Description:
Editorial Reviews
Review
"The Maya Forest Garden is an excellent addition to the New Frontiers in Historical Ecology series. Ford and Nigh’s book presents readers a thorough, accessible, and holistic anthropological introduction to the nature of Maya agricultural practices, a review of past and present ecological and conservation conditions, and a convincing theory for adopting an interdisciplinary approach to studying this unique relationship between a people and its environment. This work should be of interest to Maya scholars; students in the fields of cultural ecology, sustainability, and archaeology; and others interested in the dynamics of sustainable ecological practices of complex societies."
- Jeffrey L. Brewer, University of Cincinnati, USA, in American Anthropologist
"Ford and Nigh bring decades of field research to this book and draw on ethnography, agroecology, ethno- and paleobotany, archaeology, historical climate data, and ethnohistory. Even today, Maya forest gardeners cultivate sustainably but are threatened by Euro-informed models of agriculture that view tropical lowlands as suitable mainly for destructive pasturing. Scholars interested in tropical swiddeners and Mesoamericans in particular should read this discussion. Summing Up: Highly recommended."
- A. E. Adams, Central Connecticut State University, CHOICE
"The book is a timely multidisciplinary exploration of not only the rich historical ecology of the Maya forest garden, but also of Maya culture, history and knowledge – and the risk of loosing all of it. The value of explorations like the one offered by this study need to be ― for the future of any form of sustainable humanity and in my modest opinion ― continued."
- Alessandro Questa, Anthropology Book Forun (American Anthropological Association)
"An excellent contribution to the world literature on sustainable, indigenous land management. After rigorous paleo-botanical, archaeological and ecological research and on the ground consultation with existing practitioners, the authors conclude that the widely assumed cause of the collapse of the Mayan civilization due to deforestation and environmental degradation is not true... I’d recommend Ford and Nigh’s book to anyone interested in permaculture and forest gardens."
- Michael Pilarski, Friends Of The Trees Society
"A groundbreaking new book co-authored by a UC Santa Barbara researcher... asserts the Maya not only survived their presumed apocalypse, they thrive today using farming techniques that are thousands of years old. The Maya Forest Garden: Eight Millennia of Sustainable Cultivation of the Tropical Woodlands by UCSB’s Anabel Ford and Ronald Nigh demonstrates that the Maya milpa system is sustainable, sophisticated and highly productive."
- Jim Logan, The UCSB Current
"Ford’s book, The Maya Forest Garden: Eight Millennia of Sustainable Cultivation of the Tropical Woodlands, co-authored with Ronald Nigh, a professor at the Centro Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social in Chiapas, Mexico, published in June, is the result of 44 years of excavation and research into El Pilar’s domestic architecture, gardens and traditional forest crops."
- Joan Koerper, Inlandia Literary Journeys
"We have been reading The Maya Forest Garden by Anabel Ford and Ronald Nigh. It tells the tale of a civilization that weathered many climate changes, foreign conquests and failed attempts at cultural genocide. That civilization is still there today, after 8,000 years."
- Albert Bates, Resilience
"For years, archaeologist Anabel Ford has been arguing the case that the ancient Maya knew well how to manage their tropical forest environment to their advantage, eventually sustaining large populations even beyond the time when many archaeologists suggest the Maya declined and abandoned their iconic Classic period pyramidal and temple constructions and monumental inscriptions during the 8th and 9th centuries CE. She challenges the popular theories long held by many scholars that the Maya declined because of overpopulation and deforestation from increased agricultural production, perhaps aggravated by draught and climate change."
- Popular Archaeology
"In 2001, I traveled to the Belize-Guatemala border to report on UCSB archaeologist Anabel Ford’s many discoveries at El Pilar, the Maya monument complex she uncovered in 1983. That’s where she developed revolutionary theories that threatened to rock the academic world, namely that the Maya did not “disappear” due to an overpopulation cataclysm, but merely dwindled with time."
- Matt Kettmann, Santa Barbara Independent
"The book makes use of a wide range of data sources, including texts, ethnographic and archaeological research, pollen cores and a variety of climate proxies. The first two chapters after the introduction provide a useful summary of the archaeology, history and historical ecology of the Maya region. These sections are clearly written and well illustrated, and will mean that the book is accessible to those not familiar with recent research in Mesoamerica."
