( CNN ) -- On December 21 , 2012 , our calendar will align with the Maya date 13.0.0.0.0 , completing a great Maya cycle of time . There 's been a lot of hoopla that we are about to face a doomsday -- better known as the Maya apocalypse . There are television specials and panic buying of disaster supplies in Russia , a reminder of the stockpiling that took place for Y2K back in 1999 . While the Maya date will coincide with the solstice , the shortest day of the year , will it also coincide with the end of the world ? I 'm no seer , but I am confident that December 22 will see the dawn . The ancient Maya of Mexico , Guatemala , Belize and Honduras were close keepers of time . They charted every day , organizing them into 20- and 400-year periods . Using a base-20 counting system ( ours is base 10 ) and zero , they easily calculated thousands of dates , some noting the existence of millions of years . Why we 're fascinated with the apocalypse . During the height of their civilization in the 8th century , the Maya recorded dates and deeds at dozens of city-states , from births and battles to the triumphant wrenching of trophies from enemies . Artists inscribed their signatures on painted pots and stone sculptures . Stucco inscriptions adorned monumental pyramids that crested over the rainforest canopy . But to continue building ever grander structures , the Maya needed resources . Most of all , they needed timber to burn limestone in order to make cement . By the late 8th century , the rainforest was in retreat , fuel was scarce and recurrent drought led to desperation . Eventually , there was chronic warfare as well . And so one of the most extraordinary civilizations came to a crushing halt . Small groups of desperate dwellers in some cities held out behind hastily thrown-up palisades . Elsewhere , foes burned enemy cities to the ground and smashed monuments , leaving them scattered across the surface to be found in recent times . Scrub jungle overtook what had been sparkling white plazas . Compact ball courts that had seen raucous competition of a team sport played like soccer went silent . Wildlife scavenged lavish furnishings for their nests and dens . The reasons were many , and the outcome was shocking . The Maya civilization collapsed in most of its southern lowlands , leaving only abandoned pyramids in silent cities . This was the true face of apocalypse . Did they see it coming ? Just a few years before the rot set in , Maya painters at the site of Bonampak , a small city in Chiapas , Mexico , covered the walls of a small three-room palace with extraordinary murals . They painted more individuals -- men , mainly , but women and children , too -- than had been rendered before , numbering more than 250 . They deployed more fancy pigments than had been used before , more than would ever be used again in ancient Mexico , some 47 vibrant blues , reds and yellows . The paintings reveal the social layers of courtiers and lords , musicians and dwarves , victims and their blade-wielding sacrificers . Musicians , singers and performers lined up to perform on plazas and pyramids . None of these activities or materials was new , but what was new was the rapidly crumbling world around the Bonampak painters . No one could change -- the paintings seem to tell us . The Maya ignored the crisis in front of them , instead dancing with great panaches of precious quetzal feathers on pyramids , as if the present would forever hold . Now in the 21st century , perhaps we have also reached a precipice . Global warming is not just fearful thinking -- it 's real . Weeks after Superstorm Sandy , scientists are now predicting the near-term and long-term effects of global warming as more dire that previously thought . Some , perhaps like our Maya predecessors , would rather not see the writing on the walls of our flooded cities . The crises pile up in front of us , one after another , and we ignore them at our peril . Acknowledging and doing something about the problems in front of us seems hard . Give us more feathers . Build more walls . Stockpile canned goods and buy a generator . As for December 21 , rest easy . This day will pass as if it were nothing more than the Maya Y2K , the nonevent of the decade . We 'll wake up on December 22 , and the world will still be here . And so will our pressing environmental challenges . We need to make some hard decisions and resolve that we will confront our own brewing apocalypse before it 's too late . The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Mary Miller .
There are doomsday fears of Mayan apocalypse on December 21 . Mary Miller : The world will not come to an end , but we have pressing challenges . She says the Maya ##n crisis , including depletion of natural resources . Miller : We have to face our own challenges , such as global warming .