A Radical Makeover for the Trash Museum

The Teusaquillo neighborhood's Museo de la Basura, or Trash Museum, used to look like this:

and this:

With its constant denunciations of our human mistreatment of the planet.

'Cosmic suicide will awaken us from our lethargy.'

Of course, the house's owner, Antonio, was correct. Today's headlines about how we're charging down the road to permanently destabilizing the planet's climate, and the accelerating pace of things like deforestation and coral reef destruction prove it.

But few people care enough to do anything about our planet. Except for Antonio, who filled his house and yard with garbage while he stayed inside drinking. Perhaps his 'environmental' campaign was no  more than a justification for never cleaning up, but at least it served as a reminder that the evidence is that we're heading towards calamity.

The trash museum today.

But after Antonio died some months ago his brother, who evidently does not share the same environmenal commitment, cleaned the house up. The change was undoubtedly a relief for the neighbors.Their  property values rose and they can more easily ignore the fact that the planet is careening towards disaster.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Of Fracking and Bullfighting

Is this Colombian animals' biggest problem? A Colombian bullfighter at work
this February in Bogotá's Santamaria Plaza.

Recently, there's been lots of critism to two activites in Colombia: fracking and bullfighting.

Fracking

Both are questionable for different reasons. Fracking, which releases hydrocarbons by fracturing underground rock formations, can pollute water resources and cause minor earthquakes, according to critics.

And bullfighting seems like a holdover from the Dark Ages, which should have died out along with
witch burning and gladiator battles. Bullfighting is also cruel. And, making entertainmet out of killing an animal can only bring out the worst in spectators.

Nothing else to protest? Marching against
bullfighting in downtown Bogotá.

In recent months, fracking's opponents have lobbied, filed lawsuits and written opinion pieces calling for the procedure to be banned in Colombia.

And bullfighting's opponents have for years battled - futilely - in the streets, courtrooms and Congress to have the practice prohibited.

But fracking and bullfighting are only tips of the iceberg of the larger phenomena of the fossil fuel industry and animal mistreatment. Yes, fracking causes environmental damage, but so do the conventional oil and coal industries: they trigger deforestation, drive climate change, pollute the seas and poison the air when burnt. The oil shipping industry, like all shipping, damages marine life with noise, by transporting exotic animals and by collisions with marine mammals. In short, the fossil fuel industry's impacts are innumerable, and fracking is just a tiny part of that.

Is it fracking, or just oil? A  seabird dirtied by
spilled oil doesn't care where that oil came from.

And if bullfighting is cruel, practices such as cockfighting and factory farming are much crueler and affect many more animals.

But fracking, like GMOs, gets attacked because it seems new, strange and sinister.

And bullfighting represents many things despised by its leftist opponents: the wealthy, Mayor Peñalosa and the traditional landowning class.

And while both fracking and bullfighting are very questionable activities, the danger is that by obsessing with these two narrow issues, activists ignore the wider problems. And, if they actually win these two battles, they may feel that the larger battle is won and they can cease fighting.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

The End of the Trash Museum

Cyclists outside the Trash Museum back in the days of its full glory.

Bogotá's least popular anti-museum is no more.

The Trash Museum asks you what you're doing to the planet.

The Trash Museum, founded decades ago by the son of an upper-middle-class Bogotá family, became a regular stop on our bike tours, as well as a source of discord in its quiet Teusaquillo neighborhood.

As I heard the story, Antonio went to study in paris, where he rebelled against consumerism and wastefulness. He retunred hom, filled his family's house and yard with garbage. The museum became a landmark for bike tourists, but an eyesore for its neighbors, who at least once tried get to get Antonio evicted.

The house's front 'yard' was hidden behind a jumble of paper, plastic, boards and old shoes, decorated

'We are the trash culture!'

with signs denouncing mankind's wastefulness and announcing the planet's environmental collapse. 'How many of these objects came from your house?' asked one hand-scrawled sign. 'This is the way the world is,' announced another.

Passers-by contributed their own pieces of trash and even wrote their own statements. Sometimes, Antonio left his front door wide open, for anybody to enter and experience the museum's trash-packed interior, where he actually hosted friends.

The 'museum' even attained a degree of officialness. It was on Googe Maps and received an award from the Ministry of the Environment for environmental education.

"He was strong; a straight shooter." Antonio's brother gives us the sad news. But I suspect that the neighbors were relieved. 

A daring tourist ventures into the museum.

And Antonio certainly had his admirers, including his brother, who described him as "strong" and "a real straight shooter."