- Antiquity 92 361 (2018): 267–274
"the book fulfills a longstanding need to reevaluate the ecological relationship of the Maya people and the forest which they have managed and maintained over millennia. The book will be of interest to archaeologists and anthropologists, as well as conservation biologists, paleoclimatologists, and those concerned with development strategies in the tropics."
- Scott L. Fedick, University of California, Riverside, USA, in Latin American Antiquity
About the Author
Anabel Ford is director of the MesoAmerican Research Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and President of the nonprofit organization Exploring Solutions Past: The Maya Forest Alliance. She has done extensive research on patterns of Maya settlement and landscape ecology, and is recognized for the archaeological discovery of the ancient Maya city center of El Pilar, on the border of Belize and Guatemala.,
Ronald Nigh is a professor at Centro Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS) in Chiapas, Mexico. He is the author of numerous studies and articles on agricultural, ecological, and environmental issues of concern to indigenous peoples in Mesoamerica. He is also director of Dana, a non-government organization that coordinates an experimental garden in San Cristobal de Las Casas for training and support of young Maya farmers involved in agroecological transition.
Review:
5.0 out of 5 stars An evidenced deconstruction of the narrative of western hegemony in terms of ecological imperialism
Anabel Ford and Ronald Nigh’s The Maya Forest Garden discusses the integrative and holistic agro-ecosystem ingeniously developed by the Maya over thousands of years. This agro-ecosystem featured the Milpa system of rotational agriculture, maize-centered polyculture, and protected reforested woodlands, orchards, and house gardens. With the arrival of the Spanish to the region, came an immediate disregard of the agricultural innovation by the Maya, tossing it aside due to the lens of Eurocentrism. As the Spanish were the oppressors and thus the writers of the historical narrative, the named ‘slash-and-burn’ agriculture of the agro-ecosystem was propagated as inefficient, unproductive, and unusable. In discrediting the Maya’s agricultural methods, such writers of history effectively discredited their wealth and thus the standing of their civilization as a whole. The Maya Forest Garden thus examines both the traditional agro-ecosystem of the Maya as well as the contemporary system of agricultural techniques. In accordance with the evidence gathered, Ford and Nigh repudiate claims of the incompetence of the Maya agricultural practices, utilizing extensive primary evidence extrapolated from statistics gathered from archaeological records of the changing climate.In the evidence gathered, The Maya Forest Garden argues that the ancient agricultural techniques of the Maya were in fact not only efficient, usable, and sustainable, but also able to provide for the extensive populations calculated to inhabit the region for extensive periods of time. Ford and Nigh thus analyze the ecological imperialism that undergirded the immediate disapproval of the Maya’s agricultural methods, that ultimately discredited the intellectual prowess of the Maya as a whole, and in so doing confront the well-propagated, ill-founded notion that the cause of the Maya collapse could be attributed to the ‘primitive’ methods of the Maya civilizations.As much of the argument against colonialism in ideology and practice are philosophically founded, The Maya Forest Garden offers a science-based argument confronting the ecological manifestation of Eurocentrism, ecological imperialism. Ecological imperialism demonstrates one manifestation of the Eurocentric conception of general superiority. Though the European agricultural methods were not ideal for the ecology of Central America, it was not conceivable to the closed European mind that a different people might have developed their own systems with intelligent, logical basis. This thus provides an excellent debut of the limited, closed, and corrupted mind of the Eurocentrist, as well as repudiates the entire grounding of the ecological imperialist view of the Maya’s civilization.
