Being green in Colombia

I would like to argue that if you're a middle-class person looking to live sustainably in the world, there's no better place than a mid-sized city in the Colombian high plains. Here's a few reasons why:

• No heating or AC. The temperature is about 65 degrees F year-round, so houses aren't even built with the capacity for climate control. No need for insulation, fans, energy audits, or anything like that, either.
• No clothes dryers. There's no need for them, either. Every house is built with an interior patio for line-drying clothes, which takes less than a day here in the high altitudes.
• Low electric bills. Since the fridge doesn't need to work that hard, there's no climate control, and all light bulbs are mini-fluorescents, you really don't consume much electricity when you live here. My current apartment is an exception because it's got an electric water heater, but once we make the switch to gas that cost will disappear for us.
• Fresh, varied fruits and vegetables year-round. Because we're in the tropics, most produce is in season all year. Since we're in a cool climate but only a few hours away from hot tropical zones, our weekly shopping can include strawberries, potatoes, plantains, lettuce, and passionfruit. It's all locally produced, so no qualms about food miles. There is of course Chilean produce available too, but who would want those plasticized apples and grapes? Much of what we eat is de facto organically produced as well, so that's nice. An exception are potatoes and certain other chemical-heavy crops, but that's no worse than in the States. Furthermore, we can easily get in contact with farmers to see what methods they're using and buy from the most responsible producers.
• Meat is great. Beef here is all local and mainly pasture-raised. When I go to my local butcher and ask for ground beef, he cuts a few slices off of a hunk of loin or flank, then grinds it in front of me. That means that instead of a burger made from hundreds of cows mixed together industrially, as I'd get at a US supermarket, my burger is coming from one cow, one cut of meat.
  
• If you need stuff for your house (baskets, furniture, etc.) it's easy to find a local artisan that produces it, or will custom-make it for you. This is of course from local, natural materials, which are abundant and responsibly regulated in Colombia. Even our swivel office chairs were assembled in a shop in our neighborhood, to my tall-man specifications!
• Clothing is similar. Most clothes you can buy are made right here in good old Colombia. This ensures a modicum of worker protection and fair pay, at least compared to if it were made in some far-flung place like Bangladesh. Chinese products are making an inroads here, but they are by no means dominant.
• Public transport is easy. Actually, in a megalopolis like Bogota, public transport trips can be long and hellish, though they do offer good coverage of all zones. But in our small city, you can walk almost everywhere, which keeps you in good shape. Intercity travel is no problem either. There are at least hourly buses from any town to any other town you might need to get to, and they're cheap.
• If you do plan on driving, you can be sure that your fuel is locally-produced. Colombia has huge oil reserves, so your driving isn't supporting any oppressive Wahhabi monarchy.
• Lots of tourism opportunities. Whether by bus or driving your own car, there are a million places to go in Colombia. Tropical beaches, ancient ruins, mountain lakes, colonial architecture, dense jungle, cosmopolitan cities, they're all just a few hours away by well-maintained, safe roads. So you and your family don't need to spend lots of money and spew out lots of carbon dioxide for jet travel to far-away destinations.
  
• No urban sprawl. Granted, Caro and I cringe at the sight of new construction going up in the cow pastures fringing our town. But most of this is mid-rise apartment complexes. Even the luxury subdevelopments of our town are in the form of rowhouses arranged around a central park. This would be a dream for US proponents of responsible suburban development, and would be considered high-density even in Chicago.

Okay, so it seems that you can live with a low environmental impact here in Colombia. But what about social issues? Isn't Colombia known for its inequality?

• This is sadly true. There is a huge gap between rich and poor here in Colombia. Even we in the middle class are always sort of hustling, on the verge of falling into poverty. But it seems that this is not much different from life in the States.
• That said, Colombia has universal health care and free university education available to all citizens. Of course the poor have until now stayed poor, but the society is making certain strides to integrate the poor into the prosperity of the nation as a whole. Even your electric, water, and gas bills are graduated depending on your income!
• Many of the cheap prices we enjoy here reflect the low earnings of those who make things, and the low buying power of those who buy them. I don't want to sugarcoat this, but I feel that it's good that at least prices here in Colombia correspond to general income. In Chicago, on the other hand, if you live in the ghetto and have low earning power, you still have to pay a price for everything that represents what wealthy superconsumers can pay, not what the poor can afford.
  
• This also means that work in Colombia has a measurable, recognized economic value. In the States I was brought up to feel that certain things aren't worth doing, namely things in which my physical labor is a major part of the value of the final product. Because we disdain and underpay real work in the States, it is hard to earn enough to live with dignity unless you're speculating, using machines, or otherwise artificially ramping up production (the latest form of "increasing worker productivity" is by outsourcing jobs, which is counted in the States as increasing production without increasing US workers). Here in Colombia the work I do with my hands represents a real value, and if I earn something from it, that something is enough to buy other things.
  
• This brings us back to the issue of Colombian wage differentials. Many middle-class people here do hire women to clean and maintain their houses, because they share the US attitude that manual work is not worthwhile or is beneath them. But unlike in the US, where the difference in wages between a professional and a cleaning woman is so great that the professional can hire out housework without batting an eye, here in Colombia the wage gap between the middle class and the "cleaning woman class" is not as great. The middle class people I know that hire others for housework are often spending beyond their means. The positive side of this is that my decision to clean my own house and cook my own food, which rests in part on a moral conviction that no one is too good to take care of his own home, also ends up saving my family an appreciable amount of money. That is to say that my housework, my manual labor, has a real, measurable value. On the other hand, if we did decide to hire someone to do our housework, we would know that what we paid that person is an amount sufficient to contribute to sustaining a household in a dignified manner.
• Poverty is certainly bad in Colombia. In fact, because life is so good for the more or less middle-class among us, and infrastructure is great everywhere, it's often easy for people to forget or be unaware of the poverty in our country. My state is less than two hours away from Colombia's capital, but it has the highest rate of child malnutrition in the country! We look around and see good roads and electric lines and assume that issues like malnutrition are behind us, but they're not. But once again, for my wife and me, this also means that there is important work to be done in terms of food and development, which we are happy to contribute to. And the concentration of resources and professionals in Bogota means that we professionals who live in the provinces have a lot to offer. Our work is valued, our ideas are listened to, and we can really make an impact in places where no one else has either cared enough or known how to put together good projects and effect change.

Okay, that's all I can think of for now regarding the environmentally and socially sustainable possibilities of life here in Colombia. If I think of more I'll add them. But it's probably best that you just come and set up house here yourself. You'll soon see what I'm talking about.