For a documentary about the Lacandons  I planned in 2006 I wrote the following description:
Normally, cultures peak and decay during the course of centuries. The Lacandon Indians in the Mexican rain forest have experienced this process in fast motion. The last 40 years have catapulted them from a rudimentary society into the modern media age of overpopulation.
In 1979, I spent two weeks with them. They cut their fields from the dense jungle. Despite the great effort involved in that, they let them rest and replenish during the following year, cutting new ones instead in different places. They seemed to live in a different time. But the outside world was moving in on them.
In 1971, President Echeverria had officially declared them the owners of the forest. With that he bypassed a law from the Mexican revolution, which allowed anybody to squat land that wasn’t privately owned. Subsequently, logging companies bought the woods from the Lacandons who didn’t understand the concept of money or ownership. Missionaries moved in, splitting the tribe into two, one kept living by their old laws, the other by the new ones.
Part of my project will be the conceptualizing and planning of an expedition into the Lacandon jungle, in which over 300,000 settlers are living. It disappears at a faster pace than the Amazon rainforest.
The Lacandons had lived in it for centuries. In their mythology, the earth was covered with woods. If the woods died, so would the earth. Like the modern Western world they lived an enchanted, isolated life, unaware of the outside world’s need of space. The destruction of their world carries essential catastrophic elements: Cultural and environmental destruction.