But, as much as I agree with Antonio's ideas - Bogotá's streets, sidewalks and waterways are strewn with paper and plastic from unnecessary packaging left over from mostly unnecessary products, which will either end up rotting in the Doña Juana landfill or float into the ocean, where animals will swallow it and choke to death.

A recognition from
the Ministry of
the Environment.

But Antonio, with his ways of antagonizing people, was not the best messenger. And I´m not sure whether his 'museum' was the product of principle, or just the rationalization of laziness. After all, Antonio spent his time indoors drinking himself to death.

Neither was he a particuarly pleasant person. Once when I stopped in front of the house with a bike
tour, Antonio Emerged from a amidst his trash and greeted us with an 'Heil Hitler.'

Later, we asked him what he did for a living.

"I'm the new Adolph Hitler," he told us.

About ten days ago, Antonio died, most probably from all of his drinking. His brother is clearing out his house and yard - a monumental task - and plans to rent out the property. Check it out soon on air BnB.

Hard at work clearing out the museum.

Ready to cart away the trash.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

A Respite for Bogotá's Breathers?

A TransMilenio bus belches its way thru central Bogotá
recently. How much cleaner will the new buses be?

In a small victory for clean air, Mayor Peñalosa increased the advantage zero-pollution buses will receive in the bidding for a new fleet for TransMilenio from 50 to 400 points.

Unfortunately, I can't discover anywhere how many total points we're talking about: Are we talking about 400 points out of a thousand, or 400 points out of a million?

But apparently the 400 points are significant, since Peñalosa promised that thanks to them many of the 1,000-plus new buses will be Euro 6: basically electric or naural gas powered.

That will be a relief for us breathers, since many of the older TM buses are veritable 'rolling chimneys' because they've exceeded their planned mileage and obviously have neither been maintained or equipped with filters.

Electric buses, at least, can never pollute, no matter how old they get or how badly they're neglected. (And, because Colombia's electricity is mostly hydroelectric, it generates relatively little greenhouse gas.)

The clean buses will cost more to buy, (altho less to maintain), and they will also require the installation of new infrastructure in TM statiions. So, they'll be expensive up front, but will save Bogotanos untold amounts in health expenditures and human suffering, as well as the economic benefits from increased tourism and businesses' willingness to move to a cleaner, more pleasant city.

But that makes me ask: If City Hall is willing to go to that expense and effort to make TM cleaner, why not bother to sanction monstrosities like this bus I saw yesterday belching its way up Calle 19?

Or this truck I spotted smoking away today along on Calle 13 near the train station?

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

The Suspicious Border Gasoline Boom

Stirring up cocaine in a jungle laboratory. The process uses
lots of gasoline. (Photo: Business Insider) 

The town of Argelia, in the department of Cauca, has some 27,000 residents and 19 gas stations. However, last year the municipality racked up 3.4 million gallons of gasoline sales and 642,000 gallons of diesel sold - some three times as much as just two years before and higher per-capita than sales in Bogotá - despite Argelia's poverty and few cars.

Argelia, Cauca: booming gasoline market. Foto: RCN Radio

The paradoxical situation, reported by El Tiempo, may a simple explanation: Argelia and other rural agricultural communities with booming fuel sales also happen to have booming coca leaf and cocaine economies - and gasoline and diesel are basic ingredients for converting leaves into the drug.

The intersects with many other disfunctions. Because cocaine is illegal, those many millions of gallons of fuel are handled without any regulation or safety laws. So, once exhausted, they're often just dumped into rivers or onto the jungle floor.

The popularity of motor fuels for cocaine production is partly the fault of the Colombian government, which spends a fortune every year on fuel subsidies - particularly in border areas. Fuel subsidies make little sense socially or economically, since they go disproportionately to the wealthy. And they make absolutely no sense at all environmentally, since fossil fuel production takes a huge environmental toll all along its life cycle and burning fuels contributes to global warming. But the subsidies make sense politically, since they buy votes. The pressure to subsidize gasoline is particularly strong in areas near Ecuador and Venezuela, which subsidize their fuels much more than Colombia does.

And by subsidizing gasoline for drivers, Colombia also does so for drug producers.

Officials may be considering various strategies to deal with this problem - altho none of them likely involves raising the price of gasoline to pay for its social and environmental impacts, which would not only make cocaine production more expensive, but would also reduce traffic jams, clean the air and generally make Colombia's cities more liveable.

