Gaviotas A Village to Reinvent the World by Alan Weisman

In the absence of infrastructure, the first Gaviotans invented wind turbines to convert mild breezes into energy, hand pumps capable of tapping deep sources of water, and solar collectors efficient enough to heat and even sterilize drinking water under perennially cloudy llano skies. Over time, the Gaviotans' experimentation has even restored an ecosystem: in the shelter of two million Caribbean pines planted as a source of renewable commercial resin, a primordial rain forest that once covered the llanos is unexpectedly reestablishing itself.
Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez has called Paolo Lugari "Inventor of the World." Lugari himself has said that Gaviotas is not a utopia: "Utopia literally means 'no place.' We call Gaviotas a topia, because it's real."
Relive their story with this special 10th-anniversary edition of Gaviotas, complete with a new afterword by the author describing how Gaviotas has survived and progressed over the past decade.

About the Author

Alan Weisman
Author of the critically acclaimed New York Times best seller The World Without Us, Alan Weisman is an award-winning journalist whose reports have appeared in Harper's, the New York Times Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, Discover, and Orion, among others, and on National Public Radio. A former contributing editor to the Los Angeles Times Magazine, he is a senior radio producer for Homelands Productions and teaches international journalism at the University of Arizona. He lives in western Massachusetts. ...

Gaviotas
A Village to Reinvent the World
by Alan Weisman

Excerpt

TOPIA
"They always put social experiments in the easiest, most fertile places. We wanted the hardest place. We figured if we could do it here, we could do it anywhere."
-Paolo Lugari, founder of Gaviotas

Paolo Lugari was never tempted by the lush resources of places such as the Serranía de la Macarena. The vision gestating in his subconscious, as his Land Rover crawled across Colombia's huge eastern plain in late 1966, involved a hunch that someday the world would become so crowded that humans would have to learn to live in the planet's least desirable areas.
But where? His time in the Chocó-Colombia's Pacific jungle, slated for a possible trans-oceanic canal --had persuaded him that rain forests and excess people were a foolish mix. But in South America alone, there were 250 million hectares of fairly empty, well-drained savannas like these. One day, he was convinced, they would be the only place to put bursting human populations. Los llanos were a perfect setting, he decided, to design an ideal civilization for the planet's fastest-filling region: the tropics.

No one held much hope for him. The llanos were considered good for little except inspiring llanero musicians to write songs about how mournful life gets on an endless prairie. Biologists believed that thirty thousand years earlier, this had been part of an unbroken rain forest clear to the Amazon. Then, climate change had created new patterns in the predominant winds. The trade winds that formed over the seas to the northeast blew inland, fanning lightning strikes into fires that burned the jungle faster than woodlands could regenerate. A few trees, including curatella americana-the lonely, fire-hardened chaparro, a recurring leitmotif in regional folklore-were able to adapt. For the most part, the jungle receded south, where the winds diffused, leaving short-cycle, nutrient-poor savanna grasses in its stead. "It's just a big wet desert out there," Lugari was told repeatedly.

"The only deserts," he would one day reply, "are deserts of the imagination. Gaviotas is an oasis of imagination."

September, 1968: Jorge Zapp, head of the mechanical engineering department at the University of Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, leaned back at his desk. His last class of the week had just ended; outside his window, it was a rare Bogotá day, so clear that the white mantle of the Nevado de Ruiz volcano gleamed two hundred miles to the west. He was headed out to stroll the grassy hills of the campus when someone knocked on his door. Even as he swiveled to answer, a tall, thick-chested young man wearing a light khaki jacket strode into his office. Extending a large hand as he sank into a chair, in lieu of introduction he demanded, "True or false: Can you build a turbine efficient enough to generate electricity from a stream with just a one-meter drop?"
The stranger propped his elbows on Jorge's desk, rested his bearded chin on his hands and leaned forward. He looked vaguely familiar, and despite his audacious entrance there was something ingratiating about him. Zapp rubbed his moustache and thought a moment. "True," he replied. "Why?"
Then he recognized him. This was the Paolo Lugari he'd seen in the newspapers, the enfant terrible son of a brilliant Italian lawyer, engineer, and geographer who'd found Colombia's tropics so irresistible he married into a prominent family here and stayed. Educated mainly at home by this eclectic father, Lugari passed his university exams without attending classes. On the strength of an inspired interview, he won a United Nations scholarship to study development in the Far East. Upon returning from the Philippines, he launched a highly-publicized, successful national campaign to save a historic village near Bogotá from being drowned by a federal hydroelectric project.
"Come to Gaviotas and I'll show you," Lugari told Zapp. "Tomorrow."
"Come to where?"
"You'll see."
Next, Paolo went to find Dr. Sven Zethelius, a soil chemist at the Universidad Nacional's agricultural chemistry department. Zethelius was the son of a Swedish ambassador who, like Lugari's own father, refused to return to the relative boredom of Europe after a diplomatic stint here. Not long after his first trip to los llanos, Lugari learned that Zethelius was delivering a series of stirring lectures on the tropics. On evenings whenever the Universidad Nacional wasn't closed by strikes, he had gone to listen.
The tall, graying, goateed chemist had been sent as a boy to Scotland to study, but he'd promptly returned. "Europe is too organized," he told students. "I want a place where there's no fossilized order. I want a jungle. There are a hundred times more resources here than in developed countries, where everything's been exploited. Colombia can be whatever you want it to be."
Lugari sensed a fellow dreamer. One afternoon he cornered Zethelius in his chemistry lab and explained that he'd staked a claim to an abandoned highway camp he'd found in los llanos, along with ten-thousand surrounding hectares. "What can I plant out there?" he asked.
"Probably nothing." The soils around Gaviotas, Zethelius informed him, were only about two centimeters thick, quite acidic, and often high in aluminum toxicity. "Frankly, they're the worst in Colombia. A desert."

