DP
> -----Original Message-----
>
> A couple of weeks ago I forwarded a review from the Nation about a book
> called Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World. It describes an amaz=
ing
> community of scientists and engineers who have been inventing and
> deploying
> solar-, water-, human- and wind-powered technologies for 30
> years. They're
> based in the rural flatlands of Columbia, between Marxist guerillas,
> right-wing paramilitary forces, and drug lords. It's a very inspiring
> story, and the book reads like a novel.
>
> Anyway, there's a website for the book
> http://www.chelseagreen.com/Gaviotas/index.html
>
> I've included the book review again below.
>
>
>
>
> GAVIOTAS: A Village to Reinvent the World.
>
> By Alan Weisman.
>
> Chelsea Green. 231 pp. $22.95.
>
> Imagine no disaster. Imagine the drumbeat of social-ecological
> deterioration quieting and a sudden thrill of
> honest hope. Something substantial. Not another small tale of rene=
wal
> told without proportion. Not public
> relations, junk science or professional optimism but sweet
> realism and
> actual, honest hope. Imagine actual
> good news.
>
> If that's too hard, imagine a book telling a tale too lovely for
> fiction, a lyrical, well-observed book that
> reports from the llanos of eastern Colombia, savannas
> tortured by guns
> and cows and cocaine, of an
> experiment in solar democracy in which "appropriate technology" is
> anything but a sad product on the
> discount tables of broken, post-sixties idealism. That experiment,
> named after a local river tern, is
> Gaviotas, and if ever something small and distant deserved our
> attention, this is it.
>
> Gaviotas is a village of professors and peasants, of Indians and
> engineers. It was founded in 1971 by
>
> Paolo Lugari, a visionary son of the Colombian upper crust who loo=
ked
> into the future and saw that the
> population would surge. But then Lugari did something new--he
> concluded that the only alternative to
> deforestation was learning to live, sustainably and well, in the
> llanos. Then he staked a claim to 25,000
> acres and set out to do just that, with considerable brio
> and success.
> Years later, his trouble earned him a
> copy of Gabriel Garc=EDa M=E1rquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude=
, in
> which the great man had
> inscribed, "Paolo Lugari, inventor of the world."
>
> An amazing tale it truly is, one that begins in earnest when Jorge
> Zapp, head of mechanical engineering at
> Bogot=E1's Universidad de los Andes, succumbs to Lugari's
> enthusiasm and
> comes to the llanos--and then
> brings all the grad students he can entice. Lugari flies around
> hustling grants and volunteers. A research
> colony forms, para-socialistic like most isolated scientific
> stations,
> only more so. The inventions begin.
>
> The early list is suggestive: a non-polluting tannery, a cheap ble=
nd
> of local soil and cement for paving
> roads and runways, gaskets made of palm leaves, food preservation
> techniques, palm oil=ADbased feed
> supplements. These people were working from the ground up! Then ca=
me
> solar collectors and biogas
> generators. And all manner of pumps, like the hydraulic ram that u=
sed
> riverflow to move a piston, and the
> piston to pump water. And micro-hydro turbines. And,
> eventually, after
> fifty-eight attempts, a windmill
> sufficiently adapted to local conditions that it could harness the
> slightest breezes and last years without
> repair.
>
> Gaviotas was not quite unique. In our own New England, the
> New Alchemy
> Institute was tracking the
> same ethos down the same trail. But though the appropriate-technol=
ogy
> movement ramified well enough,
> Gaviotas prospered and New Alchemy did not. One key to its surviva=
l
> was geographic--Gaviotas was
> both in and of the developing world. By the late seventies,
> it sported
> a third of a square kilometer of
> hydroponic greenhouses, using rice husks in place of the poor loca=
l
> soil to cultivate all sorts of vegetables,
> including eggplants the local Guahibo Indians wouldn't eat on a be=
t.
> In 1978, the World Conference on
> Technical Cooperation Among Developing Countries named Gaviotas th=
e
> leading example of appropriate
> technology in the Third World.
>
> The "solar kettle," more than any other Gaviotan device, proves th=
e
> justice of this award. Though based
> on "an old country custom: boil water one day to drink the next," =
the
> kettle took six years to perfect. It
> combines solar panels, storage tanks, an efficient heat exchanger,=
a
> bit of distillation and a spigot--which
> you turn to draw off potable water. In a world like ours, where
> billions lack access to safe water and the
> developmentalists cite this fact above all others to justify even
> their most harebrained big-dam-based
> schemes, the implications of such a simple, lovely device are, alo=
ne,
> astonishing enough.