Solutions which Colombia is more likely to try, such as rationing fuel in some border areas, will inevitably increase smuggling and contraband, particularly from Venezuela, and enrich criminal organizations. Officials also talk about adding a chemical ingredient to fuels to make them less effective for drug making. But expect drug makers to find a way to neutralize this chemical and to increase smuggling across the border, since Colombia's neighbors certainly won't add the ingredient to their own fuels.

There's only one way to end these absurd and ineffective attempts to use ineffective policies to repair a failed one - decriminalize drugs and minimize their harm.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Rushing to Burn Coal

Coal producers know that their dirty fuel's days are numbered. If concerns about global warming - burning coal pumps more carbon into the atmosphere per unit of energy generated than does either oil or natural gas - don't lead to coal's phaseout, then the rapidly dropping prices of solar and wind-generated electricity will make coal obsolete sooner or later.

Colombia's El Cerrejon coal mine,
near the Venezuelan border, owned 
by BHP Billiton, Anglo American 
and Glencore, also produces about 33 
million tons of coal annually. 

That's why coal producers, including Colombia's Drummond, face an economic reality. If they don't sell their coal soon, they might have to leave it in the ground.

So Drummond - and undoubtedly other producers - are planning to accelerate their coal mining, long term environmental impacts be damned.

Drummond produced about 33 million tons of Colombian coal last year, and plans to raise annual production to 35 million tons with hopes to one day reach 40 million tons. At that rate, perhaps, it can exhaust its Colombian reserves before before coal sunsets.

According to the great majority of the world's scientists - as well as basic common sense - pumping huge quantities of carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere is altering the planet's climate in fundamental ways. However, Drummond doesn't seem concerned - I didn't see a mention of climate change on the company's website - and neither does the El Tiempo newspaper, despite all its protestations about  environmental problems, headlined its interview with Drummond's Colombian CEO 'That's how things are done' and didn't mention global warming. And neither does the Colombian government, which claims to aspire to sustainable development while overseeing unrestrained resource extraction.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

A Hail Mary for the Amazon

Deforestation in the Amazon is accelerating. (Photo: WWF)

In what might be called a desperate hail mary pass to save the beleaguered Amazon rainforest, a Colombian court gave the region region rights, a bit similar to a person.

The concept is great. After all, Colombian is suffering a terrible - and accelerating - loss of forest. Between the years 2015 and 2016 deforestation rose 44%, destroying close to 200,000 hectares of forest in 2016 and accompanying biodiversity, much of it in the Amazon. And deforestation apparently has speeded up since then.

The acceleration may result in part from the peace agreement with the FARC guerrillas, who

Deforestation in Brazil. (Photo: Getty Images)

controlled a lot of territory in Colombia's remote regions and its jungle south. By threatening miners, farmers and cattleraisers in remote regions with robbery, extortion and kidnapping, the guerrillas involuntarily protected those areas. Today, the FARC are demobilizing, leaving Colombia's natural diversity open for business - and exploitation.

But the basic motives underlying deforestation are capitalistic: A jungle, tragically, is worth more dead and gone than it is living and dynamic - at leat in the short term. Loggers, soybean farmers, coca leaf growers, mahogany loggers and others feed their families next month and next year by destroying forest, although all of us will pay much more in the long run.

The court's ruling is very admirable - and very idealistic.

But unfortunately, the illegal miners, ranchers and loggers who are clearing Colombia's jungles are not likely to respect a judge's opinion. The fundamental problem is that the jungle contains immense resources waiting to be stolen, with almost no protection. In some regions, just a few rangers are charged with protecting tens of thousands of square kilometers of wildlands, leaving them unprotected at all. It's a depressing situation with no solution in sight.

However, while courts and park rangers aren't likely to do much, each of us can reduce pressure on the Amazon a bit by minimizing our own consumption of Amazon products, such as hardwoods, beef and soybeans produced by deforesting jungle.

A bus pollutes central Bogotá. Don't kids have a
right to be protected from this?

This lawsuit was filed in the name of Colombian children's right to a healthy environment and protection from the impacts of global warming. The right to a healthy environment is in Colombia's Constitution. That begs the question why courts don't protect urban kids' rights to a clean environment with healthy, breathable air?

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

A Dead Jaguar's Lesson

The leaking well killed thousands of animals,
but not this jaguar - at least directly.

During the recent oil well leak in Santander, a photo went viral of animals killed by the spill, including a jaguar. The image illustrated the  spill's deadly impacts.

It turned out, however, that the jaguar had not been killed by the oil spill, but rather hit by a motor vehicle.