balancines and pump design

"So I'm told. Look," Paolo urged, "the only deserts are those of the imagination. Think of them as different soils. Someday," he continued, "Colombians who want land will have three choices: burn down the Amazon, do the same to El Chocó, or move to the llanos. If we could figure out ways for people to exist in the most resource-starved region in the country, they can live anywhere."

"We?"
"Think of it. Gaviotas could be a living laboratory, a chance to plan our own tropical civilization from the ground up, instead of depending on models and technology developed for northern climates, like the Peace Corps wants to teach everybody."
Zethelius began to nod.
"Something for the Third World, by the Third World," Paolo persisted. "You know what I mean: When we import solutions from the United States or Europe we also import their problems."

Zethelius glanced outside. Protesters were again massing in the concrete plaza. Megaphones, then tear gas would shortly follow. He pulled the window shut. "True enough," he replied. "In Colombia, we've got enough problems as is."

"What exactly do you intend to beget here?" Sven Zethelius asked him. They were lying in canvas hammocks under an open-air maloca that local Guahibo Indians had built them, consisting of a hip roof of thatched palm-fronds supported at the corners by four thick poles cut from moriche trunks. By yellow Coleman lamplight, they watched a squadron of shadowy bats feast on the buzzing hordes attacking their gauzy mosquito netting.
"Exactly? I'm honestly not sure," Paolo confessed. He'd had a raw, barely formed idea of people coming out to los llanos and living together in productive harmony. Who they would be, and exactly what they would do, wasn't yet clear.
"I'll tell you once I know, myself. Or when people like you tell me what's possible."
Night after night, they fell asleep talking in their hammocks. Zethelius told Paolo about changes underway that alarmed him and his colleagues, such as a phenomenon called the greenhouse effect, and how the number of the earth's species was inexorably shrinking-both of which were news to Lugari in 1970. If they were going to colonize the llano, Zethelius insisted, they should aim for nothing less than a new, alternative, inhabitable bio-system. Maybe they should invite people from all over the world and make Gaviotas a confluence of cultures, the beginning of a new earthly society.
"I don't know if we should be thinking about saving the entire world out here."
Zethelius hooted. "I've seen what you're reading." Lately, Paolo had been gobbling the canon of utopian literature: Sir Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Thoreau, Emerson, Karl Popper, Edward Bellamy, B.F. Skinner, Bertrand Russell, even revisiting Plato's Republic.
"You don't want to just survive out here," Zethelius's voice declared from behind his mosquito netting. "You're trying to create a utopia. In los llanos, no less."
Paolo tried to sit up upright in his hammock to look the older man directly in the eye. After flailing about briefly, he gave up. Lying back again, he said, "I want Gaviotas to be real. I'm tired of reading about all these places that sound so perfect but never get lifted off the page into reality. Just for once, I'd like to see humans go from fantasy to fact. From utopia to topia."

AS GAVIOTAS JOURNAL

Carlos Villalon for The New York Times
Farmers in Las Gaviotas, a Colombian village founded in the arid eastern plains 40 years ago, use a special tool, above, to plant pines that produce resin for biofuel.
Enlarge This Image

Carlos Villalon for The New York Times
The village uses the biofuel in its tractors and processes other resin for market sale.
Stopping to rest in this vast expanse, written off by agronomists as the equivalent of a tropical desert, Mr. Lugari decided it was the perfect place to experiment with the future of civilization. He founded a village unlike any other in this war-weary country.
"The only deserts that exist in this world are deserts of the imagination," said Mr. Lugari, 64, on a visit this month to the community he named after the river gulls, or gaviotas, he saw flying overhead on that trip more than 40 years ago.
These days, visitors travel by propeller plane over the bleak savanna to get here, or by bus past the occasional guerrilla or paramilitary checkpoint. The visitors rarely come. But when they do, they get a glimpse into a four-decade experiment to alter civilization's dependence on finite fossil fuels and industrial agriculture.

