The Future Is La Antigua Guatemala

La Antigua Guatemala is a small city which enjoys a robust tourism industry and hosts innumerable Spanish language schools for foreigners. Buried in the colonial architecture (which earned the city status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site) lies all the trappings of modern civilization. The relative wealth of La Antigua amidst the poverty and violence of Guatemala has afforded the city opportunities to modernize, and the government seems open to all ideas which may propel La Antigua into the 21st century as assuredly as any western nation.

Towards the end of last year the municipality introduced a free wireless zone in its central park, earning it status as the first digital city of Latin America. The novel concept of free wi-fi for all has been championed by consumer advocates the world over but in San Francisco the process has been bogged down by negotiations with competing providers and to this day there is no such service, but in La Antigua they just decided to roll up their sleeves and make it happen. When one thinks of Guatemala they probably don’t imagine internet cafes and people using their laptops in the park, but access is available to all who would wish to make use of it.

As encouraging as that development is the people of La Antigua are preparing to lay the ground-work for another first, and possibly becoming the first city of its kind in the entire world. According to Rudy Giron’s excellent La Antigua Daily Photo, a group of dedicated people are busy laying the framework for an alternative fuel project for the city. Biopersa organizers went from restaurant to restaurant collecting spent cooking oil with the intention of reprocessing it into biodiesel for municipal vehicles and the local hospital. If the initial steps are successful and the idea takes hold La Antigua Guatemala could be the first city which operates its city vehicles entirely on reprocessed biodiesel.(See bottom for an update.)

 

Do Not Mail

Pic by Parsons

San Francisco politics might suffer from being habitually ridiculous and petty but it’s never a boring scene. District 5’s own Ross Mirkarimi sends out periodic updates via e-mail that I always skim through, and sandwiched between standard policy initiatives and the results of preliminary meetings with MUNI over route changes are the meat and potatoes of Left Coast head-scratchers.

Not to demean everything that is debated down at City Hall. The latest newsletter included a brief section about a resolution to be voted on by the board. If passed San Francisco would hold hands with local advocacy group Forest Ethics in some unspecified manner in order to aid in the establishment of a California “Do Not Mail” registry, based on the wildly popular “Do Not Call” registry that everyone except me signed up for.

The Do Not Mail subdivision of Forest Ethics has compiled an impressive dossier of the environmental consequences resulting from the billions of pieces of junk mail articles manufactured and shipped yearly. It’s not something I’ve ever invested much thought in beyond the obvious disgrace of massive quantities of paper I send towards recycling plants, but the carbon footprint (I suddenly feel like I’m a hot new Green start-up all of a sudden), assuming their figures are sound, is pretty horrifying. According to their site the manufacturing of what is cloyingly referred to as Direct Marketing creates greenhouse gas emissions parallel to nearly 10 million cars. Okay, I guess that’s cars driving some supposed average time per day with an average smog capacity and everything, but that’s a lot of pollutants.

On the deforestation front, Indonesia, Canada and the Southeastern United States are the primary sources for pulp used to make junk mail. The rate of deforestation in Indonesia has become a hot international topic, particularly as clear cutting for biofuel production is eradicating large tracts of land and driving peaceful monkey types to extinction, or at least heavy drinking and drug abuse. The less trees there are the less carbon dioxide is being absorbed before building up in the atmosphere (they accuse Indonesia of being the third largest Co2 belcher in the world), and 6.5 million tons of junk mail found new homes in domestic landfills as recently as 2006. Growing up in San Francisco it’s too easy to forget not every town has curbside recycling, although I’m quite confident laziness and cost effective rationalizations contribute their fair share to unnecessary paper waste. Many dumps incinerate their solid waste and while this helps to generate a small quotient of electrical power there’s still the matter of what’s hitting the air when the flames are on.