The miss-marketing of the jaguar's death should not detract from the scale of the environmental damage from the oil spill, which killed thousands of animals, most of them fish, but also birds, amphibians and others.

But in a broader sense, oil did kill the jaguar.

Actually, thousands of animals were killed.

After all, the vehicle which hit it was almost certainly oil-powered. And the road the jaguar was crossing was likely paved with oil products and built to carry oil-powered vehicles. At the same time, the deforestation caused in part by oil drilling has driven wild animals out of their traditional habitats and into conflicts with people - and their vehicles.

And if the oil is not spilled and gets burned as planned, it will pump pollutants into the atmosphere which will harm the health of humans and jaguars,

When will Colombia escape from its oil addiction?

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Marching Against Lizama

'The Lizama Petroleum Disaster'. Lizama is the name of the well which poured out oil last month.

Young people marched down Carrera Septima this afternoon protesting the oil well which spilled oil for most of March in Santander Department. 

'As a Colombian I demand the resignations of those
responsible for the ecocide: The Minister of the Environment and
 the director of the ANLA.' And what about the
Ecopetrol executives' resignations?

(The ANLA issues licenses for companies which want to
carry out projects generating environmental impacts.)

According to Controlaría reports, the state oil company had left many abandoned wells unsealed and had not properly updated its contingency plans. I'd be willing to bet that out there in the swamps and jungles a lot of oil wells are leaking away with nobody around to notice.

Interestingly, in Bogotá the oil well scandal over the oil well leak happened to coincide with rare attention to the chronic problem of air pollution as authorities announced a 'yellow alert' about pollution levels in late March. The alert generated a number of news articles and editorials, and one academic even informed us that the pollution comes from diesel vehicles. 

It's almost makes one wonder whether Colombia should kick its dependence on a fuel which damages the environment and human health from the moment it's sucked out of the ground to when it is burned and released into the atmosphere. Perhaps Colombia could no longer make fossil fuel exports the foundation of its economy, and stop subsidizing driving. But real changes are too much to ask, of course. And the real problem is not how they extract oil, but whether they do so at all.

Still, the industry can rest comfortably: the moment will pass, and the public's attention will move on to something more important, such as gasoline prices, football games and beauty pageants.

Unfortunately, despite Colombian leaders' expressions of concern about climate change, the nation continues to make fossil fuel exportation the 'locomotive' of its economy and celebrates cars sales as an unqualified good. The only prominent voice calling for change - leftist presidential candidate Gustavo Petro, who wants to change oil for avocadoes - is completely unrealistic and would generate huge opposition from citizens and industry.

'The land belongs to the campesino; Not to the multinational.'

A bit strangely, many of the protests denounced fracking - even tho the leaking well did not employ fracking. But fracking makes a good all-purpose demon.

Environmental authorities were criticized for slowness in responding to the spill. So far, no heads have rolled. But it sure seems as tho people in power should pay for the failure to put into place environmental safeguards, which is the TRUE scandal here.

'No to cruelty, no to fracking and yes to renewable energy.'  

'The Lizama Petroleum Disaster'. Lizama is the name of the well which poured out oil.

'Popular sovereignety on environmental issues.' 

 More and more municipalities are holding local referendums, and voting overwhelmingly against permitting oil exploration and mining. The votes are controversial, with some national politicians declaring that they have no legal weight.

'No to fracking.' But the leaking well had nothing to do with fracking.

The often uninformed and emotional opposition to fracking (like the opposition to nuclear power genetically modified organisms) threatens to make conventional oil extraction appear environmentally sound.

'Don't take out our life. No fracking in Colombia.'

 By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

The Real Scandals Behind the Oil Spill

Spilled out from Ecopetrol's Lizama 158 well poisons a nearby stream. (Photo: Vanguardia Liberal)

An abandoned oil well pouring out petroleum since the beginning of this month has generated angry headlines about animals killed, fishermen out of work and residents sickened. But the real scandal may be state oil company EcoPetrol's alleged irresponsible handling of its exhausted wells.

The Lizama 158 oil well in Santander Department has been pouring out oil, much of it into a nearby river, since the start of March. At least 550 barrels of oil - according to the company - and perhaps as many as 23,000 barrels - according to the National Environmental Licensing Agency (ANLA) - have spilled out.

Ecopetrol has speculated that a nearby tectonic shift could have triggered the leak. But whatever the immediate cause of this spill, the press scrutiny has exposed a much larger scandal. According to multiple Controlaria reports, Ecopetrol frequently failed to seal exhausted oil wells, leaving the wells a threat to pour petroleum onto their surroundings.

