**12. Conclusion**

for this practice in large part of this territory, men built and used canals to transport water from distant sources and thus obtain good harvests. Because of these facilities, they were able to achieve very high performances. On the absence of excavations in rural areas, the knowledge of ancient Mesopotamian agriculture is based mainly on old texts, including the numerous records of the practice of field sales. Exploitation contracts or loans for farmers, as well as the abundant documentation, were found in the administrative buildings of the palaces and

The irrigation technology in the fields implemented implied the risk of soil salinization. The evaporation of water causes the minerals it contains to rise, and if the soil salt content is too high, the field can no longer be cultivated and the water must be drained off the field to replenish the soil. This problem affected many lands in southern Mesopotamia, which became uncultivable and abandoned after intensive exploitation. In contrast, palm trees grow very well in salinized grounds, which explains their growth in the oldest Mesopotamia.

The collapse of the Mayan civilization was because of the destruction of the environment caused by it due to the mismanagement of resources, indicated the American archeologist Richard D. Hansen [71, 72], one of the principal researchers of that old culture. "The Mayans themselves damaged their environment. They destroyed it. The impact of the damage (to the environment) was so strong that they caused the collapse of civilization," says Hansen.

In the Cuenca Mirador, the expert explained, the Mayans developed "the first economic state in the Americas." "In the pre-Classic period (in the year 1500 BC), they formed the first political State, almost an empire, where there was a development with strong economic management and large populations," but due to a strategic error "of government," the same Mayas caused its collapse.

Starting in 150 AC, "due to multifactors" associated with the environment such as diseases, drought, and deforestation, "people started to leave the area." "But it was not a case of abandonment in which people leave, but come back. Here they left and did not return. The collapse of the Mayas was a total abandonment "due to the lack of resources, Hansen stressed. The Mayans "were human" and as such "made mistakes," "abused the resources they had at their disposal." They fell into "conspicuous consumption." Preferring to build great palaces "without thinking about the needs of the people, without feeding them, until they finished everything, "he said.

In the year 100 BC, the Roman Empire was spread along the Mediterranean. The Romans could have stayed in this area, near the sea, but the explorations gave good results, and they were encouraged to continue their territorial expansion by increasing connectivity. However, transportation by land was slow and expensive, unlike maritime transport, so the increase in

According to Joseph Tainter [73, 74], professor of environment and society at Utah State University, one of the most important lessons of the fall of Rome is that complexity comes at a cost. In the third century, Rome added more and more new elements: a considerable

temples of the cities of Mesopotamia.

**11.2. The Mayans**

62 Behavior Analysis

**11.3. Roman Empire**

the connectivity became expensive.

The mathematical theory of chaos when applied to experimental time series of learning processes is shown to be efficient and rigorous in revealing properties that underlie the interior of those, such as irreversibility and entropic connectivity. Similarly, when categorizing the performance of learning according to the dynamics (weak, medium, chaotic), it exhibits the behavioral patterns produced by each dynamic. Learning, as a human activity perennial in time, induces behavior patterns, an order associated with emotions, exporting entropy to the biosphere: "order wins" wanted "exporting disorder" not wanted. This learning reveals an overestimation, historical, and cultural, of the regenerative capacities of the environment and planet Earth, especially concerning one of the forms of the disorder ("unwanted"), more characteristic of modern human activity: garbage and pollution, which we leave in charge of the planet. At present, we can perceive these regenerative limits in the form of depletion of croplands and productive demands on agricultural land through increasingly powerful fertilizers with unexpected consequences, consumption of drinking water, acidification and desertification of the oceans, atmospheric pollution, climate change, and so on. Would we expect another result? As we say about the time series, we face the increasing, and the frenetic entropy connectivity of the learning (much of trial and error) overstimulated by a POS/NEG ratio exacerbated toward positivity. On the other hand, an economic-technological system that essentially seeks to optimize profit as a synonym of well-being and, by extension, an illusion of happiness. Given the current state of the biosphere [75–77], would we expect another result? The complexity of this disjunctive is that nothing is more proper to human nature than its willingness to learn. Civilization, from its inception, has shown that an essential evolutionary characteristic of its learning is to adapt the environment to its utilities and needs, which will always be influenced by the certainties and uncertainties of knowledge and its transforming polarity. Innovating patterns of behavior, which have given us confidence in our possibilities by feeling exclusive of species on a planet with supposedly infinite resources, are complex. It means accepting limits. It recognizes in human activities not only its load of positivity, but also negativity, which broadens its meaning. There is no more provocative word for freewill than the idea of limits to what we want and can do. It is necessary to face that in all the processes that they want to carry out, the existence of limits will play an essential role. A predicament that is not new, and always proclaimed—and most of the time, interestingly overlooked—by the most varied forms and themes of reflection: complex systems, entropy, science, emotions, the human brain, religion, and more.

It is probable that the revenge for the untied man (restless Nietzsche would say), of today, is the irruption of the "contemplative man" that Nietzsche would point us out of tomorrow. The challenge is greater, as indicated, because it requires us to explore new forms of relationship between ourselves and with nature [58], of which we are a part, and of the planet Earth in particular. Our viability of species is in interdiction, even expanding our environment of space, and this is a medium, even extremely hostile to human life [59].

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