>
> This is where the story gets good, for Gaviotans refused to patent
> their inventions. Instead, they offered
> them to all who would use them and encouraged the formation of
> cooperatives through which low-income
> people could manufacture and thus benefit from Gaviotan technology.
> They ran a factory that built and
> installed thousands of windmills throughout the country. Back in
> Bogot=E1, a friend arranged for them to
> design a solar water-heating system for a 5,500-unit public housin=
g
> project. They had already developed
> highly efficient collectors, but needed lots of them and so organi=
zed
> a factory in which street kids, reborn
> as solar techs, churned them out. Now they needed a system for
> distributing the hot water fairly between
> floors, so they invented one. Today the building is the largest
> solar-water-heated construction in the
> world.
>
> In Colombia, bad news and violence are in no short supply. Here,
> again, the tale of Gaviotas turns into
> unexpected terrain, as in the story of Gaviotas's hospital, which
> melds solar architecture and Modernist
> design in such a sensitive manner that it was named, by a Japanese
> architectural journal, one of the forty
> most important buildings in the world. But forget that. Consider
> instead that it serves all comers: engineers,
> Indians and llaneros, guerrillas, army men and paramilitary forces.
> The policy is not to ask.
>
> The Gaviotans have their sympathies, of course. But at least as
> Weisman paints them, they are blessed to
>
> live lives that forbid them the joys of ideology. Indeed, one of t=
he
> pleasures of this book is the brief, vivid,
> situated tales that make the violence comprehensible.
> Narcotraficantes
> are a blight upon the land, but the
> guerrillas are hardly heroes:
>
> Far from feeling shielded by the purity of their mission, the
> Gaviotans knew well that environmental
> endeavors could be perilous. Recently, ELN guerrillas had
> captured the
> entire staff of a national park,
> Parque Natural El Cocuy. Nature reserves, they declared, were elit=
ist
> contrivances to deny people their
> rightful access to land. With the others watching, the
> guerrillas made
> the park superintendent, a biologist
> and celebrated llanero harpist, kneel and confess to this crime. T=
hey
> summarily executed him with a bullet
> to the back of the head.
>
> No wonder Gaviotans reject the zealotry of what, alas, many people
> still call "the left." But does this mean
> they cherish illusions of having somehow become post-political? I
> don't think so. Weisman reports a 1989
> visit by a group of Chinese diplomats. The ambassador, charmed by =
the
> forthrightness of the Guahibo
> Indians (who decided, after some deliberation, that he was white a=
nd
> not Indian because of his clothes),
> declared Gaviotas "a socialist paradise." Lugari, we are told,
> groaned. Fortunately, a subsequent visit by
> "the dean of Colombian right-wing politics" revealed that Gaviotas
> embodied "profound conservative
> principles." And Lugari complained that everyone wanted to classif=
y
> them. "We're not ideologues. All
> ideologies do is start trouble."
>
> Indeed. But here we should step back. The zealotry of the guerrill=
as
> was bred from suffering and injustice,
> and nature reserves often are "elitist contrivances." And they oft=
en
> do deny people access to land. The
> Gaviotans know this and don't expect their solar kettles and sleev=
e
> pumps to take the place of justice and
> land reform. They can always hope, of course, as can we, but still=
,
> time passes and land reform does not
> come. And there is so little unthreatened forest left. And in
> Colombia, as in Chiapas, as throughout the
> Americas and Asia and Africa, the forests shrink and shrink.
>
> Hope must strain against realism, and the overarching theme of the
> book is that, having established itself in
> one of the harshest environments on earth, Gaviotas "bears witness=
to
> our ability to get it right, even under
> seemingly insurmountable circumstances." And so it does, though we
> shouldn't stretch the point. I say this
> not because I see limits to the elegance and potential of
> decentralized solar technologies but because the
> dream of sustainability, though strong enough to brace Gaviotans
> against incessant brutality, remains a
> weak redoubt from the larger gale of "development." Gaviotas marks=
a
> wonderful spot on a new path for
> the poor, a path that's been marked before, though never, it seems=
,
> with quite the same panache. But
> remember, it isn't "poverty" that's the problem, not
> ecologically. Far
> better to indict "wealth."
