Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World

Alan Weisman, a journalist hired by NPR to investigate solutions for environmental crises, spent years collecting information in a tiny, remote village at the eastern edge of the war-torn country of Colombia. That village was Gaviotas; this book is his result.I read this book on a recommendation from Daniel Quinn, author of "The Story of B" and "Beyond Civilization." Quinn's entire philosophy rests on two ideas: living in a sustainable manner, and allowing the reader to come up with their own solutions for doing so. Gaviotas is a community where people did just that - through ingenuity, creativity, and hard work, the residents of this planned village created a place where water is pulled from the ground using pumps attached to children's see-saws, heat is provided by the sun, and electricity by the wind.It's a progressive's dream come true, and an experiment that has succeeded in all possible ways. This book lays out the history of Gaviotas and its unique founder, Paolo Lugari, and places it within the context of the ongoing struggles in Colombia. In the wake of the World Trade Center attack, I decided to re-read Gaviotas to remind myself that not only is there hope for humanity as a whole, but hope that individuals will begin to take responsibility to begin freeing ourselves from the confining forces of our self-imposed prisons called "civilization," but still manage to retain the good things, too.Every person on earth should read and re-read this book. If you haven't, buy it now or start hoofing it to the library.

This is truly one of the most inspirational books I have ever read, for a couple of reasons. For the most part, utopian ideals such as this are very hard to envision as a real solution, because they tend to be made up of people who for whatever reasons are willing to give up the creature comforts and bring their standard of living down a few notches. Whether or not their new style of living is actually better, and more enriching is not the issue in my mind, what is the issue is that the vast majority of those in the first world would under no circumstances give up those luxuries.But Gaviotas is a colony founded not by communalists or hippies, but by pragmatic engineers, who enjoy many creature comforts. They do not attempt to drastically change the social structure into something entirely non-hierarchical; instead, one gets the impression this is a group of very intelligent people, who realized they were destroying the planet they lived on with their lifestyles, and so keep it on a 'selfish' level, rather than introducing an ideological debate. This is terribly important, in my mind, to creating a new world in which we can live sustainably.This book is well written, full of intriguing concepts which will send you out looking for more information about photovoltaic systems and how exactly pumps work, and most of all, full of more hope than anything I have read in... well, forever.After all, if this can work in the middle of a virtual desert, in -Columbia- of all places, than it should be able to work anywhere.I recently bought fifty copies of this book, and I give them to almost everyone I meet. I'm not a zealot by nature, but this book is so very important, I would urge every single person who is considering buying it to do so, and to tell fifty friends as soon as you've read it.

In 1966, when he was 22, Paolo Lugari and his brother drove over barely passable roads to a desolate area 200 miles east of Bogota, Columbia. The llanos area is a poor-soil barren that grows only a few nutrient-deficient grasses, a vast expanse of sun-baked plains in spite of over 100 inches of rain per year. A place of deadly water and hungry mosquitos. Conditions were so daunting that the Columbian government abandoned an attempt to build a road through the area. Lugari saw an opportunity to create something very special. And he did it. Today Gaviotas is a thriving, sustainable community of hundreds of joyous people studying, inventing, producing, singing and dancing amidst a huge forest that they planted. Residents from all walks of life have designed and built, planted and harvested, birthed, nurtured, taught, and entertained. There are teeter-totters that operate super-efficient pumps to bring water to the school, solar heat to cook meals, solar kettles to sterilize drinking water, ultra-light windmills to provide power. The hospital has been designated one of the 40 most important buildings in the world. Some have called Gaviotas a utopia. Lugari insists that, "Utopia literally means no place. We call Gaviotas a topia because it's real." Gaviotas the village is surprising, uplifting, extraordinary. Gaviotas the nonfiction book is as compelling as a novel, as educational as a textbook, as inspirational as the biography of a great person. If you need to rise early, do not take this book to bed with you.

A captivatingly inspirational account of story that reaches to the core of what is remarkable about human nature, human courage, and human ingenuity achieving something great and important in the face of daunting conditions. The continuing adaptive accomplishments of the Gaviotas people in the face of multiple challenges -- extreme environmental conditions, corrupt government practices, turbulent and deadly national politics, indifferent and unsupportive post-1980s corporate globalization, continuing uncertainty -- is truly an affirmation that people can, and hopefully will, achieve a kind of society that is both ecologically sustainable and humanly necessary. This book is 'the power of one' writ large on our collective future. I teach a university course entitled: Humanistic Values in a Technological Society and, in the face of social and environmental problems caused by industrialization and electronic media-technology, it is difficult for the title not to seem a proverbial oxymoron. In the future this book will be required reading so that students can see that indeed there are solutions to our collective problems, both human and technological. One reviewer bemoaned that there was no 'useful information' in the book, meaning it was short on technical details (I am sure this will follow if sufficient positive interest is shown to this publication). In response I would point out that the people of Gaviotas have shown that the most important and necessary 'commodity' of the future is and will be human inspiration and perseverance; given these, the details will follow. I thank Alan Weisman for telling the Gaviotas story.

Twenty-seven years ago, a group of South Americans envisioned a society in which limited resources would form the base of a sustainable future. To bring their experiment to life, they chose a site in the sparsely populated and nearly arid plains of eastern Colombia. They called their village "Gaviotas" and went on to create a host of ingenious and relatively affordable technologies. Alan Weisman produced a documentary on Gaviotas for National Public Radio in 1994. After producing his radio documentary, Weisman maintained an avid interest in Gaviotas. He returned to the village several times in the past few years, and updates the Gaviotas story in his new book: "Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World." Weisman, a journalist based in Tucson, AZ, has covered some of the world's worst ecological disasters, but when he needs his faith in the future restored, he always returns to Gaviotas where, he says, "people seem to have gotten it right." This book documents the successful implemntation of a self-sufficient, harmonious, ecologically based community that is building a sustainable economy. Gaviotas comes as close as human society can to achieving a real Utopia - and perhaps will serve as a model for a more balanced way of life for all of us.