Vanished civilizations are fascinating. The fish folk of Atlantis. The volcano victims of Pompeii. The cliff dwellers at Mesa Verde. The last Broncos team that was any good.
All are mysteries, and delightful to contemplate because of it. Unless, of course, you happen to belong to a civilization that might vanish, in which case you'd want to run for the hills.
That’s just what I did last month, when I packed my car for the long drive from Fort Collins to Mesa Verde National Park. There was an eclipse happening, and the path of totality was going bang over southwest Colorado. I'm a big fan of astral shenanigans, so I booked a campsite. What fun!
But also, what a long drive! To while away the hours, I chose a talkative companion: the audiobook of Elizabeth Kolbert’s Under a White Sky—which turned out to be the perfect way to ruin a beautiful drive.
For years I had been dodging Kolbert’s gloomy articles in The New Yorker. She won a Pulitzer Prize for documenting the havoc we’ve wrought on our precious planet as we dig up carbon sources and burn them to run our cars and air conditioners. How ironic: that which keeps us cool also heats our planet, causing even more people to want air conditioners. It’s as if those Pompeiians had said, "Maybe we should heat our homes with lava?"
As I drove, and drove, and drove, along Colorado's scenic byways, Kolbert whispered a warning in my ear: “Atmospheric warming, ocean warming, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, deglaciation, desertification, eutrophication—these are just some of the by-products of our species' success.
She describes this as “the pace of what is blandly labeled ‘global change.’” There are only a handful of comparable examples in earth’s history. She says the most recent is an asteroid impact that ended the reign of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.
If that's how Kolbert defines success, sign me up for failure—and quick.
Her words hit home when I pulled into the Sinclair gas station in Fairplay, in the middle of South Park. A green plastic dinosaur—the brand’s reptile mascot—greeted me as I pulled in, which was terrifyingly appropriate: The probable means of our extinction, represented by an extinct creature. Now there’s some truth in advertising.
This brings me to the destination of my drive: Mesa Verde and the now-uninhabited cliff dwellings of Ancient Puebloan people, who were, until a hundred years ago, living here on tribal lands.
One of their descendants, a modern-day Puebloan, was my guide at Cliff House. He pointed out that the National Park Service had swooped in and claimed his people’s ancestral home to "preserve" it. How would you feel if they preserved your grandma’s house by tossing her out onto the street?
Still, it’s hard to argue with the Park Service’s intent here, however problematic: these cliff dwellings are indeed precious, even if they are haunted—and haunting.
As I clambered over Cliff House’s foot-worn rocks and poked my head into bedroom windows, I felt the ghosts of the people who built, and then abandoned, these chambers a thousand years ago. Their smoky fires stained these ceilings, and a single hand print remains high up on one wall.
Clearly, this was a civilization to admire. I asked our guide what drove them off. His answer was haunting as well: “There was a 60-year drought around the time they left,” he said. “They were wandering people, and this may have given them a reason to move on.”
So, a shift in the climate made fantastically clever people abandon their stunning homes? And now, nothing but the fire stains remain? Where have I heard that one before?
My Puebloan guide was quick to point out that these people aren’t actually gone. After all, he himself is a modern Puebloan who still visits these sacred sites for rituals and observances. So maybe there is still hope, after all? Maybe civilizations don’t just end. Maybe they migrate and transform themselves.
We don’t want future generations to tour our ruins, and wonder why we let it happen. We want to have them over for dinner, and tell them how we saved it all.
