Letter from the Editor - April 2008

Welcome to Another Day in Paradise and welcome to our first ever Eco issue.

Everyone is going green, it seems protecting the environment has finally caught on. Two summers ago in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, I attended a series of seminars in Houston, Texas, on global warming and especially its effects on water, this climate crisis, as they call it. The same summer I attended Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth presentation, where he received several ovations from a standing room only crowd, and everyone felt like an army on the march, invigorated with purpose. I was an eager audience as well. One of my shortlived summer jobs in high school (let’s just say quite a few years ago) was as a canvasser, a door-to-door grass roots fund raiser for clean water initiatives. It was a different world back then, a lot of people shut their doors in my face, not everyone was nice, few people were interested. My, how things have changed. Or have they? It still seems the natural inclination is to ignore, to stretch our brains into all sorts of creative reasonings as to why it’s really not so bad. But what’s the point to that? It’s like debating the finer points of staying healthy while smoking two packs a day… Instead of inconvenient truth maybe he should have called it, the really actually kinda obvious truth. Anyone who has been alive a few years has seen the climate changes of the last generation and it’s pretty pointless to pretend you don’t notice. The question then becomes just how far are you willing to go to change, alter or address that fact.

I read an article recently which proposed that the most ecologically sound alternative fuel vehicle was a donkey cart. That’s just ridiculous and only giving people another excuse to throw up their hands in exasperation instead of looking for actually viable answers. It’s unreasonable (and a few other adjectives to boot) to think people would want to go backwards, to diminish the quality of their lives, to lose even one single benefit of progress and evolution, even if it meant saving the entire human race. I mean, if we have to go back to donkey carts what’s the point of clean air, we’d become a less advanced species altogether.

Lucky for us, there are brighter, bolder minds at work, looking for real and realistic solutions to how the modern world can continue to flourish while co-existing with nature, and we hope Zihuatanejo and its stunning natural beauty can benefit. Here at ADIP we don’t propose to have all the answers or even all the questions…but as we come to the close of our 2007-2008 season, we hope our first ever Eco Issue inspires you to start thinking a little greener, a little cleaner, and about all the creative ways to get there.

Until next time,