John & Susy Pint

  A walk in the woods  Introducing city dwellers to Nature By John Pint Guadalajara, Mexico's second-largest metropolis, just happens to sit adjacent to a magnificent pine and oak forest just as big as the city itself. Bosque La Primavera covers 30,500 hectares. You can easily step into this woods and walk 10 kilometers without ever seeing a soul. Here we have the perfect setup for introducing the younger generation to butterflies and woodpeckers, pumice and canyons, acorns, mushrooms, and edible plants. I have seen such introductions fail miserably. Enthusiastic adults take children on a long hike. Soon they are hot, sweaty, exhausted, and decidedly turned off. “How much longer do I have to do this?” becomes the song of the day, and “Let's go home!” the refrain. The most successful example I know of, on how to bring kids into contact with nature, is the Summer in the Bosque program, which naturalist Jesús “Chuy”  Moreno has been conducting for over thirty years. For one ...

  Welcome to Mexico’s largest ecosystem: Arid and Semi-arid Scrubland by John Pint This ecosystem is what you find if you enter Mexico through Mexicali or Ciudad Juarez. It's the Mexico of film, song, and cartoon: the hot, dry habitat of the Gila monster and the jumping cholla cactus. How is it possible that this same ecosystem is today the chosen home of thousands of Canadian and US expats? It's not so surprising. The northern extreme of the Arid and Semi-arid Scrubland includes the Sonoran Desert where a temperature of 52 degrees Centigrade (126° F) was recorded last June. But at the southern end of the system we find Mexico’s largest lake, Chapala, on whose shores the average temperature is about 21 degrees centigrade (70° F), which aligns with the standard "comfortable room temperature” in most parts of the world. Few of the 20,000 expats living on the shores of Lake Chapala would describe their neighborhood as” Semi-arid Scrubland,”  despite what the geography books s...

This quick and simple way to delete messages with attachments or photos will make sure you stay within Yahoo’s new storage limits...for the rest of your life. By John Pint John Pint attacked by 11,000 email attachments At the end of July, 2025, it began to appear, a scary message from Yahoo telling me I had exceeded my email storage limit and if I didn't reduce it, I would no longer be able to send and receive messages. This would cut off communication with hundreds of people my wife and I had met while “teaching our way around the world” in South Korea, Spain, France, Japan, England and Saudi Arabia A quick search revealed that this little problem had been caused not by me but by Yahoo itself. For years they had been giving a terabyte of storage space to their non-paying customers, but now they announced that, effective August 27, 2025, they would cut this down to 20 gigabytes.  That is a 98% drop in storage space! So, how many gigabytes was I using? I discovered I could see the a...

  Por John Pint                                                                              Versión en inglés Parece que el mundo está siendo asfixiado por el microplástico. Nuestros océanos están llenos de microplástico. Los peces se lo están comiendo. Nuestra ropa lo está desprendiendo. Aquí en México, el omnipresente soplador de hojas levanta enormes nubes de microplástico para que podamos respirarlo. Y un poco de este material se mete dentro de nosotros cada vez que comemos o bebemos de un recipiente de plástico.  ¿No inventaron las bolsas biodegradables, los vasos y los platos de papel, para deshacerse de este problema? Bueno, la verdad ahora ha salido a la luz: el "papel" en esos vasos en realidad está impregnado o recubierto con plástico. De hecho, ni los vasos ni los platos so...

By John Pint It seems the world is being smothered by microplastic. Our oceans are full of it. The fish are eating it. Our clothes are shedding it. Here in Mexico the ubiquitous leafblower raises huge clouds of it for us to breathe. And a little bit of it gets inside us whenever we eat or drink anything from a plastic container. Didn't they invent biodegradable bags—and paper cups—and paper plates—to get rid of this problem? Well, the truth is now out: the “paper” in those cups is actually impregnated or coated with plastic. In fact, neither the cups nor the plates are recyclable, and when they finally break down, what you get is microplastic. Not so biodegradable Most “biodegradable” bags may need over 500 years to biodegrade. Likewise those “biodegradable” bags.  A 2017 study shows that, over a year, there was no degradation seen in so-called biodegradable bags submerged in seawater at 25°C. When they’re deposited in a landfill, a US National Library of Medicine report (2021) say...

Photos by John Pint Mexico has five big ecosystems and they just happen to converge inside what I call the “ Magic Circle ”  around Guadalajara, an area that many people refer to as Western Mexico. I live in a mile-high oak and pine forest just outside Guadalajara, which puts me in the Temperate Forest Ecosystem. The many foreigners living around Lake Chapala reside in the Arid and Semi-arid Scrubland Ecosystem with flora, fauna, and weather conditions quite different from mine. Communities located northeast of Guadalajara reside in the Grasslands, consisting of mostly flat prairie land while people located along the Pacific Coast are in two other very different, Tropical Ecosystems. This means the inhabitants of Guadalajara can reach any one of Mexico’s ecosystems after only a few hours of driving. It also means that people interested in moving to Western Mexico can literally pick the climate of their choice to live in. Here I will focus on just one of these ecosystems: the Temper...