How many times will this disaster be repeated? How many Ecopetrol wells are leaking away into the jungle?

The accompanying scandal here is the, despite the repeated Controlaria reports, apparently no government enforcement entity bothered to force Ecopetrol to obey the law.

How many other environmental regulations are being ignored, setting the scene for future disasters?

It's worth pointing out, too, that even when it's not spilled into the jungle, oil is an environmental disaster all along its life cycle: Even the cleanest oil wells often require road and pipeline construction, opening the wilderness to farmers and deforestation.

And the oil that is processed 'correctly' will ultimately be burned, polluting the air and contributing to global warming.

The best solution for the environment is not to finally seal well Lizama 158, but to end our addiction to oil.

Meanwhile, yesterday El Espectador printed this impactful article about Colombia's worst environmental disasters. As the paper points out, the leaking oil well is a minor disaster compared to Colombia's terrible deforestation rate, the innumerable rivers destroyed by illegal mining, and the Ciénaga Grande, a wetland on the Caribbean coast, is being steadily killed by roads, dikes and canals.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

The FARC guerillas: Environmental Protectors or Villians?

FARC guerrillas: Environmental criminals, defenders or both?

The FARC's demobilization was supposed to be a boon for the environment, as coca leaf planting dropped and the guerrillas were transformed from environmental depredators to environmental defenders.

However, deforestation in Colombia has accelerated, and, if we're to believe them, in the FARC Colombia's jungles lost important defenders.

In the areas where the FARC guerrillas were the de-facto government, they claim that they prohibited deforestation, banned polluting into rivers, and controlled hunting.

An oil pipeline bombed allegedly by the FARC
guerrillas in February 2013.

Many of those policies were not only to protect the environment, however: They also protected the FARC forces. Intact forests hid the guerrillas from Colombia's military. And keeping trash out of rivers avoided tell-tale clues of the guerrillas' whereabouts.

On the other hand, the FARC certainly committed wholesale environmental depredations, by protecting drug crops which caused widespread deforestation, and sponsored illegal mines, which devastated countless river valleys. The FARC also bombed petroleum pipelines, poisoning rivers, jungles and cities' drinking water.

But one thing which seems clear is that, whether or not they intended it, the FARC's terrorism, kidnapping and extortion scared potential exploiters out of Colombia's remote regions. With Colombia's internal conflict winding down, businesses and farmers invaded virgin areas, accelerating deforestation. Between 2015 and 2016, deforestation increased by a terrifying 44%, and appears set to continue accelerating.

At the same time, cocaine production, one cause of deforestation, which was supposed to decline with the guerrillas' demobilization, has also accelerated.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Of Trash and Traffic Jams

Homeless men pick thru garbage outside the
Las Nieves fruit market.

Bogotá has two severe and worsening problems:

Too much trash, and too much traffic. We've all seen the huge piles of garbage on corners, which may have decreased, by haven't disappeared now that the city has supposedly got a new company collecting its waste.

And, just a few days ago, Bogotá's traffic congestion was ranked the second worst in all of South America.

A huge -and routine - traffic jam on Calle 26
in central Bogotá. Wluld a congestion charge help?

Bogotá has attempted futiley to address both crisis with a simple formula: Provide more space. It has expanded the Doña Juana landfill, and even talked about establishing a second one. And, it has spent many billions of pesos expanding urban avenues and intersections, only to have thousands of additional cars crowd those new spaces.

Unfortunately, increasing supply of something only generates more production, leaving the problem as bad or worse.

In the case of Bogotá's garbage, residents who toss trash onto corners and sidewalks have no limit to what they dispose of and no incentive to reduce the waste they produce.

The city's perpetual entreaties to recycle have accomplished little. And recycling is a poor solution compared to not producing the garbage in the first place.

Carrying plastic bottles - which will be used once and discarded - to a store.
Would a deposit keep them out of the landfill?
Would it discourage their use in the first place?

Bags of organic waste. How about paying flower growers to buy them and turn them into compost? That would save space in the landfill while also reducing greenhouse gas pollution.

Tires discarded behind the Central Cemetery. In many places, a deposit paid when a tire is purchased pays for its later reprocessing into something else.

And, in the case of traffic, studies have repeatedly shown that increasing road space only lures more drivers onto the roads.

A garbage truck painted with a slogan urging people
to place recyclables into white bags.

