"CYBERPRENEURS" Saving The Amazon Rainforest
With The Internet

Isolated Iquitos, Peru, becomes a Demonstration of Global Village
"Telecommunity" Concept

Isolated Iquitos, Peru is a demonstration of the Global Village "Telecommunity" Concept. Cyberpreneurs Stan Tyminski and Dick Carncross embody a new way of doing business, and doing good. Tyminski lives in Toronto, Carncross lives in Los Angeles, and they own and operate a restaurant, coffee roastery shop, winery, and the local cable TV and Internet system in the Peruvian Amazon, in the small city of Iquitos (400,000 population). The city is at the head of navigation of the Amazon River and the setting of the climax of the best-selling spiritual novel, The Celestine Prophecy. These "two guys from the Amazon" (and Los Angeles, and Toronto) are "cyberpreneurs": a pair of businessmen who developed their business savvy and commercial relationships before the Internet was born -- Tyminski is 54 and Carncross is 74 -- but who use the Net every day to work together from the two ends of North America as they run their business, the Gran Maloca restaurant, distillery, store and coffee roastery, in South America.

The Electronic Information Age has enabled the two men to jointly operate a business and employ 45 people from nearly four thousand miles away while separated by some two thousand miles. (With 40-percent unemployment, Iquitos can make good use of any additional employers.) Tyminski and Carncross are working to create prosperity in the Peruvian Amazon in a manner that uses local labor and resources and does not depend on degrading or destroying the natural environment. But Tyminski and Carncross are doing more than that. They are providing education and information to Iquitos.

Tyminski (who ran for the presidency of Poland in 1990 against Lech Walesa and runs a high-end computer company in Toronto) owns Iquitos's cable TV and Internet service provider. His company offers classes in Web site development and runs an "electronic post office" providing e-mail access to Iquitos's citizens -- a vital service in a city whose only access to the rest of the world is by air and by boat (ten days down the Amazon to the Atlantic Ocean!). Carncross, a principal of a Los Angeles-based sustainable technology company, has initiated e-mail pen-pal relationships between elementary school kids in Los Angeles and Iquitos. And the two are discussing developing World Wide Web-based distance learning programs for Iquitos's college students.

Tyminski and Carncross and their Gran Maloca Restaurant are playing a role in saving the priceless biological richness of the Amazon environment: Maloca has started a winery and distillery, to make fine brandy out of native Amazon plants and enable money to flow from the rainforest without destroying it, while Tyminski lovingly oversees the winery cum distillery from Toronto (extending a family tradition from Poland, where Tyminski's family produced wine for 500 years), Carncross is a partner in the Los Angeles solar energy and environmental planning firm SUN Utility Network, which, among a host of sustainability projects, is developing a new ecological "solar coffee" project.

The heart of this new enterprise is a "Green Technology for Green Coffee Beans" barter program to sell Peruvian and developing-world coffee directly to American and European consumers using the World Wide Web and pay the coffee farmers and cooperatives in very useful environmentally sustainable technology, such as solar-thermal coffee drying machines, water pasteurization systems for clean water, and solar-photovoltaic high-efficiency water pumps for irrigation and transport of water. Solar-thermal medical autoclaves (medical instrument sterilizers) and solar-electric bicycles are other items being bartered or to be bartered in the "Green for Green" program.

Tyminski and Carncross believe in "e-trade, not aid." Due in no small part to Stan Tyminski and Dick Carncross, in 1999 Peru officially entered the Information Age and became SUN's first "Telecommunity Demonstration Center." Making a profit and helping people and saving the environment: this is the new environmental and electronic entrepreneurialism of the 21st century, as practiced by a couple of gringos from the Amazon . . . and Los Angeles . . . and Toronto!