Ecuador’s “Historic Victory” Gives Explicit Rights to Nature

The exit polls of the September 28th election showed a wide margin of support for approval of the new Ecuadorian constitution, in what President Rafael Correa claimed as an “historic victory”.  There are indeed a handful of interesting chapters of the constitution that not only reform Ecuadorian’s state institutions and personal rights, but also rights for nature to run its course.  There are clauses for State supported programs to deter human exploitation of non-renewable resources, destruction of ecosystems, and giving explicit rights to nature for an “integral restoration”.  It also states that any person can demand to any governmental agency that these rights be upheld, and may be arbitrated in a court of law.

Cuenca to Bahia Ecuador

Fellow expat Gary Scott has an intriguing article about investing in the excellent beach area known as Bahia, just north of huge port town of Manta.

Unfortunately, AFAIK right now Bahia is pretty much the farthest beach area to reach in Ecuador from Cuenca. It should be soon remedied when neighboring Manta gets improved airport connections…. but untill then, it takes two flights from Cuenca to Manta and the peak travel time (aka weekend flights) cannot really be considered “connecting” flights in that you have to stay overnight in Guayaquil or Quito. A drive to Bahia by private car is about 7-10 hours depending on roads and traffic, add a few hours if going by bus. For fellow North Carolinians, its analogous to driving to The Outer Banks from Asheville along HWY 64 in 1960.

That being said, Bahia ROCKS! Its clean, calm and picture perfect. Its the first coastal city that is more or less “environmentally aware” with hosts of sustainable horticulture, agriculture, and other ecolodge / projects going on in that region. Across the bay in neighboring and burgeoning Canoa, the surf and sun is right for a tranquil getaway that’s hip with the backpackers and surfer crowd. Its much more downtempo than Montañita to the south.

I hope the purported growth of Manta doesn’t pollute the environment in the Bahia de Caraquez …. but its almost inevitable.

Steven Wright Aphorisms

For fun today I learned how to run a bash script from PHP, and implemented everybody’s favorite command line utility: fortune! The script takes advantage of php’s exec() command, and ended up looking something like this:

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<?php
exec ("/opt/local/bin/fortune -s", $lines_of_output, $error_code);
if (!$error_code) {
	foreach ($lines_of_output as $line) {
		print $line."\n";
	}
} else {
	print "script failed with exit code $error_code, see http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/exitcodes.html";
}

Check out the two beta versions I’ve created here (Hit refresh in your browser to get a new fortune).

• Your daily online fortune cookie.


• Steven Wright aphorisms.

These are meant to be part of a larger project intended to expose these quotes via RSS to incorporate them into some dynamically created “signature” lines, which is part of some new Gmail functionality available from Google Labs.