Green Options

It’s rare that a city sets out to create a new tourist attraction and is able to do so with terrific success– but Lima, Peru has done it.

The Magical Fountain amazes visitors with its rapid changes and height.

While Lima is generally trashed by Peru guidebooks as the place everyone must dreadfully pass through on their way to other destinations like Machu Picchu, in the past few years great strides have been made to improve the city’s offerings, such as “The Magic Circuit of Water” in Lima’s Parque de la Reserva.

A device invented by Peruvians known as the “Super Tree” has recently made its debut in Lima, a city plagued with extreme air pollution. The Super Tree acts like 1200 real trees, purifying the air for approximately 20,000 people a day, at the cost of only about $6.

The company Tierra Nuestra (Our Earth) is behind the Super Tree, and hopes to begin exporting the technology. The company’s goal is to promote conservation through the development of new technologies and renewable energy.

When it comes to pollution, Lima has it all. The air is contaminated, the water, the sky, the streets. Pollution is everywhere.

I was quite surprised to read earlier today, that among all of the possibilities, a neighborhood in Lima has taken a stand on the issue of noisy, barking, scurrying, dogs. Who would have thought that noise pollution caused by dogs would get a group of Lima citizens up in arms?

Without a doubt, the level of noise pollution in Lima is tremendously high. When combining the cacaphony of sounds that arise from traffic, parties, animals, and so on, you will be hard pressed to find Lima residents who at some point have not been annoyed by the constant tapping of their ear drums. For this reason, I think there is merit in passing a law that attempts to limit noise pollution in Lima. Whether or not targeting the population of dogs as a method to control noise is the right way to do it– I’m not sure.

Several days ago my family visited one of Lima, Peru’s zoos. On the day before our visit, I wrote about some of my general thoughts and feelings about zoos, in an article titled “Why Zoos Stimulate Our Minds.”

Writing out my thoughts was a sort of preparative exercise, mostly to try to articulate the main dilemma I have with zoos: do the potential education benefits of zoos outweigh the cruelty of caging animals in small spaces that I personally believe typically don’t provide them with fulfilling lives? I still am not sure of the answer, but my trip to the Huachipa Zoo did answer another intriguing question for me. When zoos are bad, would I personally prefer that a bad zoo exist rather than have no zoo at all?

Before I reveal the answer to the aforementioned question, I should explain that my wife and I came up with some criteria for rating zoos. For the purpose of reviewing more zoos in the future, I wanted to have some reasonable means to compare them.

On Friday, the website livinginperu.com reported that the people of Lima soon will enjoy the wonders of a new planetarium. This is great news for Peru, as there are currently not many museums, science centers, or other tourist sites in Lima devoted to helping people learn more about nature.

A modern planetarium is an especially terrific asset for the country, as evidence from many of Peru’s archaeological sites suggest that ancient Peruvian peoples used the stars above and our solar system to their benefit. Examples of places where these observations occurred include Machu Picchu and also the site of Chankillo, which is thought to be the site of the most ancient solar observatory in the Americas. Now the people of today’s Peru can also use a special tool to learn about what happens in the skies above.

This past weekend, a major summit was held in Lima, Peru between leaders of European Union countries and also Latin American and Caribbean countries. Numerous agenda items were on the table, but the overall focuses of the meetings were upon the global food crisis, climate change, poverty, and potential trade agreements. Of course, what would an international summit be without some

1. good, old-fashioned name-calling to put everyone on edge before hand
2. a President attending a “rival summit” and taking time to go play some football! (Soccer for Americans.)
3. and an uninspiring finish where seemingly little got accomplished, but yet we can hold onto hope because there are plans to keep the conversation going.