>
> Even in Gaviotas, the flow of time saw idealism tested. By the end=
of
> the eighties, U.N. and
> Inter-American Development Bank grants had dried up, and armed
> violence pushed social spending far
> down on the government's agenda. Colombia's embrace of George Bush=
's
> free-trade policies was
> flooding its markets with mass-produced foodstuffs,
> undercutting local
> farmers and driving ever more of
> them to the cultivation of coca. The oil sector was booming, and, =
as
> usual, its captains were lobbying to
> block tax credits for alternative energy. The market for Gaviotas'=
s
> windmills and solar collectors declined
> and showed a disturbing trend--most sales were going to the
> "eco-fashion-conscious elite." The smell of
> defeat was in the air.
>
> But Gaviotas had become a rooted community, and it enjoyed
> the luck of
> the committed. Years before,
> after considerable effort, Gaviotan foresters had found a tree tha=
t
> would grow in the poor, thin soils of the
> llanos, and already they were growing a forest of Caribbean pine. =
It
> was a monoculture, but even this had
> an upside--the pines were sterile and posed no threat of ecologica=
l
> invasion. And since Gaviotas had
> developed plantation techniques that didn't rely on herbicides, th=
e
> trees, quite unexpectedly, formed a
> matrix in which long-dormant seeds, or, more likely, stray
> seeds borne
> by wind and bird droppings, could
> grow.
>
> As they did, with astonishing speed! Beneath the sheltering
> pines, the
> spare grasses of the llanos were
> displaced by flowering shrubs, jacarandas, saplings and vines of a=
ll
> variety. And with them were coming
> deer, anteaters, armadillos, eagles. With hard work and serendipit=
y,
> Gaviotas had helped to pioneer the
> emerging art of restoration ecology. More specifically, they had
> independently discovered a phenomenon
> that is only now being properly studied--tree plantations can host
> secondary succession processes of
> surprising resilience, in which even the fragments of altogether
> shattered ecosystems can return.
>
> And there was another happy twist to the tale--before long, the
> Gaviotans discovered that they could
> make a good income tapping the rapidly growing trees for
> resins, which
> they processed (while
> co-generating power, of course) into feedstocks for a variety of
> products, from paint to violin resin. Their
> financial crisis is over, at least for now. And they had a new ide=
a,
> which they promptly pitched to the
> Inter-American Development Bank:
>
> We expect that one day the tropical foliage will overrun [the
> trees]...we can harvest resin for decades until
> the natural forest chokes out the Pinus caribaea. If you help us t=
ake
> our agro-forestry project to a
> commercial level, we can keep marching across the savanna, plantin=
g
> more pine trees, and leaving a
> tropical rain forest in our wake. We can give seedlings to all our
> neighbors, process their resin, turn this
> desert into a productive land, employ campesinos and the Guahibo, =
and
> at the same time return the llanos
> to what...many ecologists believe was their primal state: an
> extension
> of the Amazon. Imagine that...!
>
> All and all, a lovely tale, and only the better for being true. Bu=
t
> what does it prove, exactly? Hard to say,
> though one point is obvious--this is not simply a story of
> technology;
> it is a story of community, and of the
> special realism based in poverty and cooperative enterprise.
> Technology is everywhere in it, of course,
> and the happy ending comes courtesy of the trees, but even these a=
re
> subsidiary to the particular amalgam
> of activism, science and hope that is Gaviotas.
>
> And this, indeed, is a happy brew. Keep it in mind the next time y=
ou
> see a windmill or a solar collector.
> And keep in mind, as well, that the Gaviotans, pragmatists
> though they
> may be, always stand with the
> poor. If our own green technologists did the same, rather
> than forever
> bowing to the ghost of Adam
> Smith, we might really have something to be hopeful about.
>
>
> Tom Athanasiou is the author of Divided Planet: The Ecology of Ric=
h
> and Poor (Georgia), which has
> just been published in paperback.
>
>
> Copyright (c) 1996, The Nation Company, L.P. All rights reserved.
> Electronic redistribution for nonprofit purposes is
> permitted, provided this notice is attached in its entirety.
> Unauthorized, for-profit redistribution is prohibited. For
> further information regarding reprinting and syndication, please c=
all
> The Nation at (212) 242-8400, ext. 226 or send
> e-mail to Max Block.
>
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