By Christian Monzón, Executive Director
Artwork by Jinny Park, Design Lead 
A construction project began in a city in the Maya lowlands in Southern Mexico sometime long before Europeans arrived, perhaps to commemorate a local ruler; perhaps a god; or perhaps both, as many ancient Mayan rulers viewed themselves as human manifestations of the divine. Workers on the construction project, people whose names nobody today knows, would begin their hard labor amidst the start of a drought, maybe as their city-state warred with others and certainly during a time of stark inequality and social unrest. They never finished. Today, their construction project lays abandoned and incomplete, as its workers suddenly fled some great crisis, the collapse of their civilization.
Great Mayan city-states like Tikal or Chichen Itza reflected the monumental power of ancient Mesoamerican peoples. Impressive architecture, statues, and other structures define the ruins of the now-abandoned cities. Looking at the cities today, the buildings stand in deafening silence, coexisting with surrounding jungles and seeming like a society trapped in the past. Crumbling stone architecture, abandoned palaces, and vines overtaking the cities could lead contemporary visitors to think that something terrible had happened there. Yet these societies remain very much alive-both in the some six million Mayans still living in Guatemala, Mexico, and elsewhere across the Americas, and in the Maya’s past as a sign for the present.
We often view ancient states on two fronts. On one hand, their complex political systems, sophisticated infrastructure, and beautiful buildings amaze us. On another, we view ourselves as superior-the crisis that destroyed the Mayan city-states could never happen to us. Our technology, our complexity, and our modernity would stop us from meeting the same fate. Even as most of our world understands the existence of the climate crisis, most cannot conceptualize the emergency. Many know that we will soon begin to run out of water, that rising sea levels will eventually destroy coastal cities, and that tropical storms will grow stronger and deadlier with rising temperatures, but we cannot possibly conceive of these scenarios because of their severity.
While the collapse of the Mayan city-states is hotly contested, evidence in recent years points more towards an ecological disaster in Southern Mexico in the eighth or ninth centuries. Analysis of sediment from Mayan archaeological sites suggests that severe drought contributed to the depopulation of Mayan cities. Explanations for the drought vary, but most stem from powerful people mismanaging or outright destroying the environment, from overhunting to deforestation to even destruction of the environment via warfare between states. Inter-elite competition increased the exploitation of agricultural systems and facilitated destructive population growth. And according to archaeologist B.L. Turner, the collapse occurred when the Maya had “a sophisticated understanding of their environment, built and sustained intensive production and water systems and withstood at least two long-term episodes of aridity.” In other words, the Maya were like society today-they understood their environment and the unique ecological problems they faced, yet they continued abusing the natural world until their ecosystem became unsustainable.
Like today, ancient Mayan elites viewed their environment as expendable. Competition, expansion, growth, and empire clouded their judgement, as did the unsustainable growth of population centers and absurd belief that humanity could control nature. They knew that their behavior hurt the environment, but like modern climate change, the impending desolation of their world seemed inconceivable. And if the powerful of today’s world continue to support fossil fuels, deforestation, and the illusion that somehow, they will outlast nature, our world will meet the same fate as theirs. It seems not just probable, but inevitable.
But not all hope is lost. One crucial caveat of the story of the Maya is that while the Maya collapsed, the Mayan people survived. Though far shy of the estimated 19 million that lived in the ancient Mayan cities, today’s millions of Mayans survived the collapse of their civilization, then colonialism, and even attempted genocide in the 20th century. This can give us hope that we might survive our planet’s imminent destruction. Our potential survival should invigorate us-for as long as we can hope that some small sect of humanity will survive the crisis, the world is worth protecting. The world is worth fighting for.