Its 200 residents have no guns, no police force, no cars, no mayor, no church, no priest, no cellphones, no television, no Internet. No one who lives in Gaviotas has a job title.
But Gaviotas does have an array of innovations intended to make human life feasible in one of the most challenging ecosystems, from small inventions like a solar kettle for sterilizing water to large ones like a 19,800-acre reforestation project whose tropical pines produce resin for biofuel and a canopy under which native plant species flourish.
Las Gaviotas, Mr. Lugari explained, began with one idea: Instead of choosing an easy, fertile place to test energy self-sufficiency and creativity in agriculture, why not choose one of the hardest? The concept, devised before the 1970s oil crisis and well before this decade's fears of depleting oil supplies, guided the community's evolution.
While Las Gaviotas has largely faded from public view within Colombia, it arouses interest in energy-efficiency circles in rich countries. Luminaries in the field occasionally visit, like Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a longtime champion of energy efficiency in the United States, who came here this year.
The place turned out to be more forbidding than Mr. Lugari imagined. The country's long, mutating war migrated to the savannas around Gaviotas in eastern Colombia, a once tranquil region equivalent to three-fifths of the country but with less than 10 percent of its population. Drug traffickers and private armies arrived years ago, blazing trails to move cocaine into Venezuela and run guns back into Colombia.
Like an oasis amid this madness, Gaviotas drew peasants from the llanos, or plains, who moved here to earn about $500 a month, about double the wage for rural workers elsewhere in Colombia. Some once nomadic Guahibo Indians joined them. Scientists, while largely avoiding Las Gaviotas now because of the surrounding violence, helped design the village's cluster of homes, laboratories and factories, which still lie 16 hours by jeep from Bogotá, the capital.
"We try to lead a quiet life, depending on nothing but our own labor and ingenuity," said Teresa Valencia, 48, a teacher who moved here three decades ago.
She said residents had to deal with guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the FARC, and gunmen loyal to a paramilitary warlord, Pedro Oliverio Guerrero, who reigns over the llanos with the nom de guerre Cuchillo (Knife).
"We don't take part in this war, and we ask those who enter our village to do so without their rifles," Ms. Valencia said. "So far, for us at least, this has worked."
It is impossible to know precisely how well this strategy has worked from a one-day visit here this month with Mr. Lugari, who lives in Bogotá. He guided foreign journalists and an American engineer who hopes to create his own version of Gaviotas in New Mexico, on the condition that they not spend the night, because of kidnapping fears.
Visitors who arrive at dawn on a Cessna plane leave before dusk. They see inventions like a water pump powered by a children's seesaw, a solar kitchen and the forest of tropical pine trees that stands in contrast to the otherwise barren plains.

More than two decades after the pines were planted, with the help of a mycorrhiza fungus introduced to help digest the poor soils, jacaranda, ferns and laurels have flourished under their cover in what some agronomists call one of the developing world's most astonishing reforestation projects.

The New York Times
Las Gaviotas is about 16 hours by jeep from Bogotá.
"A place like Gaviotas bears witness to our ability to get it right, even under seemingly insurmountable circumstances," the American journalist Alan Weisman wrote in a 1998 book about Gaviotas.
The village uses resin from the pines for biofuel in its tractors and motorbikes, and processes other resin for sale to use in products like varnishes and linseed oil.
Yet Las Gaviotas is not immune to the global economy. China recently flooded Colombia with cheap resin imports, forcing Las Gaviotas to slash production costs on the products it sells by 40 percent.

Mr. Lugari, whose father was a scholar from Rome and married into a Colombian political dynasty, shuns computers and travels with a heavy suitcase of books. On his one-day trip here, the suitcase carried Fritjof Capra's "The Science of Leonardo."
While Las Gaviotas spawns fascination abroad, some in Colombia are less sanguine about the village created by Mr. Lugari.
Jorge Zapp, a Bogotá engineer and early collaborator here, recognized the importance of Mr. Lugari's ideas and the force of his personality in making them reality. "But like all imperial regimes, from Julius Caesar to Castro, Gaviotas centers on one person," he said. "After some years, Paolo's shadow grew too big."
As if to underscore the point, residents of Gaviotas respectfully call Mr. Lugari "Doctor."
Others, like Mauricio Gnecco, a renewable energy expert at Los Llanos University in Villavicencio, have compared Gaviotas to a submarine, largely isolating itself from surrounding communities as it seeks lasting change within its own boundaries.
A mural in the village's common room depicts a community full of curious children at play amid the inventions, but only a dozen children attend the one-room school, raising questions about the community's future.
Mr. Lugari smiles at such doubts, shifting the conversation to new inventions, like a remote-controlled zeppelin to detect forest-threatening fires on the savanna.
One Gaviotera, as those born in this village are known, explained her theory.
"We have survived," said the resident, Andrea Beltrán, 25.
"Maybe, at this time and place in Colombia," she continued, "that is enough."

« PREVIOUS PAGE 1 2
Seth Biderman contributed reporting.