Cancun Dispatch 8/28

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We end the meeting in a state of exhaustion, and go out for beer and food and a midnight ride around the Casa de la Cultura after a cloudburst, to observe the water flow.

To read Starhawk's reports from other global justice actions, see her book Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising. (New Society Publishers, 2002). Her website, www.starhawk.org has ordering information.

P.S.: It seems I've already offended someone in Cancun City with my description of it as a model of globalization. So I just want to say that there is quite a lot about this city I really like. It's my theory of urban design that you can tell how coherent a city is by how easy it is to accidentally run into the people you need to meet -- and here it is easy. Of course, the convergence center and the media center and the downtown park are now all within a block of each other, and that helps. But it is laid out in interesting patterns and angles that leave open plazas and spaces everywhere for small parks or children's playgrounds tucked into corners, and it certainly seems more affluent than many cities I've visited. City officials are doing their best to accommodate the floods that will soon descend, and as I wrote yesterday, they were very open and interested in our permaculture proposals.

We have been hanging out with Cancun residents and people who work here and live here. Cancun, I know, is better than a whole lot of places (try Rafah, for example, in Gaza!) but it suffers from globalization as do many similar places in the U.S. and around the world. A friend of mine in Orlando, Florida, says the running joke there goes, "It's good that the Disney corporation has created so many jobs, because you need three or four of them to survive!."

Cancun lives on tourism, but most tourists never see Cancun City. They are taken off to big hotels or resorts, most owned by multinational corporations, with all-inclusive package deals, and they never need to venture out beyond the hotel zone. Which means all the delightful small businesses and good, cheap restaurants and lively clubs and taxi drivers don't benefit much from the money they spend. Money comes in, but most of it goes right back out again. In an ecosystem or an economy, abundance depends not just on how much money or rainfall or nutrients enter a system, but on how many times they recirculate before they leave.

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