[Scpg] Gaviotas A Village to Reinvent the World by Alan Weisman

[Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network]

Gaviotas
A Village to Reinvent the World
by Alan Weisman

10th Anniversary Edition

http://www.chelseagreen.com/bookstore/item/gaviotas
Los Llanos-the rain-leached, eastern savannas of 
war-ravaged Colombia-are among the most brutal 
environments on Earth and an unlikely setting for 
one of the most hopeful environmental stories 
ever told. Here, in the late 1960s, a young 
Colombian development worker named Paolo Lugari 
wondered if the nearly uninhabited, infertile 
llanos could be made livable for his country's 
growing population. He had no idea that nearly 
four decades later, his experiment would be one 
of the world's most celebrated examples of 
sustainable living: a permanent village called 
Gaviotas.
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
An Isolated Village Finds the Energy to Keep Going

CLOSE

By SIMON ROMERO
Published: October 15, 2009
LAS GAVIOTAS, Colombia - In the 1960s, an 
aristocratic Colombian development specialist 
named Paolo Lugari took a road trip across these 
nearly uninhabited eastern plains, a region so 
remote and poor in soil quality that not even 
Colombia's historic upheavals of violence had 
taken root here at the time.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/16/world/americas/16gaviotas.html?_r=3

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.

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