Jared Diamond professzor (UCLA) tanulmánya összehasonlítja a maja kultúra felemelkedését és összeomlását az Usákiáéval.
Költői kérdés: miért nem látták a maják, hogy vesztükbe rohannak? Vagy látták és nem tettek semmit?
Usákia előnye a majákkal szemben, hogy látott már civilizációkat összeomlani, és talán okulhat belőlük.

Jared Diamond/Harpers: The Last Americans

The final strand is political. Why did the kings and nobles not recognize
and solve these problems? A major reason was that their attention was
evidently focused on the short-term concerns of enriching themselves,
waging wars, erecting monuments, competing with one another, and
extracting enough food from the peasants to support all those activities.
Like most leaders throughout human history, the Maya kings and nobles did
not have the leisure to focus on long-term problems, insofar as they
perceived them.

What about those same strands today? The United States is also at the peak
of its power, and it is also suffering from many environmental problems.
Most of us have become aware of more crowding and stress. Most of us
living in large American cities are encountering increased commuting
delays, because the number of people and hence of cars is increasing
faster than the number of freeway lanes. I know plenty of people who in
the abstract doubt that the world has a population problem, but almost all
of those same people complain to me about crowding, space issues, and
traffic experienced in their personal lives.

...

If all of this reasoning seems straightforward when expressed so bluntly,
one has to wonder: Why don't those in power today get the message? Why
didn't the leaders of the Maya, Anasazi, and those other societies also
recognize and solve their problems? What were the Maya thinking while they
watched loggers clearing the last pine forests on the hills above Copán ?
Here, the past really is a useful guide to the present. It turns out that
there are at least a dozen reasons why past societies failed to anticipate
some problems before they developed, or failed to perceive problems that
had already developed, or failed even to try to solve problems that they
did perceive. All of those dozen reasons still can be seen operating
today. Let me mention just three of them.

First, it's difficult to recognize a slow trend in some quantity that
fluctuates widely up and down anyway, such as seasonal temperature, annual
rainfall, or economic indicators. That's surely why the Maya didn't
recognize the oncoming drought until it was too late, given that rainfall
in the Yucatán varies several-fold from year to year. Natural fluctuations
also explain why it's only within the last few years that all
climatologists have become convinced of the reality of climate change, and
why our president still isn't convinced but thinks that we need more
research to test for it.

Second, when a problem is recognized, those in power may not attempt to
solve it because of a clash between their short-term interests and the
interests of the rest of us. Pumping that oil, cutting down those trees,
and catching those fish may benefit the elite by bringing them money or
prestige and yet be bad for society as a whole (including the children of
the elite) in the long run. Maya kings were consumed by immediate concerns
for their prestige (requiring more and bigger temples) and their success
in the next war (requiring more followers), rather than for the happiness
of commoners or of the next generation. Those people with the greatest
power to make decisions in our own society today regularly make money from
activities that may be bad for society as a whole and for their own
children; those decision-makers include Enron executives, many land
developers, and advocates of tax cuts for the rich.

Finally, it's difficult for us to acknowledge the wisdom of policies that
clash with strongly held values. For example, a belief in individual
freedom and a distrust of big government are deeply ingrained in
Americans, and they make sense under some circumstances and up to a
certain point. But they also make it hard for us to accept big
government's legitimate role in ensuring that each individual's freedom to
maximize the value of his or her land holdings doesn't decrease the value
of the collective land of all Americans.

Not all societies make fatal mistakes. There are parts of the world where
societies have unfolded for thousands of years without any collapse, such
as Java, Tonga, and (until 1945) Japan. Today, Germany and Japan are
successfully managing their forests, which are even expanding in area
rather than shrinking. The Alaskan salmon fishery and the Australian
lobster fishery are being managed sustainably. The Dominican Republic,
hardly a rich country, nevertheless has set aside a comprehensive system
of protected areas encompassing most of the country's natural habitats.

Is there any secret to explain why some societies acquire good
environmental sense while others don't? Naturally, part of the answer
depends on accidents of individual leaders' wisdom (or lack thereof). But
part also depends upon whether a society is organized so as to minimize
built-in clashes of interest between its decision-making elites and its
masses. Given how our society is organized, the executives of Enron, Tyco,
and Adelphi correctly calculated that their own interests would be best
promoted by looting the company coffers, and that they would probably get
away with most of their loot. A good example of a society that minimizes
such clashes of interest is the Netherlands, whose citizens have perhaps
the world's highest level of environmental awareness and of membership in
environmental organizations. I never understood why, until on a recent
trip to the Netherlands I posed the question to three of my Dutch friends
while driving through their countryside.

Just look around you, they said. All of this farmland that you see lies
below sea level. One fifth of the total area of the Netherlands is below
sea level, as much as 22 feet below, because it used to be shallow bays,
and we reclaimed it from the sea by surrounding the bays with dikes and
then gradually pumping out the water. We call these reclaimed lands
"polders." We began draining our polders nearly a thousand years ago.
Today, we still have to keep pumping out the water that gradually seeps
in. That's what our windmills used to be for, to drive the pumps to pump
out the polders. Now we use steam, diesel, and electric pumps instead. In
each polder there are lines of them, starting with those farthest from the
sea, pumping the water in sequence until the last pump finally deposits it
into a river or the ocean. And all of us, rich or poor, live down in the
polders. It's not the case that rich people live safely up on top of the
dikes while poor people live in the polder bottoms below sea level. If the
dikes and pumps fail, we'll all drown together.

Throughout human history, all peoples have been connected to some other
peoples, living together in virtual polders. For the ancient Maya, their
polder consisted of most of the Yucatán and neighboring areas. When the
Classic Maya cities collapsed in the southern Yucatán, refugees may have
reached the northern Yucatán, but probably not the Valley of Mexico, and
certainly not Florida. Today, our whole world has become one polder, such
that events in even Afghanistan and Somalia affect Americans. We do indeed
differ from the Maya, but not in ways we might like: we have a much larger
population, we have more potent destructive technology, and we face the
risk of a worldwide rather than a local decline. Fortunately, we also
differ from the Maya in that we know their fate, and they did not. Perhaps
we can learn.