ABSTRACT
In 1592, a group of Spanish friars led by Bishop Diego de Landa gathered every sacred book that remained in Yucatan from the Classic and Postclassic Mayan civilization — a civilization that had flourished in Mexico and Central America for a thousand years. Pacific plains were cleared long ago for export crops and subsistence agriculture, deforestation has been most severe in the lowland tropical moist forests of the Atlantic, or Caribbean, side of Central America. Land cleared from tropical forests will produce reasonable beef yields for an average of 7 to 10 years before erosion, weeds, and loss of fertility prompt the cattlemen to search for new pastures. In some places, cattlemen simply abandon the worn-out pastures and move elsewhere, much as geographer Susanna Hecht found that up to 80% of pasturelands cleared from tropical forest have been abandoned in some regions of the Brazilian Amazon.
