I LOVED this book! Read it years ago and was so inspired.
Kai
--- On Sun, 12/6/09, Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network <lakinroe at silcom.com> wrote:
From: Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network <lakinroe at silcom.com>
Subject: [Scpg] Gaviotas A Village to Reinvent the World by Alan Weisman
To: scpg at arashi.com
Date: Sunday, December 6, 2009, 1:38 PM
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."
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Seth
Biderman contributed reporting.
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