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The book “Mexican Rural Development and the Plumed Serpent” is a very interesting and informative. The author, Betty Faust, provides details of her ethnographic study on the Yucatec Maya in Campeche, Mexico. Her work covers the Maya culture, their technology, and tradition. In this book, Faust wrote about how the government and modernization affects the Mayans. “Government programs, national laws, poverty, oppression, and prejudice all have combined to pressure the younger villagers to discard the knowledge of their elders.” (xxiv, Faust) The Mexican government and elites treat the Maya people like peasants and unfairly because according to them, the Maya people are not “civilized.” The village of Pich where Faust stayed at is agriculturally dependent on rainfall to feed the community. With modernization, the destruction of the forest by lumbering affects the local agricultural ecology. Deforestation has come from development programs and cattle raising. The local government, however are against the traditional swidden system because they think it is environmentally destructive, saying that it damage ecologically from the fires and they think the corn seed that is used year after year is old and “degenerated.