In both cases, the city shoulds employ economic incentives to motivate residents to change their behavior.

An obvious one is a deposit on tires, bottles and other disposable items, which would be used to pay
consumers to return those objects to be reused or recycled, and finance their reprocessing into something useful. The beauty of a deposit is that it also shifts the costs to the products' users instead of society in general.

Recycling sounds idealistic, but is much less environmentally sound than simply not generating waste in the first place. And, most of Bogotá's recycling programs are disfunctional, anyway. Take a peek into most recycling bins, and you'll see regular trash in all of them. And the trash collectors have only one place to dump the contents, anyway. The city urges residents separate recyclables from regular trash and place them in white bags. Nobody does this - and for good reason, since the trash collectors have no separate place to carry recyclables, anyway. And even if people did separate out their recyclables, dogs and homeless people would come by and rip open the bags and scatter the trash, anyway.

And the best way to reduce traffic congestion is to raise driving's cost, by hiking the cost of gasoline or introducing a London-style congestion charge for driving into the center of the city. Bogotá's Pico y Placa law, which prohibits cars from driving three days per week depending on their license plate numbers, has obviously failed to reduce traffic jams, and may even be making them worse.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

When Numbers Lie

Perhaps - but probably not - you saw this brief article in El Tiempo recently:

Under the headline 'Ecological Vehicles Improve their Position,' the article boasts that the registration of electric and hybrid vehicles shot up in September by 26.3%. The writer doesn't seem to know basic math, since the previous months fewer than half such vehicles were registered, meaning that September actually saw a registration leap of way over 200%.

Potential relief for our lungs from Bogotá's polluted air? Don't be so hopeful.

'October started badly for car sales.'

Translated into absolute numbers, in September only 24 'green' vehicles were registered, and 9 and 11 in July and August. Those numbers are so measly as to be insignificant.

After all, in the first half of October, 7,260 new vehicles were registered in Colombia, a number which the national retailers federation, Fenalco, called 'disappointing.'

At that rate, in a good month for 'ecological' vehicles and a 'bad' one for sales of conventional, smog-belching ones, the so-called 'green' vehicles accounted for only a little more than one tenth of one percent of all car sales.

(It's also worth recalling that, depending on the materials used to build them, particularly the battery, electrical vehicles can produce lots of environmental impact.)

Incomprehensibly, the government has even placed quotas on the number of ecological vehicles which can be imported each year, at about 5,000 annually thru 2027. I doubt they limit imports of conventional gas guzzlers. Of course, at the rate they're going, the imports will never come close to that number. E-vehicles are more expensive than conventional ones (altho less expensive to operate), environmental values here don't seem very strong, and Bogotá has few vehicle charging stations - and in fact removed some of them recently.

A Renault Twizy electric car in north Bogota, alongside a truly ecological vehicle.

Colombia provides some tax and import-duty benefits for importers and buyers of electric vehicles, but they obviously are not enough. And until the government gets serious, mostly by raising the price of gasoline, don't expect any real change.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

'Deforested Bones'

A skeletal bird made from wood represents deforestation's impacts.

Colombia's immense biodiversity is going fast, in great part because many creatures' forest habitats are disappearing.

A deforested danta.

And the National University's Natural History Museum's current exhibition dramatically exhibits that with sculptures of wild animals made from sticks, pieces of bark and charred wood gathered in deforested areas.

Peace with Colombia's various outlaw organizations was supposed to strengthen protection of the environment. Instead, deforestation has accelerated the last several years, to an incredible 20,000 hectares per hour, or 178,000 hectares per year - about double the entire land area of the Dutch Antilles. According to the museum, half of Colombia's high-altitude wetlands and its foothhill forests are gone, as are 90% of its tropical forests.

With the forests, go all the species living in them.

Deforestation is driven primarily by the expansion of agriculture, both legal and illegal, including cattle ranching. Every time a new road or pipeline is cut thru forest, observers watch the deforestation radiate out from the initial line.

A deforested jaguar.

The museum's exhibition, called Deforested Bones, includes messages warning against consumerism. However, our unbridled consumption of natural resources is only one cause of a complex phenomenon. Other parts are poverty that makes farmers desperate to feed their families, wealth which enables landowners to corrupt government officials, and twisted government policies which routinely give natural resource extraction priority over environmental conservation.

A deforested sloth.

A deforested spider monkey.

The natural history museum also has permanent exhibitions about anthropology, evolution, archaeology and Colombian wildlife.

A museum visitor sticks his hand into a crocodile's mouth.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours