[Scpg] An Invitation to Visit Gaviotas in November 2010

[Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network]

An Invitation to Visit Gaviotas in November 2010

Please post this on your own sites, lists, etc. - Thank you!

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=659348860625601851#

So far, few outsiders have managed to visit this 
special place. But public order is making a 
comeback in the region, and this past March, a 
group of 30 people (including a 1-year old baby 
girl!) traveled all the way to Colombia's eastern 
plains to visit this unique community 
http://www.friendsofgaviotas.org/Friends_of_Gaviotas/Home.html

  The visit was a success, and the village now 
wishes to invite another 40 people for a fully 
hosted day visit. In addition, Gaviotas founder 
Paolo Lugari is personally inviting you to spend 
2 additional days in conversation with him and 
other Gaviotans in and around the Gaviotas office 
in Bogotá.

During the 8-month rainy season the roads turn 
into mud and the Gaviotas landing strip is 
flooded - this November is your chance to go 
while it is dry!

The regular price for 3 days of hosted events, 
including a chartered flight from Bogotá, meals, 
tours and talks is $995 (US dollars). To make 
sure we fill up all the spaces, we are offering a 
combination of early-registration discounts and 
group discounts (2 or more people signing up at 
once) that together can lower your price to as 
little as $495 (see pull-down price menu below).

Your payment will support numerous current 
initiatives at Gaviotas (including 
reforestation). You will make personal 
connections that may lead to further involvement 
and new friendships! Sorry, but we have no 
scholarship funds available at this time.

The 3 consecutive days of activities will take 
place during the last full week of November 
(Thanksgiving week in the USA). As a safety 
precaution, there will be no overland travel and 
no overnights at Gaviotas. You are encouraged to 
arrive in Bogotá on Sunday night at the latest 
(21-NOV) and depart on Saturday at the earliest 
(27-NOV) to allow for extra time with your new 
friends. Suggestions for meaningful optional 
activities will be provided.

If you cannot commit the 6 days above, please 
coordinate with us, to make sure you won't miss 
the key event of the trip - the day visit to 
Gaviotas itself.

You must make your own arrangements for travel 
from your home country to Bogotá and back, as 
well as for your overnight accommodations in 
Bogotá. We will suggest a hotel (likely in 
Bogotá's old town) where everybody could stay 
together.

Sample U.S. round-trip airfares: $536 from Los 
Angeles, $455 from NYC, $329 from Miami (check 
out www.kayak.com).

We are offering a 2-month money-back guarantee - 
no questions asked - in case you later change 
your mind about participating. This way, you can 
ensure your spot without any risk and lock in the 
discounted early-registration rate by clicking 
below. During the sign-up process on the PayPal 
site, please click on 'Add special instructions 
to merchant' and enter the names and email 
addresses of each person you are signing up.








Once we have a solid list of participants, we 
will share email addresses ahead of time, so 
people can introduce themselves to the group and 
coordinate travel and extra days in Colombia.

Happy travels! - - - - - Robert (trip coordinator at Friends of Gaviotas)

From the Lonely Planet's 2010 edition:

Colombia's back. After decades of civil conflict, 
Colombia is now safe to visit and travelers are 
discovering what they've been missing. The 
diversity of the country may astonish you. Modern 
cities with skyscrapers and nightclubs? Check. 
Gorgeous Caribbean beaches? Check. Jungle walks 
and Amazon safaris? Check. Colonial cities, 
archaeological ruins, high-mountain trekking, 
whalewatching, coffee plantations, scuba diving, 
surfing, the list goes on.
Read more at: http://www.lonelyplanet.com/colombia


Update :: Gaviotas Still Dreaming and Growing


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by Catherine Bailey
posted Jul 07, 2009

Ten years ago in YES! Š
We featured the story of Gaviotas, a village of 
more than 200 scientists, ecologists, students, 
dreamers, and innovators located deep in the 
heart of the Colombian llanos-an area of 
virtually lifeless desert. Founder Paolo Lugari 
explained, "They always put social experiments in 
the easiest, most fertile places. We wanted the 
hardest place." The pioneers of Gaviotas 
transformed 20,000 acres into a thriving 
community that sustained a wealth of flora and 
fauna, offered medical aid to the region, 
provided safety and education for young and old, 
built relationships with the indigenous people, 
and made its way toward self-sufficiency by 
cashing in on its renewable crops.
Today Š




Kids help with tree planting, one part of the sustainable forestry cycle.
Photo courtesy www.friendsofgaviotas.org.

Though it has had its share of troubles, Gaviotas 
is alive and well. The pine forest the Gaviotans 
planted in the 1970s has created a lush ecosystem 
that supports over 200 different kinds of plants 
and animals-many more than there were a decade 
ago.
In his postscript to the 10th anniversary edition 
of his book, Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the 
World, Alan Weisman writes, "Gaviotas [has] 
stayed alive by becoming an agro-industrial 
cooperative, and the industry part [means] 
tractors, mulchers, plows, and disks as well as 
motor scooters." The biodiesel grown on-site is 
enough to power them all. The Gaviotans have 
built a massive forest-fire prevention system 
featuring steel lookout towers-manned 24 hours a 
day-and a 65-foot-long, remote-controlled 
zeppelin equipped with video cameras. Their 
co-generating boiler produces heat to refine pine 
resin while spinning a turbine that provides 
electricity to the entire village.
The founder of the U.N.'s Zero Emissions Research 
and Initiatives foundation, Gunter Pauli, has 
been working with Lugari on expanding the 
Gaviotas model to other parts of Colombia. With 
the help of the community, they are making plans 
to build Gaviotas II, a reforestation project 
that would offset the equivalent of Japan's CO2 
emissions.

Catherine Bailey wrote this article as part of 
The New Economy, the Summer 2009 issue of YES! 
Magazine. Catherine is a YES! editorial assistant.
Check out the YES! archive:


Gaviotas! Oasis of the Imagination
In the "big, wet desert" of los llanos, nothing 
grows except a few nutrient-poor grasses. Paolo 
Lugari said he could build a self-sufficient 
society there-and make it sustainable.
http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/rx-for-the-earth/842
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by Alan Weisman
posted Jun 30, 1998






In the "big, wet dessert" of los llanos, nothing 
grows except a few nutrient-poor grasses.
Photo by Alan Weisman

As his Land Rover crawled across Colombia's huge 
eastern plain, the vision gestating in Paolo 
Lugari's subconscious involved his hunch that 
someday the world would become so crowded that 
humans would have to learn to live in the 
planet's least desirable areas. Los llanos, he 
had decided, were a perfect setting to design an 
ideal civilization for the planet's 
fastest-filling region: the tropics.

Later, he would tell everyone, "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."
No one disagreed, but in the beginning, no one 
held out much hope, either. The llanos were good 
for little except inspiring llanero musicians to 
write songs about how mournful life gets on an 
endless prairie. Biologists believe that about 
30,000 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 blew inland, 
fanning lightning strikes into fires that burned 
the jungle faster than the woodlands could 
regenerate. A few trees and plants were able to 
adapt, but 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," 
Paolo was told repeatedly.
"The only deserts," he would reply, "are deserts of the imagination."
Beginnings
Paolo Lugari passed his university exams without 
ever attending class. A fervid orator, he'd won 
competitions at Bogotá's Universidad Nacional, 
and, on the strength of a single inspired 
interview, he netted a scholarship from the 
United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization 
to study development in the Far East. Returning 
to Colombia in 1965, he was hired by a commission 
planning the future of the Chocó, a tropical 
wilderness that stretched the length of 
Colombia's Pacific coast. Today, the Chocó is one 
of the world's largest remaining intact virgin 
rain forests, inhabited by several 
jungle-dwelling Indian communities who have lived 
there for centuries.
Paolo's work had persuaded him that rain forests 
and excess people were a foolish mix. But after 
his uncle took him on an inspection flight of the 
Orinocan llanos, he started having visions. In 
South America alone, there were 250 million 
hectares of fairly empty, well-drained savannas. 
One day, he was convinced, they would be the only 
place to put bursting human populations.
From 1967 to 1970, Paolo Lugari slipped off to 
the llanos whenever his duties permitted. He went 
through a dozen tires, frequently got lost, 
waited days for ferries, collected medicinal 
herbs with a Guahibo Indian shaman, camped on 
river sandbars amid the rustling of mating 
turtles, stayed in a friendly llanero's hut when 
the chiggers drove him nuts, and contracted 
malaria twice. ("Light cases. Just a lot of 
chills," he assured his friends. "I bring 
repellent now.")
On one trip to los llanos, Paolo and his brother 
Patricio found a pair of long, concrete sheds 
filled with weeds. These were former warehouses 
of a road construction camp, now abandoned, that 
would have been the midpoint of the failed 
trans-llano highway.
"We're here," Paolo told his brother.
"Where?" replied Patricio, removing his driving 
goggles and scraping caked dust from his face. 
Perplexed, he looked around. What was Paolo 
planning to do in this desolation? Only a few 
sections of the warehouses' laminated roofs were 
still intact. Except for a small thicket of 
gallery forest, they were surrounded by grass in 
every direction.
Paolo, meanwhile, was exuberant. These buildings 
formed the shell casing for the idea that had 
bored through his mind ever since he had seen 
them from the air - they could be the first 
structures in a community expressly designed to 
thrive in these inhospitable, supposedly 
uninhabitable lands.
For now, he was home. As they leaned against the 
Land Rover, three small yellow-billed terns flew 
over. "There must be water beyond those trees," 
Paolo said.
"Why?"
He pointed at the birds. "River gulls. They're gaviotas."
A Living Laboratory
As Paolo's duties in the Chocó wound down, he 
spent more time at his camp, which he had named 
Gaviotas. Paolo often stayed on the nearby Río 
Muco with his llanero friend, who was growing 
rice, citrus, papaya, mangos, guavas, and cashew 
fruit. But in order for a substantial population 
to live here, Paolo realized, they would need to 
cultivate the llano itself, not just the thin, 
arable strips along its river banks.
Not long after his first trip to los llanos, 
Paolo learned that Dr. Sven Zethelius, a soil 
chemist at the National University, was 
delivering a series of lectures on the tropics. 
Sensing a fellow dreamer, Paolo attended the 
lectures whenever the Universidad Nacional wasn't 
closed by strikes.




This windmill was designed to take advantage of 
faint, tropical breezes. Gaviotas has distributed 
this technology and other innovations throughout 
Colombia and the world.
Photo by Alan Weisman


One afternoon, he cornered Zethelius in his 
chemistry lab and explained that he'd staked a 
claim to the abandoned highway camp he'd found in 
los llanos, along with 10,000 surrounding 
hectares. "What can I plant out there?" he asked.

"Probably nothing." The soils around Gaviotas 
were only about two centimeters thick, quite 
acidic, and often high in aluminum toxicity, 
Zethelius informed him. "Frankly, they're the 
worst in Colombia. A desert."
"So I'm told. Look," Paolo urged, "think of them 
as different soils. Someday, Colombians who want 
land will have three choices: burn down the 
Amazon, do the same to El Choco, 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. "True enough," he 
replied. "In Colombia, we've got enough problems 
as it is.
At Zethelius's direction, he planted some fruit 
trees and also tried growing corn, without much 
success. He lured a pair of university soil 
chemistry students out to hunt for possible 
pockets of fertility, as well as to look for sand 
and clay deposits to use in construction. He 
hired Guahibo Indian and llanero workers to begin 
reconditioning the old highway workers' camp and 
building thatched living quarters. When an 
itinerant teacher wandered in, the scattering of 
families who lived in the area embraced Paolo's 
idea of a school, and soon the teacher had ten 
llanero kids for pupils. A nurse from Puerto 
Gaitan offered to come once a month. Within a 
year, as more people settled in Gaviotas, she was 
staying for a week at a time.
From Utopia to Topia
"You don't want to just survive out here," 
Zethelius's voice declared from behind his 
mosquito netting. They were lying in canvas 
hammocks under an open-air maloca the Guahibo had 
built. "You're trying to create a utopia. In los 
llanos, no less."
Paolo tried to sit 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, which in Greek 
literally means 'no place,' to topia."
But how to do that? He started by persuading the 
faculties of various universities around the 
country to send thesis candidates to Gaviotas, to 
dream up solutions to the challenges that 
concocting an ideal society from scratch in los 
llanos would entail. Word spread that Gaviotas 
was seeking adventurous thinkers with ideas they 
wanted to test. The reward: Earn a degree by 
helping to make the empty savannahs flourish. If 
the students thought they would be happy at 
Gaviotas, Lugari told them, Gaviotas would be 
their sponsor.
Which meant, they later learned, that they would 
get a hammock, mosquito netting, food, and a 
share in the cooking duties. Usually, they didn't 
learn this until 500 kilometers of roadless llano 
separated them from home.





Gaviotan water pumps, like this innovative seesaw 
pump, brought clean, safe water to many rural 
South American communities.
Photo by Alan Weisman

Jorge Zapp, head of the mechanical engineering 
department at the Universidad de Los Andes in 
Bogotá, had needed no persuading to bring 
engineering students to Gaviotas. Undergrads whom 
he had taught how to weld and to turn a lathe 
were now at Gaviotas getting graduate degrees, or 
simply getting paid, for playing. In a drafty 
workshop converted from the highway crew's former 
heavy equipment shed, they recycled a mass of 
flotsam lugged from the city into prototype 
windmills, solar motors and water heater panels, 
micro-hydro turbines, biogas generators, and all 
manner of pumps.

Until the Arab oil embargo in 1973, Gaviotas was 
considered an intriguing experiment with little 
practical relevance. Then, as waiting in gas pump 
lines gave the world time to contemplate the 
novel notion of renewable energy, Gaviotas began 
to attract attention. Journalists appeared. After 
the Wall Street Journal published a front-page 
feature about a South American community that had 
"solved" the energy crisis by devising implements 
powered by energy that was actually 
replenishable, a delegation arrived from the 
United Nations Development Programme.
In 1976, shortly after the OPEC oil embargo, 
Gaviotas was designated as a model community to 
the United Nations, and this honor was 
accompanied by a substantial research grant. Over 
the years, as their successes multiplied, the UN 
support would grow to include travel budgets for 
Gaviotans to scour the world for ideas they could 
adapt to their tropical topia, and then show that 
same world how their approach could work 
anywhere. It was on one such trip in the 
mid-1970s that Paolo Lugari hit upon a solution 
to two problems at once.
Cultivating Los Llanos
He was returning from a conference in Río de 
Janeiro, when his plane stopped to refuel in the 
Brazilian jungle port of Manaus. He resigned 
himself to a delay that meant the airline was 
lodging them in Manaus's riverside palace, the 
Hotel Tropical. But what impressed Paolo Lugari 
far more that night than the neocolonial 
architecture were the dinner vegetables.
He collared the maître d'. "Where," he demanded, 
"are you getting fresh lettuce and tomatoes in 
the middle of the jungle?" By now he knew that 
the impoverished soils in los llanos weren't much 
different from those of a rain forest, and 
despite Sven Zethelius's diligent efforts, 
Gaviotas was having a dismal time producing 
anything nourishing from them.
"Aren't they lovely?" the maître d' agreed. "Some 
priests deep in the forest have a garden."




Interlocking soil, cement, and burlap blocks 
patterned after Incan construction methods made 
up this swimming hole's dam.
Photo by Alan Weisman


Paolo cancelled his flight, rented a boat, and 
went to find them. A few hours upriver, he was 
led to local Catholic missionaries growing greens 
in box planters made of palm wood, set on blocks 
above the slick clay jungle floor. The Brazilian 
priests had analyzed the soil to determine which 
minerals were lacking. In the boxes, they mixed 
dirt with decomposing jungle detritus, and 
compensated for the absent nutrients by adding 
extra cobalt, manganese, and traces of magnesium, 
zinc, and copper. The result was a bountiful crop 
of onions, chard, lettuce, and tomatoes.

Excited, Lugari went back and told Zapp and Zethelius. They had some concerns.
"Besides lacking all the minerals those priests 
have to add, we're missing potassium, phosphorus, 
calcium, and boron," Zethelius said. But the 
bigger problem was root disease. Introduced 
species, such as carrots and lettuce, had no 
natural defenses against the local insects, 
fungi, and bacteria.
"Suppose," Zapp asked Zethelius, "that instead of 
poisoning soil with fungicides, we just 
sterilized it?" Before Sven could reply, Zapp's 
mind raced ahead. "Got it," he announced. Instead 
of trying to sterilize the local soil, it would 
be a lot easier to make their own, and then add 
whatever minerals were necessary.
"Make it out of what?" Lugari asked.
"Anything. All you need is something to hold the 
plants in place so they don't fall over. Sand 
from the riverbank beaches. Rice husks."
Four years later, greenhouse enclosures covered a 
third of a square kilometer, filled with Spanish 
onions, tomatoes, chard, lettuce, cilantro, peas, 
peppers, parsley, garlic, cabbage, balm, and 
radishes. The Gaviotas hydroponic system used 
wastes from the rice farms along the Río Meta as 
a growing medium. The technique spread around the 
country, even in the flower industry. In their 
hydroponic nursery, they had plants germinating 
in trays of sawdust and wood chips. "It lets us 
grow food where nothing would grow before," Zapp 
said.
Later, Sven Zethelius actually found something 
that would grow in los llanos. Paolo had brought 
the idea back from Venezuela, where he'd heard an 
agronomist mention the hardiness of pinus 
caribaea, the tropical pine that grew in a 
variety of soils throughout Central America. 
Zethelius obtained seedlings from Guatemala, 
Nicaragua, Belize, and Honduras. So far, 
everything was still alive and even getting 
taller, with the hondurensis variety performing 
the best. Sven's little plot of foot-high, 
long-needle pines became a Gaviotas curiosity.
"What will we do with the pine trees?" an engineer asked him.
"Who knows? At the very least, we'll learn something from them."
Pioneer Clinic
In 1975, Oscar Gutiérrez, a doctor from Cali, 
Colombia, had been headed to the Amazon for a 
year of rural service when a chemist told him 
about a colleague, Sven Zethelius, who was off 
with a bunch of romantics trying to settle los 
llanos, like pioneers in the North American Old 
West. Intrigued, Oscar tracked down Paolo Lugari, 
who told him that the difference was that 
Gaviotas was helping to save the Indians, not 
shoot them. They had a vacant building that could 
serve as a clinic. "Are you ready to go?"





Gaviotas founder Paolo Lugari with a Guahibo man.
Photo by Alan Weisman

A week later, a group of Guahibo Indians appeared 
to see the new doctor. Cases of smallpox, they 
said, were appearing in their village. To 
Gutiérrez's relief, it turned out to be measles, 
but he had never seen so many adults infected at 
once." There is no cure for measles," he said 
helplessly. "If a person isn't immunized, it can 
be fatal." Obviously, nobody here was.

Oscar Gutiérrez turned around and returned to 
Bogotá to seek enough vaccine to halt an 
epidemic. In the federal health department, they 
told him that none was available.
"There's no vaccine," he was told again in the Ministry of Health.
"They're dying!" he insisted.
"So what? They're Indians."
In Cartagena, he finally located four thousand 
doses of measles vaccine, which saved many lives, 
but it was too late for many others: The 
epidemic, which the health ministry had chosen to 
ignore, eventually spread all the way to 
Venezuela. Despite high mortality, it merited 
mention only in the back pages of Bogotá 
newspapers.

Originally at Gaviotas to fulfill his one-year 
rural service obligation required of all recently 
graduated M.D.s, Oscar Gutiérrez remained an 
extra year, leaving to study cardiology in Europe 
only after being assured that Magnus Zethelius, 
his former assistant who had recently earned his 
M.D., would replace him. Together they drew up 
plans for a health system, based on their 
experiences in the measles campaign, to deal with 
the great distances between the villages of los 
llanos. They wanted radios in every settlement, 
so Indians and llaneros could call the central 
clinic at Gaviotas for emergency instructions or 
an ambulance. They wanted the Gaviotas school to 
be a center for teaching indigeous people the 
rudiments of Western medicine and also a 
repository of the Indians' knowledge of medicinal 
botany.

They submitted a funding proposal to the Ministry 
of Health. Their work was featured in a film 
about Gaviotas shown at the United Nations' 1976 
World Conference on Human Settlements and Habitat 
in Vancouver. Two years later, at the World 
Conference on Technical Cooperation Among 
Developing Countries held in Buenos Aires, 
Gaviotas was named the leading example of 
appropriate technology in the Third World. 
Nevertheless, the Ministry of Health rejected 
their proposal.

"It's unconscionable," Magnus Zethelius said.
"It's votes," Paolo replied. "In los llanos, 
there aren't any. Indians don't. Nobody would 
count them if they did. That's the way things 
work."
"I'm sick of how things work," Magnus said. 
"Maybe we should start our own hospital."
"We will," Paolo said. "We will."



NEXT ISSUE: Gaviotas! Oasis of the Imagination :: Part 2
The UN funding for Gaviotas runs out just as oil 
prices plummet. With little possibility of 
marketing their solar collectors, the Gaviotans 
must find ways to become self-sufficient while 
coping with intrusions by the military, 
guerrillas, and paramilitary groups.





This adaptation and synopsis was taken from, 
Gaviotas!: A Village to Reinvent the World, by 
Alan Weisman, copyright © 1998. We 
enthusiastically recommend this well-written, 
often moving book on this remarkable community. 
Go to your local bookstore or buy this book now.

Alan Weisman is an independent journalist who has 
written for numerous publications, including the 
Los Angeles Times Magazine. He also co-produced a 
series for National Public Radio on solutions to 
world environmental and social problems.

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