5.0 out of 5 stars A way forward in the face of climate collapse
Anabel Ford’s and Ronald Nigh’s “The Maya Forest Garden: Eight Millenia of Sustainable Cultivation ofthe Tropical Woodlands,” offers a well-researched, well written answer of how to reverse climatechange in times of predicted collapse. The answer shifts our understanding of Maya Civilization from afocus on huge temple complexes, wars, and large agricultural fields to the intimate work of the MayaForest Gardeners, who work with the rainforest in small plots, termed “milpas.” In this family-basedmodel, the forest is tended with integrity, spirituality, and love, providing an amazing bounty ofresources for people. Ford and Nigh are activist scholars, creating school curriculum, working acrossnational boundaries on shared goals, and standing up to those who might steal from the forest forprofit. This model serves as a template for much of the world’s tropical rainforests. The milpa processabsorbs a huge amount of carbon, demonstrates how to purify and utilize clean water, how to abut thedamage of hurricanes, and how to thrive within ecological balance. This 8,000-year practice showsresilience through drought, climate change, and war with the potential to serve populations of millionsacross the planet. Finally in this age where megacities of 20 million people cause global warming, wasteof resources, and make social inequalities worse, this book offers a viable shift to economies andcultures that are self-sustaining and dispersed across landscapes.Matt Oppenheim, PhDFellow Emeritus: The Society for Applied Anthropology
4.0 out of 5 stars Very scholarly. Well documented conclusions
Tough reading, many scholarly references were in-line, should have been footnoted.
5.0 out of 5 stars Good book
Good book
5.0 out of 5 stars A hidden-in-plain-sight way through our present crises
This book tells the tale of a civilization that weathered many climate changes, foreign conquests and failed attempts at cultural genocide. That civilization is still there today, after 8,000 years. There are more children born and raised in families today whose first language is a Mayan dialect than during the Classic period 1400 years ago.When the first two-leggeds arrived in Mesoamerica over 10,000 years ago, the region was cool and arid – akin to the Great Plains of central Canada. Over the next 2,000 years, as the Hemisphere continued to emerge from the great Ice Age, Mesoamerica became a warm and wet tropical region, reaching an early heating peak during the Holocene Thermal Maximum before settling back to the wet tropics we find there today.Land use changed over time based on social constraints. In ancient times, smallholders who produced a variety of goods and services from the forest were at times compelled to increase production to pay taxes and to feed the elites and their armies. This process continues today. Greater demands for exports from the forest require denser populations, because working hilly terrain without machines or animals requires hands and feet. Today it may imply imported labor, a form of economic slavery not much different than in the Classic Maya era. To the extent that human labor for cultivation and transportation has been replaced with fossil energy, the requirements for human slaves have diminished.One barrel of oil has 5.7 million BTUs of energy, or 1700 kWh. An average adult can, in hard labor, generate 0.6 kWh/day. That's 11 years of human labor packed into each barrel of oil. Put another way, fifty dollars currently buys you eleven petroleum slaves working year-round at hard labor. What would those slaves cost if they were human? Ten thousand dollars? Half a million dollars? It depends on where you get them and what tasks they perform for you.Thanks to petroslavery, we have higher wages, higher profits, really cheap products and more people doing little to nothing. The average USAnian uses 60 barrels per year (or equivalent coal, gasoline and fracked gas) or roughly 660 fossil slaves standing at the beck and call of each and every citizen. Those numbers are quite a bit less in the Mayan world today, but nonetheless significant, and growing. Farmers don't have to carry corn and mangos to the city on their backs, although no one has yet found a way to machine-harvest cacao or spray-pollinate vanilla vines.Nonetheless, extraction costs for fossil fuels are rising -- 17% per year for the past 10 years. That drives up energy costs and as that price goes up, its like having to pay your slaves. Profits decline, and some slaves get laid off.As we lose our energy slaves, will we go back to sending our army to snatch human slaves from weaker or less militaristic neighbors? The Classic Maya were something like that. With cheap slave energy gained by conquest they paved roads and built pyramids. Many historians assume they overran their resources or had a slave revolt, but Ford and Nigh have eliminated ecocide, because food resources never diminished. Slavery has its limits and the Maya's slaves may have reached theirs.Misleading assumptions about Mayan ecological demise, and climate over 10,000 years, came from paleoclimatic reconstructions based on lake sediments and pollen counts. Ford and Nigh point out that the pollen data emphasize windborne pollen, and yet, in the tropics, all but about 2 percent of plants are pollinated by bees, birds, bats and butterflies.Ford and Nigh picked up clues from ramon trees and grassland forbs, which were better indicators of the milpa cycle. While climate perturbations, sometimes severe, occurred repeatedly, the heaviest climate changes came in the Early Holocene, before the appearance of the Maya. The milpa system evolved in that era, as proof of concept for climate-resilient agriculture. They conclude that the Classic Era, while it was not without impact -- evidenced by high phosphorus lake sediment loading and diminishing soil quality -- did not end from an environmental collapse. And yet, 1100 years ago, the Empire broke down and retreated back into the jungle. Civic centers gradually depopulated and rural farms resumed their ubiquity. Soil quality began to improve and runoff to decrease. The Maya did not disappear, they dispersed.Ford and Nigh disagree with popular myths told by historians of rapacious city-states that denuded their landscape to bake lime for painting temples and then starved. According to their meticulous research, the Maya forest garden was not just an indelible feature that withstood the rise and fall of successive empires, but holds, in its ramblings and roots, a hidden-in-plain-sight way through our present crises.
