By Grandmother Birch
Aug 21, 2026
Reproduced on NSFM with permission
and our thanks.
There is a story I have heard throughout my life. I’m pretty certain you’ve heard it too. It’s the story of ancient civilizations and how they tended to collapse. But, just in case you somehow missed hearing this story, it goes something like this: when ancient civilizations inevitably became too big – their leaders bloated with their own grand machinations and hubris – these civilizations became wildly “unsustainable” and then proceeded to fall apart. And the people of those doomed civilizations then vanished (sometimes quite quickly) into the phantom mystery. All that remained was broken abandonment. Scattered stones of impossible-to-fathom building blocks. Palatial steps going nowhere. Shards of pottery and middens of shells and bones.
This is the story of the Mayan civilization I first heard in elementary school. The story never failed to spark a fearful curiosity in my young mind. How could a whole population of ‘civilized’ humans eat themselves out of existence and then disappear into the merciless howling jungle? Whatever happened to them all? Could such a thing happen to me and those I loved?
These days, the story seems like a cautionary tale. Particularly plausible given the amassing global injustices and political corruption, and Earth’s life-systems lurching towards self-immolation. It’s hard not to gasp while imagining a fate not that dissimilar to the story of the Mayan people. A faith destroying, soul crushing narrative, to say the least.
Except dear reader, the story is not true!
The Mayan people did not collapse and vanish. What collapsed was a civilization of exacting kings, gilded treasures, and pyramids. Those who walked away were the people who carried seeds in their pockets, and the blueprint – a living document kept alive through song and story – on how to plant them.
The blueprint was the Mesoamerican Milpa, an agroforestry system now many millennia old. While a milpa cultivation is always a small parcel of land, maybe one or two acres, a single field may grow more than forty botanicals – providing food, medicine, fibre, and building materials for humans, livestock and wildlife. Field crops, pasture, and mature forest are precisely rotated (most often using fire) so that the land is in continuous succession and constant regeneration. The milpa is a co-inspired, cultural phenomenon of human and more-than-human beings. It is a curated mutuality.
The milpa of present-day Mesoamerica is the story of continuity and belonging. A story of making and remaking home. In this, our own current moment of mass global “unhoming” – where the displacement and alienation of millions of people and manufactured scarcity and divisiveness of fear fill our news-feeds and nightmares – it seems to me that the moral of civilizational collapse is not about what vanishes, but rather what we can choose to carry forward.
Most of us can carry a seed. And if we dig far enough into ourselves we may find we hold a fragment of the blueprint to rebuild home. We need this now.
References
– Maya Forest Gardeners
(https://mayaforestgardeners.org/resources/outside-resources/)
– Milpa, a Long-Standing Polyculture for Sustainable Agriculture
(https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0472/15/16/1737)
– The ancient roots and vital future of food forests
(https://absentofi.org/2025/01/ancient-food-forests/)
– “The farmers restoring Hawaii’s ancient food forests that once fed an island”
(https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/17/hawaii-traditional-farming-methods-ancient-food-forests)
– Nation of Strangers : Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century
Ece Temelkuran, Book published April 19, 2026 by Scribner Canada. Interview with Ece Temelkuran about the book available on YouTube Keen on Channel