Making the dream of sustainability a reality (fwd)

[Roberto Verzola <rverzola@phil.gn.apc.org>]

The inspiring message below was posted by Tom Athanasiou, the author
of Divided Planet: The Ecology of Rich and Poor (Georgia), which has
just been published in paperback.

 -----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 amazing 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 renewal 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 looked 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 Garcia
 Marquez'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 Bogota'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
 blend of local soil and cement for paving roads and runways, gaskets
 made of palm leaves, food preservation techniques, palm oil-based
 feed supplements. These people were working from the ground up! Then
 came solar collectors and biogas generators. And all manner of pumps,
 like the hydraulic ram that used 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-technology movement ramified well enough,
 Gaviotas prospered and New Alchemy did not. One key to its survival
 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 local
 soil to cultivate all sorts of vegetables, including eggplants the
 local Guahibo Indians wouldn't eat on a bet. In 1978, the World
 Conference on Technical Cooperation Among Developing Countries named
 Gaviotas the leading example of appropriate technology in the Third
 World.

      The "solar kettle," more than any other Gaviotan device, proves
 the 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, alone,
 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 Bogota, a friend arranged
 for them to design a solar water-heating system for a 5,500-unit
 public housing project. They had already developed highly efficient
 collectors, but needed lots of them and so organized 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 the 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
 elitist 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. They 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 and 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 classify them. "We're not ideologues. All
 ideologies do is start trouble."

      Indeed. But here we should step back. The zealotry of the
 guerrillas was bred from suffering and injustice, and nature reserves
 often are "elitist contrivances." And they often do deny people
 access to land. The Gaviotans know this and don't expect their solar
 kettles and sleeve 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 that 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 ecological
 invasion. And since Gaviotas had developed plantation techniques that
 didn't rely on herbicides, the 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 all variety. And with them
 were coming deer, anteaters, armadillos, eagles. With hard work and
 serendipity, 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 idea, 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 take our agro-forestry
 project to a commercial level, we can keep marching across the
 savanna, planting 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.
 But 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 are
 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
 you 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
 Rich and Poor (Georgia), which has just been published in paperback.


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