Great
Very important close look at the milpa agroforestry system so important to the maya but supressed today, yet with a great potential to be one of the solutions to the ever increasing problems of industrial farming.
Visit the Routledge Store
The Maya Forest Garden (New Frontiers in Historical Ecology) (Volume 6)
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Visit the Routledge Store
The Maya Forest Garden (New Frontiers in Historical Ecology) (Volume 6)
AED31491
Quantity:
Order today to get by
Free delivery on orders over AED 200
Imported From: United States
At bolo.ae, we stand behind the authenticity and quality of every product we sell. We guarantee that all items offered on our website are 100% genuine, sourced directly from authorized distributors, trusted partners, or the original brands themselves.
We do not sell counterfeit, replica, or unauthorized goods. Each product undergoes thorough inspection and verification at our consolidation and fulfilment centers to ensure it meets our strict authenticity and quality standards before being shipped and delivered to you.
If you ever have concerns regarding the authenticity of a product purchased from us, please contact Bolo Support . We will review your inquiry promptly and, if necessary, provide documentation verifying authenticity or offer a suitable resolution.
Your trust is our top priority, and we are committed to maintaining transparency and integrity in every transaction.
All product information, including images, descriptions, and reviews, is provided by third-party vendors. bolo.ae is not responsible for any claims, promotions, or representations made within product content or images. For more accurate or detailed product information, please contact the manufacturer directly or reach out to Bolo Support.
Unless otherwise stated during checkout, all prices displayed on the product page include applicable taxes and import duties.
bolo.ae operates in accordance with the laws and regulations of United Arab Emirates. Any items found to be restricted or prohibited for sale within the UAE will be cancelled prior to shipment. We take proactive measures to ensure that only products permitted for sale in United Arab Emirates are listed on our website.
All items are shipped by air, and any products classified as “Dangerous Goods (DG)” under IATA regulations will be removed from the order and cancelled.
All orders are processed manually, and we make every effort to process them promptly once confirmed. Products cancelled due to the above reasons will be permanently removed from listings across the website.
Description:
Editorial Reviews
Review
"The Maya Forest Garden is an excellent addition to the New Frontiers in Historical Ecology series. Ford and Nigh’s book presents readers a thorough, accessible, and holistic anthropological introduction to the nature of Maya agricultural practices, a review of past and present ecological and conservation conditions, and a convincing theory for adopting an interdisciplinary approach to studying this unique relationship between a people and its environment. This work should be of interest to Maya scholars; students in the fields of cultural ecology, sustainability, and archaeology; and others interested in the dynamics of sustainable ecological practices of complex societies."
- Jeffrey L. Brewer, University of Cincinnati, USA, in American Anthropologist
"Ford and Nigh bring decades of field research to this book and draw on ethnography, agroecology, ethno- and paleobotany, archaeology, historical climate data, and ethnohistory. Even today, Maya forest gardeners cultivate sustainably but are threatened by Euro-informed models of agriculture that view tropical lowlands as suitable mainly for destructive pasturing. Scholars interested in tropical swiddeners and Mesoamericans in particular should read this discussion. Summing Up: Highly recommended."
