Slash and burn tactics by illegal loggers, cattle ranchers and drug traffickers in Guatemala are repeating the mistakes of their ancestors and destroying enough trees to fill an area the size of Dallas each year.
One theory for the relatively sudden Mayan collapse 1,200 years ago is that clear-cutting of trees led to widespread erosion and evaporation. Studies of settlement remains show the deforestation coincided with a dramatic drop in the Mayan population around 950 AD.
Read (MSNBC)