"Everywhere else they're tearing down rain forests. We're showing how to put them back."...Paolo Lugari, Gaviotas Founder

Surrounded by Colombia's political turmoil and guerrilla warfare lies an inspirational example of human ingenuity and resourcefulness. What began as a living laboratory to develop sustainable technology for the tropics soon became a community, a village; and the scientists, entrepreneurs and visionaries who created it called their new home Gaviotas.

 
In the late 1960s, Colombian activist Paolo Lugari surveyed his surroundings and started to worry. He noted the exponential growth of the world's population. He weighed the depletion of natural resources by modern industry. He speculated that, if the trend continued, no land would remain to sustain human life.

But Lugari also had hope. He believed that if someone could demonstrate that a place like the barren savanna of Colombia's Llanos region was fit for human life, then the whole notion of sustainable living could be rethought.

And who better to prove the point than Lugari himself.

The Llanos, an area of vast plains east of the Andes Mountains, comprises more than a quarter of Colombia. But because the land is so starved of nutrients, only 2 percent of the country's population lived there as recently as the '80s.

According to Sven Zethelius, a soil chemist with the Universidad Nacional in Colombia, the soil of the Llanos is "the worst in Colombia - a desert." All of which was perfect for Lugari's intentions.

"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," Lugari explains in Alan Weisman's book, "Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World."
 

What began as a center to develop sustainable technology became a village, and the scientists, entrepreneurs and environmental visionaries called their new home Gaviotas.Lugari, Zethelius and a small group of scientists and environmentalists started looking for solutions to the Llanos' lack of natural resources.

To convert the area from a barren prairie to an arable site, engineers tapped underground sources for potable water. They built windmills to power the town's water pumps. At a local playground, they installed a seesaw to power a water pump that fills a reservoir and wading pool.

The group found innovative ways to gather other resources. They created windmills capable of withstanding the occasional strong current and equally capable of converting the steady but mild Llanos wind into energy.

Despite persistently cloudy weather, the solar water heaters at Gaviotas have been so successful that residents and companies around the country have purchased them.
 

The innovations have clearly paid off. According to Weisman, the village is now self-sufficient in energy production and nearly self-sufficient in food production. In the early '70s, the United Nations named Gaviotas a "model village to the world in appropriate technology."

Perhaps the most exciting breakthrough at Gaviotas occurred in agriculture. According to biologists, the Llanos was once part of a vast rain forest that stretched to the Amazon River. About 30,000 years ago, drastic climate changes and devastating fires destroyed the area. By the time Lugari and his team arrived, the soil was acidic and shallow - poor conditions for agriculture.

Undaunted, they kept experimenting, searching for crops that could survive such conditions. Finally, to everyone's surprise, the Gaviotans discovered that Caribbean pines not only flourish in the desolate Llanos but also yield a natural resin used in a variety of products such as paint, cosmetics and medicine. This resource now provides the village with a substantial source of income.

With the newly planted trees, Gaviotas witnessed the resurgence of a complex, vibrant ecosystem. The community decided not to use herbicides or remove any superfluous growth that sprouted in the shelter of the trees that were planted. The result was remarkable. Wild plants and animals that had disappeared with the rain forest returned.

The Llanos is once again alive.

"If we show the world how to plant sustainable forests, we can give people productive lives and maybe absorb enough carbon dioxide to stabilize global warming in the process ... Everywhere else they're tearing down rain forests. We're showing how to put them back," Lugari says.

Lugari and his community have succeeded in their mission to inhabit the uninhabitable; to convert desert wasteland into vibrant forest; to foster a sustainable community in the most unforgiving area of Colombia. As Weisman says, "these are people who are just trying to solve a little problem - 'Could this part of our country become useful?' They came up with something that has implications far beyond their success. We can all gain from it."

©200 Environmental news network
 
 
 

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Nearly everyone who has been to the solar village Gaviotas, east of the Andes in Colombia, calls it a utopia. But it isn't, says Paolo Lugari, its founder. That word means in Greek "no place." Gaviotas has existed, however improbably, for more than 30 years now. Lugari says it's a "topia" -- simply a place.

