No Place for the Mega Metropolis: The Kleptogarchy part 25

No Place for the Mega Metropolis

The future world, as I see it, will be a rural world with small cities. It will not be possible to provision large cities. We will see more former industrial centres like Detroit reclaimed by small-scale farming, with nature flourishing as in the Mayan jungle cities in Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico. Drought probably ended the power of the large and complex Mayan cities. As Jared Diamond wrote in Collapse,[1] “the Maya warn us that crashes can also befall the most advanced and creative societies”.

The Mayans outgrew their environment, not all at once but with more and more frequent emergencies which eventually coalesced. Expanding populations cut down forests, exposing soils which were eroded away. Deforestation and drought are intimately linked, as Joseph Stromberg explained in 2012: “Because cleared land absorbs less solar radiation, less water evaporates from its surface, making clouds and rainfall more scarce.”[2]  Applying this conclusion to the Amazon basin, the world’s fastest depleting carbon sink, suggests that President Jair Bolsonaro’s drive to deforest Brazil, and replace trees with cattle and arable crops, is doomed to failure because less rain is likely, and when it does rain, soil will leach into the rivers. On depleting soils, crop yields will fall unless they are smothered in agrochemicals, which in turn will pollute the rivers and adjacent habitats. Lose, lose, rather than win, win.

The Mayan city of Tikal, now in northern Guatemala, was deserted in a time of drought, and wasreclaimed by jungle. Author’s photo.

Jared Diamond studied the Mayan city of Copán, in present day Honduras, and describes how the city’s “population was increasing steeply while the hills were being occupied. The subsequent abandonment of all those fields in the hills meant that the burden of feeding the extra population formerly dependent on the hills now fell increasingly on the valley floor, and that more and more people were competing for the food grown on those 10 square miles of valley bottomland. That would have led to fighting among the farmers themselves for the best land, or for any land…” As the civilisation’s resources waned, inhabitants’ health suffered, a process evident from skeletons recovered from the city and dated between 650 and 850 AD.  By 1250 AD the city was being reclaimed by forest: the people had gone.

Competition for resources led, and leads, to conflict. During fierce conflicts, soldiering replaces everyday civilian occupations including farming, but soldiers must eat, even if it means consuming seed crops. In a decline, problems escalate and the means of resolving them diminish. That has been so through recorded history, and is where we find ourselves now, this time on a global scale.

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[1] Collapse was published in the USA by Viking Penguin and in the UK by Allen Lane in 2005 by Penguin in 2006. The collapse of Mayan civilisation is on pages 157-177 of the Penguin edition.

[2] Joseph Stromberg, writing for smithsonianmag.com on August 23^rd 2012, ‘Why Did the Mayan Civilization Collapse? A New Study Points to Deforestation and Climate Change’, was summarising a study by researchers at Columbia University, published in Geophysical Research on August 25^th 2012 and titled ‘Pre-Columbian Deforestation as an Amplifier of Drought in Mesoamerica’. The authors were B I Cook, K J Anchukaitis, J O Kaplan, M J Puma, M Kelley and D Gueyffier. (This was after the study’s mention in the Smithsonian Magazine, which maybe had an advance copy.)

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