By Matthew Hirsch

One man's junk: A unique collaboration of city officials, design companies, and countercultural artists created the Scrap House in Civic Center Plaza as part of World Environment Day. The light and airy, fully functional, one-bedroom home was built entirely of salvaged materials - from street signs to phone books and computer keyboards - demonstrating the potential for reusing recycled items.
Guardian photo by Lori Spears

Instead of rebuilding the city to resemble its past, the people of Bahia declared their home an eco-ciudad, an ecological city. They created an environmental affairs department that would have a say in all city planning, and they reserved land for wildlife habitat extending within a few blocks of the plaza in the heart of the city.

Bahia de Caraquez is now an evolving model of urban sustainability. With far fewer resources than most of the world's industrialized cities, Bahia has managed to develop its economy while sidestepping common urban problems like pollution and traffic congestion.

"We have to make the city an ecological city and not just say it is an ecological city," Dr. Carlos Mendoza Rodriguez, the mayor of Bahia, told the Bay Guardian June 3 during his visit to San Francisco for U.N. World Environment Day.

In a translated interview from his room in the Clift Hotel, Mendoza described how Bahia overhauled virtually all its basic city services in the aftermath of the 1998 destruction.

During the rainstorms clay washed down from the hillside, filling the streets sometimes as much as four feet deep in muck. With the help of nongovernmental organizations from around the world, including the San Francisco-based Planet Drum Foundation, inhabitants started replanting the hillside with vegetation to improve the soil and keep more of it in place when the rainy season returned.

Bahia also developed a transportation system that revolves around bicycling and pedicabs, which are human-powered tricycles people hire to be shuttled around the city. And it came up with a zero-garbage policy that includes citywide recycling and composting. (See the entire ecological city plan for Bahia de Caraquez at the Planet Drum Web site, www.planetdrum.org/eco_plan_2001.htm.)

"But the most important thing is education, to keep the people educated about the importance of having an ecological city," Mendoza told us.

That, some conservationists say, is what's missing from the environmental dialogue in the developed world. Here in the U.S., environmental stewardship is often viewed as more of a voluntary political pastime than an essential way of life.

Former U.S. poet laureate Robert Hass touched on this point at the Nature in the City Symposium, one of the World Environment Day events held at the Metreon in downtown San Francisco.

Hass said the problem with the environmental movement is that it's always in reactive mode, responding to something bad that's about to happen. The reason ecological restoration is so important is because it represents a proactive effort to secure the natural environment before it can be exploited, he said.

Before people in Bahia began rebuilding their city, they held a giant civic celebration. Peter Berg, founder of the Planet Drum Foundation, told us in this way they integrated stewardship of the land with their distinct local culture.

"Part of the urban identity has to be the restoration and preservation of nature," Berg said.

Last week at World Environment Day, lots of important people tried to draw attention to the most acute environmental problems of today. If the U.N. is looking for solutions, Berg suggested, they may want to schedule next year's World Environment Day in Bahia.

"In the future," Berg said, "I believe Mayor Mendoza and people like him will become teachers of the developed world."

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