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2012 and all that
Filed under GeneralNov 11Not wanting to fuel the flames of an already existing viral marketing fire, tomorrow marks the release of the film 2012. It’s by the makers of Independence Day and The Day after Tomorrow, so as you can imagine this is no low budget, indie flick promoting low carbon living in the near future.
Instead 2012 follows the supposed Mayan Prophecy that the world will end in 2012.
Rain Water Fed pool
Last January, I visited the Yucatan in Mexico home of the Maya. I even stayed in a Mayan village just outside a newly discovered temple ruin at Ek Balam. I stayed on a fantastic eco-resort run by a very forward thinking Canadian woman. Amongst other things, she had built her entire complex from compressed plastic bottles, she had a swimming pool fed by rainwater and employed people from the local area.
Attracting tourists from all over the globe she helped generate a valuable source of income for the locals in the near and surrounding areas.
During my time there I spoke to a number of Mayans and the subject of 2012 came up a couple of times, mainly from other tourists. The Mayans generally agreed that 2012 would be a good time for them financially, as a number of tourists have already booked to stay in the resorts and hotels, but none of them thought it would mark the end of the world.
This is echoed in the wider Mayan society as this quote from Wikipedia suggests. “Mayan elder Apolinario Chile Pixtun and Mexican archaeologist Guillermo Bernal both note that “apocalypse” is a Western concept that has little or nothing to do with Mayan beliefs.”
So, in short the world won’t end in 2012, no more than it should have ended in 2000 or on 6/6/66 or even today for that matter. To me the Maya are just another in a long line of ‘Mysterious’ peoples who’s culture is being misrepresented in the media and by the public at large.
What really annoys me is that we can learn important lessons from the Maya, their culture is a sustainable one. However, as far as I could see, slowly but surely Western influence is destroying their way of life.
Before they became ‘civilized’ the Maya had one of the healthiest diets in the world. They lived on a largely vegetarian diet of chiefly maize, squash and beans along with seasonal fruit and various other vegetables including the hugely nutritious leaf crop called chaya. They sometimes ate wild meat or fish or domesticated meat such as turkey. Some of practices still go on to this day, gardens are full of home-grown produce and weird looking native turkeys can still be seen wandering through their villages.
Now with Western influence the local village shop sold heavily salted and fried snacks like Doritos, ironically mimicking traditional Mexican method of using up stale tortillas. In addition to this they sold bottles and cans of fizzy drinks, white wheat style bread (with added sugar) and all manner of sweets and junk food.
The nearest recycling point was 90 miles away in Cancun so not only did these products damage the health of the next Mayan generation, as the traditional method of disposing of litter is to burn it, it also damages the environment they are to inherit.
All over Mexico huge piles of plastic bottles are mounting up, just out of town in Ek Balam one such pile is growing and growing without any sign of removal. The same problem was happening in a famous flamingo spotting town, on the other side of the peninsula, Celestun. Huge tourists busses, including ones from Thomas Cook, appear in town and tourist would be whisked off to boat trips to look at the flocks of Flamingos just off the coast.
What the tourists don't see
What the tours didn’t show were the piles of plastic trash washed up on the beach and the meat and fish waste from the restaurants dumped in the mangroves just behind the nesting sites of the flamingos. The smell in these mangroves was enough to make you sick, just mounts of waste from cafes and restaurants dumped away from the prying eyes of tourists.
So unless something is done, the swathes of tourists due to hit the Yucatan region in 2012 may leave a trail of destruction as large as hurricane Dean and Wilma.
On the other hand, responsible tourism could be a real boon to an area, which has recently struggled in the wake of the great Swine Flu paranoia outbreak.
For the Mayans 2012 could spell the end of their civilization but not in the way Hollywood has predicted. So, rather than by a cataclysmic chain of events, a slow erosion of their diet, their language and environment may destroy the Mayan culture.
