Bringing Mexico’s Pyramids to Virginia

During August, I fulfilled a fervent boyhood dream: to climb the ancient pyramids of Teotihuacan outside Mexico City.  Not only did I climb them, but I also flew over them in a hot-air balloon just at sunrise on one bright, crisp day.  It was an awe-inspiring vista, looking down on the Pyramid of the Sun and the Avenue of the Dead with the snow-covered Volcan Popocatépetl in the distance.

Established around 200 BCE and lasting until its fall sometime between the 7th and 8th centuries CE, this enormous archaeological site was designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1987.  Its origins, including its original name, are lost to us.

Yet during its peak in 500 CE, it was the center of a powerful culture covering over 11 square miles and housing as many as 200,000 people.  At that point, it was arguably one of the largest urban centers in the world, surpassing Paris and London in size and influence.

The unfortunate downfall of Teotihuacan has been correlated to lengthy droughts and famine associated with regional ecological decline.  In other words, its inhabitants overstretched available natural resources at a vulnerable period in local history in their unsustainable attempt to provide food, water, and other vital materials to their burgeoning population.

It’s a story of climatic deterioration exacerbated by human appetite that has repeated itself across the planet over the past few thousand years: Easter Islanders, the Anasazi, the Maya, Haitians, and other collapsed cultures among the numerous examples.

How might the long-dead people of Teotihuacan teach us something about our own relationship to the seemingly rich natural environment here in the Roanoke Valley in these early decades of the 21st century?

First, we need to understand that natural resources are finite.  They are not inexhaustible; we’ve made that mistake repeatedly when utilizing the ocean’s fisheries or when overusing the “commons” of publicly-owned wild spaces such as city parks and national forests.  And even so-called renewable natural resources require care in their continued maintenance.  Tree plantations, for example, still need to be pruned, spaced, and fertilized by arborists for sustainable harvesting.

Second, we need to recognize our own limitations.  Technology and current knowledge may not be enough to avert disaster so it’s important for us to honor the ancient processes and rich biodiversity of a planetary web of life billions of years old.  We are a part of, not apart from, those processes and biodiversity.

Third, we need to avoid the reactive “90-day thinking” manifested by some politicians and businesspeople and instead have the courage to practice proactive long-term thinking about our relationships with the Earth.  Quantifying ecological trends – trends such as increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide and acid precipitation in the atmosphere, for example – requires data-collection (and the incumbent funding) for a decade or more.

Fourth, we need to make painful decisions about our values.  The overall impact of 6.7 billion humans on the planet’s natural resources cannot be sustained at current levels, especially among modern First World citizens.  Many scientists and conservationists believe that we are already living with a nature deficit: that is, our ecological footprint exceeds our allotment of available productive land and water.  Thus, we may have to reappraise our values about family planning, individual rights, consumerism, religion, national sovereignty, military might, and all other aspects of functional society.

And, finally, we need to appreciate the interconnectedness of our global world.  Those bonds are not limited to humans, however.  To be sure, within moments of events in the Middle East or in Central America, I can see these events displayed through the internet, on the television, and in print media.  But human society everywhere is also connected intimately to its local, regional, and even global biodiversity: forests, soils, waterways, and all other living systems.

I highly recommend to my readers a 2005 book by Pulitzer prize-winning scientist Jared Diamond called “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.”  It’s an engaging book about environmental catastrophe throughout human history wherein members of various societies ignored all the mounting warning signs to their great peril.

My all-too-brief visit to Teotihuacan was a life-changing fulfillment of a boyhood dream.  It was also a haunting, near-visceral reminder that we can make – and have made – fatal choices about our uses of Earth’s natural resources.  Here in the Roanoke Valley we are blessed with clean air, water, and soil and with abundant wildlife and striking mountainous landscapes.  Should we push Earth’s systems toward a new climatic tipping point, however, we will then discover how vulnerable those natural resources are toward change.  Life will go on, but at what cost to our quality of life in that new paradigm?