- A. E. Adams, Central Connecticut State University, CHOICE
"The book is a timely multidisciplinary exploration of not only the rich historical ecology of the Maya forest garden, but also of Maya culture, history and knowledge – and the risk of loosing all of it. The value of explorations like the one offered by this study need to be ― for the future of any form of sustainable humanity and in my modest opinion ― continued."
- Alessandro Questa, Anthropology Book Forun (American Anthropological Association)
"An excellent contribution to the world literature on sustainable, indigenous land management. After rigorous paleo-botanical, archaeological and ecological research and on the ground consultation with existing practitioners, the authors conclude that the widely assumed cause of the collapse of the Mayan civilization due to deforestation and environmental degradation is not true... I’d recommend Ford and Nigh’s book to anyone interested in permaculture and forest gardens."
- Michael Pilarski, Friends Of The Trees Society
"A groundbreaking new book co-authored by a UC Santa Barbara researcher... asserts the Maya not only survived their presumed apocalypse, they thrive today using farming techniques that are thousands of years old. The Maya Forest Garden: Eight Millennia of Sustainable Cultivation of the Tropical Woodlands by UCSB’s Anabel Ford and Ronald Nigh demonstrates that the Maya milpa system is sustainable, sophisticated and highly productive."
- Jim Logan, The UCSB Current
"Ford’s book, The Maya Forest Garden: Eight Millennia of Sustainable Cultivation of the Tropical Woodlands, co-authored with Ronald Nigh, a professor at the Centro Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social in Chiapas, Mexico, published in June, is the result of 44 years of excavation and research into El Pilar’s domestic architecture, gardens and traditional forest crops."
- Joan Koerper, Inlandia Literary Journeys
"We have been reading The Maya Forest Garden by Anabel Ford and Ronald Nigh. It tells the tale of a civilization that weathered many climate changes, foreign conquests and failed attempts at cultural genocide. That civilization is still there today, after 8,000 years."
- Albert Bates, Resilience
"For years, archaeologist Anabel Ford has been arguing the case that the ancient Maya knew well how to manage their tropical forest environment to their advantage, eventually sustaining large populations even beyond the time when many archaeologists suggest the Maya declined and abandoned their iconic Classic period pyramidal and temple constructions and monumental inscriptions during the 8th and 9th centuries CE. She challenges the popular theories long held by many scholars that the Maya declined because of overpopulation and deforestation from increased agricultural production, perhaps aggravated by draught and climate change."
- Popular Archaeology
"In 2001, I traveled to the Belize-Guatemala border to report on UCSB archaeologist Anabel Ford’s many discoveries at El Pilar, the Maya monument complex she uncovered in 1983. That’s where she developed revolutionary theories that threatened to rock the academic world, namely that the Maya did not “disappear” due to an overpopulation cataclysm, but merely dwindled with time."
- Matt Kettmann, Santa Barbara Independent
"The book makes use of a wide range of data sources, including texts, ethnographic and archaeological research, pollen cores and a variety of climate proxies. The first two chapters after the introduction provide a useful summary of the archaeology, history and historical ecology of the Maya region. These sections are clearly written and well illustrated, and will mean that the book is accessible to those not familiar with recent research in Mesoamerica."
- Antiquity 92 361 (2018): 267–274
"the book fulfills a longstanding need to reevaluate the ecological relationship of the Maya people and the forest which they have managed and maintained over millennia. The book will be of interest to archaeologists and anthropologists, as well as conservation biologists, paleoclimatologists, and those concerned with development strategies in the tropics."
- Scott L. Fedick, University of California, Riverside, USA, in Latin American Antiquity
About the Author
Anabel Ford is director of the MesoAmerican Research Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and President of the nonprofit organization Exploring Solutions Past: The Maya Forest Alliance. She has done extensive research on patterns of Maya settlement and landscape ecology, and is recognized for the archaeological discovery of the ancient Maya city center of El Pilar, on the border of Belize and Guatemala.,
Ronald Nigh is a professor at Centro Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS) in Chiapas, Mexico. He is the author of numerous studies and articles on agricultural, ecological, and environmental issues of concern to indigenous peoples in Mesoamerica. He is also director of Dana, a non-government organization that coordinates an experimental garden in San Cristobal de Las Casas for training and support of young Maya farmers involved in agroecological transition.