When he first saw it, looking down from a small plane in 1965, it surely looked like no place. There were two crumbling warehouses abandoned by a road crew at the end of a failed attempt to cut a highway across the huge, wild, wet savanna called the llanos. No one lived on the llanos except a few scattered ranchers and the Guahibo Indians, who fished and hunted in mosquitoey forest strips along the rivers. The soil was so toxic that nothing but tough grass could grow.

If people can live here, they can live anywhere, Lugari thought. He set out to show that they could.

His secret weapons were the professors and students of the universities of Bogota. Lugari dropped into the office of a mechanical engineer named Jorge Zapp and asked, "Can you build a turbine efficient enough to generate electricity from a stream with just a one-meter drop?" He went to Sven Zethelius, a soil chemist and asked, "What can we grow in that soil?" He posted notices inviting doctoral theses on how to press oil from palm nuts, how to raise hundred-pound wild capybaras for meat, how to make fiberboard out of llano grass.

Most of these experiments didn't work, but once the engineers got out to Gaviotas, a 16-hour tire-destroying jeep drive from Bogota, they began having other ideas. Necessity surrounded them, and they produced a stream of invention.

They found that 14 parts of that terrible soil combined with one part cement hardened into a stony substance they could use for dams and buildings. They made water pipes by lining ditches with soil-cement, laying down long polyethylene tubes filled with water, pouring more soil-cement on top, letting the whole business harden, then draining the water and pulling out the plastic. Trucks could drive over those pipes without crushing them.

They attached water pumps to see-saws; kids provided the pumping power. They designed ultra-light windmills to catch the mild but steady llanos wind without being blown over by the occasional llanos gale. They invented solar water-heaters so cheap and effective that Gaviotas started a business back in Bogota, installing them everywhere from the president's house to a 30,000-resident slum housing project. Often engulfed in mountain clouds, Bogota is no ideal place for solar power, but the Gaviotans developed a collector so efficient it could catch scattered sun energy even on cloudy days.

The technical and architectural triumph of Gaviotas is its hospital, cooled by the wind, heated by the sun. The sun also provides hot water, boiled sterilized water, and the heat for six pressure cookers in the kitchen, plus enough electricity for the lights. By the time the hospital was built, Gaviotas had several hundred inhabitants, including the only doctors, nurses, and teachers for hundreds of miles around. People came there for medical care and sent their children there to school.

There were fish in the river, and cattle could eat the grass. Zethelius had discovered enough decent soil on the riverbanks to plant mangoes and cassava and cashews, but not enough to provide fresh vegetables for a growing population. So the Gaviotans learned to grow lettuce and tomatoes and cucumbers in containers of nutritionless rice hulls, washed with manure tea.

They kept searching for some plant that could survive the llanos soil and finally found it. A Caribbean pine from Venezuela thrived, they discovered, as long as they dipped the roots of its seedlings in a fungus, a mycorrhyza, which was missing from their soil but importable from the pines' native territory. Without knowing quite why, they planted hundreds of acres of pines.

As the pines grew into forests, the Gaviotans found a use for them. They tapped their oozing gum, which could be distilled (with solar energy) into turpentine and a valuable resin used in paints, glues, cosmetics, perfume, and medicines. There was a huge market. Gaviotas had a new industry.

The pines dropped needles and built up soil. They cooled the ground, slowed the wind, raised the humidity. Suddenly new kinds of plants sprang up beneath them -- hundreds of kinds of plants. The rainforest, not far to the south, had once grown here, and now, through seeds carried by birds or roots creeping up from the river-edges, it was returning.

The Gaviotans imagine themselves planting pines in expanding circles out into the llanos, harvesting gum for 100 years, leaving rainforest behind. Meanwhile their technologies for pumps and collectors and windmills, all simple, affordable, and purposely unpatented, are spreading throughout the world.

"This is what the world needs," said Aurelio Peccei, aged founder of the Club of Rome, who visited Gaviotas ten days before he died. I agree, not only because of Gaviotas's technical ingenuity, but because of its attitude. Gaviotans live in peace surrounded by narcotics dealers and guerillas. They live without guns, without pesticides, willing to serve and teach all comers. They count their wealth in sun, water, and community. They believe that solutions can come from anyone, anywhere, even from, most especially from, the Third World.