Plants of the Ancient Maya with permission of the author. Victoria Schlesinger can be reached via email

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