Review:
5.0 out of 5 stars An evidenced deconstruction of the narrative of western hegemony in terms of ecological imperialism
Anabel Ford and Ronald Nigh’s The Maya Forest Garden discusses the integrative and holistic agro-ecosystem ingeniously developed by the Maya over thousands of years. This agro-ecosystem featured the Milpa system of rotational agriculture, maize-centered polyculture, and protected reforested woodlands, orchards, and house gardens. With the arrival of the Spanish to the region, came an immediate disregard of the agricultural innovation by the Maya, tossing it aside due to the lens of Eurocentrism. As the Spanish were the oppressors and thus the writers of the historical narrative, the named ‘slash-and-burn’ agriculture of the agro-ecosystem was propagated as inefficient, unproductive, and unusable. In discrediting the Maya’s agricultural methods, such writers of history effectively discredited their wealth and thus the standing of their civilization as a whole. The Maya Forest Garden thus examines both the traditional agro-ecosystem of the Maya as well as the contemporary system of agricultural techniques. In accordance with the evidence gathered, Ford and Nigh repudiate claims of the incompetence of the Maya agricultural practices, utilizing extensive primary evidence extrapolated from statistics gathered from archaeological records of the changing climate.In the evidence gathered, The Maya Forest Garden argues that the ancient agricultural techniques of the Maya were in fact not only efficient, usable, and sustainable, but also able to provide for the extensive populations calculated to inhabit the region for extensive periods of time. Ford and Nigh thus analyze the ecological imperialism that undergirded the immediate disapproval of the Maya’s agricultural methods, that ultimately discredited the intellectual prowess of the Maya as a whole, and in so doing confront the well-propagated, ill-founded notion that the cause of the Maya collapse could be attributed to the ‘primitive’ methods of the Maya civilizations.As much of the argument against colonialism in ideology and practice are philosophically founded, The Maya Forest Garden offers a science-based argument confronting the ecological manifestation of Eurocentrism, ecological imperialism. Ecological imperialism demonstrates one manifestation of the Eurocentric conception of general superiority. Though the European agricultural methods were not ideal for the ecology of Central America, it was not conceivable to the closed European mind that a different people might have developed their own systems with intelligent, logical basis. This thus provides an excellent debut of the limited, closed, and corrupted mind of the Eurocentrist, as well as repudiates the entire grounding of the ecological imperialist view of the Maya’s civilization.
5.0 out of 5 stars A way forward in the face of climate collapse
Anabel Ford’s and Ronald Nigh’s “The Maya Forest Garden: Eight Millenia of Sustainable Cultivation ofthe Tropical Woodlands,” offers a well-researched, well written answer of how to reverse climatechange in times of predicted collapse. The answer shifts our understanding of Maya Civilization from afocus on huge temple complexes, wars, and large agricultural fields to the intimate work of the MayaForest Gardeners, who work with the rainforest in small plots, termed “milpas.” In this family-basedmodel, the forest is tended with integrity, spirituality, and love, providing an amazing bounty ofresources for people. Ford and Nigh are activist scholars, creating school curriculum, working acrossnational boundaries on shared goals, and standing up to those who might steal from the forest forprofit. This model serves as a template for much of the world’s tropical rainforests. The milpa processabsorbs a huge amount of carbon, demonstrates how to purify and utilize clean water, how to abut thedamage of hurricanes, and how to thrive within ecological balance. This 8,000-year practice showsresilience through drought, climate change, and war with the potential to serve populations of millionsacross the planet. Finally in this age where megacities of 20 million people cause global warming, wasteof resources, and make social inequalities worse, this book offers a viable shift to economies andcultures that are self-sustaining and dispersed across landscapes.Matt Oppenheim, PhDFellow Emeritus: The Society for Applied Anthropology
4.0 out of 5 stars Very scholarly. Well documented conclusions
Tough reading, many scholarly references were in-line, should have been footnoted.
