REBUILDING the VILLAGE

LAS GAVIOTAS

Our office for various environmental projects (I can't tell you which year) once circulated an old photocopy of a story about a sustainable fantasy dream-project called Las Gaviotas.

Big dream indeed!

And the article had photos. That meant that the place was real. The article was copied again and again, circulated around different offices, three hole punched and displayed in a coffee table binder of projects that gave us inspiration—set our own dreams alight.

And the pictures we saw? (I wish I could show you!)

Life of a forest coming from desert: we saw sandy dry soil and trees being planted in channels in the middle of nowhere, seesaws pumping water, a windmill....

I'm quoting the next couple of paragraphs here from the book description of, "Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World, 2nd edition", by Alan Weisman, that "... in the late 1960s, a young Colombian development worker named Paolo Lugari wondered if the nearly uninhabited, infertile Ilanos 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...

"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 Ilanos is unexpectedly reestablishing itself... Paolo Lugari (has been called) "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."

Between desert-like dry conditions and flooding, the grassy savannah with a soil PH of 4 was too acidic to plant. The Gaviotans with their determination and perseverance observed bio-diverse clue after clue, until challenges thwarted were all laid to rest and the forest that once had existed 30,000 years ago slowly began to regrow.

First they had found a type of young pine, a rare tree seedling that might take to the soil with its PH. The Gaviotans cultivated these to provide the beginnings of shade. They accidentally learned that some of the trees stood a much better chance in the presence of certain soil fungi during the minimal growing time in the region.

The shade from these pines then lowered the temperature of soil, thus adding moisture and increasing the microbial web. Another synergistic enzyme made the pines hardier, resilient too. And so on it goes...

Humidity from the processes and breathing of trees and bacterial presence in air increased the rainfall, gradually regenerating two hundred and fifty new species of plants, including medicinal ones presumed to be dormant, re-catalyzed from ancient rainforest seeds during the restoration of soil PH to 6.5.

Fresh water aquifers added to deep soil water basins and further new kingdoms of life sprang up. Medicines allowed for health care of local groups and animals.

With more growing life, increasing forest products permitted the residents bio-based economic activities and their larger community provisions with food, water, products and education from reforestation.

Quality wood made musical instruments. The Gaviotan pine resin turned out to be valuable for turpentines on the international market and with biofuels too.

The empowered villagers using clever solutions in biology, physics and green chemistry, with a zero waste biorefinery for their resin packaging right at it's core, built many inventions: a water-pumping children's playground, processing facilities for mineral waters with packaging to be recycled as toys, a manual well-digger, ox-drawn land graders; peanut shellers, balers which compressed hay into bricks, solar grain dryers, pedal-powered grinders, sugar cane presses, solar panels, solar kettle, micro-hydro plantation and a naturally ventilated and UV purified hospital with sterilization and distillation for surgeries too.