5.0 out of 5 stars Good book
Good book
5.0 out of 5 stars A hidden-in-plain-sight way through our present crises
This book tells the tale of a civilization that weathered many climate changes, foreign conquests and failed attempts at cultural genocide. That civilization is still there today, after 8,000 years. There are more children born and raised in families today whose first language is a Mayan dialect than during the Classic period 1400 years ago.When the first two-leggeds arrived in Mesoamerica over 10,000 years ago, the region was cool and arid – akin to the Great Plains of central Canada. Over the next 2,000 years, as the Hemisphere continued to emerge from the great Ice Age, Mesoamerica became a warm and wet tropical region, reaching an early heating peak during the Holocene Thermal Maximum before settling back to the wet tropics we find there today.Land use changed over time based on social constraints. In ancient times, smallholders who produced a variety of goods and services from the forest were at times compelled to increase production to pay taxes and to feed the elites and their armies. This process continues today. Greater demands for exports from the forest require denser populations, because working hilly terrain without machines or animals requires hands and feet. Today it may imply imported labor, a form of economic slavery not much different than in the Classic Maya era. To the extent that human labor for cultivation and transportation has been replaced with fossil energy, the requirements for human slaves have diminished.One barrel of oil has 5.7 million BTUs of energy, or 1700 kWh. An average adult can, in hard labor, generate 0.6 kWh/day. That's 11 years of human labor packed into each barrel of oil. Put another way, fifty dollars currently buys you eleven petroleum slaves working year-round at hard labor. What would those slaves cost if they were human? Ten thousand dollars? Half a million dollars? It depends on where you get them and what tasks they perform for you.Thanks to petroslavery, we have higher wages, higher profits, really cheap products and more people doing little to nothing. The average USAnian uses 60 barrels per year (or equivalent coal, gasoline and fracked gas) or roughly 660 fossil slaves standing at the beck and call of each and every citizen. Those numbers are quite a bit less in the Mayan world today, but nonetheless significant, and growing. Farmers don't have to carry corn and mangos to the city on their backs, although no one has yet found a way to machine-harvest cacao or spray-pollinate vanilla vines.Nonetheless, extraction costs for fossil fuels are rising -- 17% per year for the past 10 years. That drives up energy costs and as that price goes up, its like having to pay your slaves. Profits decline, and some slaves get laid off.As we lose our energy slaves, will we go back to sending our army to snatch human slaves from weaker or less militaristic neighbors? The Classic Maya were something like that. With cheap slave energy gained by conquest they paved roads and built pyramids. Many historians assume they overran their resources or had a slave revolt, but Ford and Nigh have eliminated ecocide, because food resources never diminished. Slavery has its limits and the Maya's slaves may have reached theirs.Misleading assumptions about Mayan ecological demise, and climate over 10,000 years, came from paleoclimatic reconstructions based on lake sediments and pollen counts. Ford and Nigh point out that the pollen data emphasize windborne pollen, and yet, in the tropics, all but about 2 percent of plants are pollinated by bees, birds, bats and butterflies.Ford and Nigh picked up clues from ramon trees and grassland forbs, which were better indicators of the milpa cycle. While climate perturbations, sometimes severe, occurred repeatedly, the heaviest climate changes came in the Early Holocene, before the appearance of the Maya. The milpa system evolved in that era, as proof of concept for climate-resilient agriculture. They conclude that the Classic Era, while it was not without impact -- evidenced by high phosphorus lake sediment loading and diminishing soil quality -- did not end from an environmental collapse. And yet, 1100 years ago, the Empire broke down and retreated back into the jungle. Civic centers gradually depopulated and rural farms resumed their ubiquity. Soil quality began to improve and runoff to decrease. The Maya did not disappear, they dispersed.Ford and Nigh disagree with popular myths told by historians of rapacious city-states that denuded their landscape to bake lime for painting temples and then starved. According to their meticulous research, the Maya forest garden was not just an indelible feature that withstood the rise and fall of successive empires, but holds, in its ramblings and roots, a hidden-in-plain-sight way through our present crises.
Great
Very important close look at the milpa agroforestry system so important to the maya but supressed today, yet with a great potential to be one of the solutions to the ever increasing problems of industrial farming.
Similar suggestions by Bolo
More from this brand
Similar items from “Indigenous Peoples”
Share with
Or share with link
https://www.bolo.ae/products/U1611329981