BeFriending Creation
Reinventing the world at `rightly ordered' Gaviotas
It was as if I had been led— through an amazing series of coincidences, or perhaps nudges of the Spirit—to a place that everyone who reads about it wants to visit, but is always told, "You can't go there."
Gaviotas, a remarkable community in the inhospitable savannas (or llanas) of eastern Colombia, embodies the Quaker concept of "rightly ordered." It has grown out of the vision of Paolo Lugari, who in the early 1970s was looking for a place to test his ideas about sustainable development, as one answer to the desperate poverty of millions in his home city of Bogota.
In the 35-plus years since then, he and others whom he has inspired have regenerated 20,000 acres of forest, which now provides jobs and clean water for an entire community. It is a place where formerly jobless people are paid a living wage, ride bikes to work, and share three meals a day in community. Powered entirely with renewable energy sources, the community utilizes farming practices that follow a key principle of the natural world, that the waste of one process is food for the next.
In June, 2005 I had the privilege to travel with six other North Americans to this famed village.
My trip was initiated because of another extraordinary effort: The commander of the Colombian Air Force had been inspired by Gaviotas, partly because he was interested in redirecting his country from war-making to peace-building. The commander recently arranged to donate 43,000 hectares (100,000 acres) of military land to Gaviotas in order to create a five-fold expansion of this model community. The donated land—also on the llanos, but in Marandua, north and east of Gaviotas—will eventually provide jobs and homes for 10,000 people. The Colombian Air Force then hired Gunter Pauli and the organization he had founded, Zero Emissions Research and Initiatives (ZERI), to apply its systems approach in creating the community, which is called "The Project for Life." (See the November-December 2006 BeFriending Creation for more on ZERI).
Because military planes were making a number of trips to Gaviotas to carry ZERI staff, Gunter seized on the opportunity to fill 15 empty seats, on a first-come, first-serve basis, with "Friends of Gaviotas," those of us who had attended one of the conferences that brought Lugari to the U.S. in 2002 and 2003. The e-mail invitation, sent less than six weeks before the trip, seemed an opening I had to follow. My choice to take early retirement at the end of 2003 in order to devote my life full time to the work of ecological sustainability and economic justice gave me the time to go, and Quaker funds, as well as the recent sale of an old fixer-upper house I had renovated, made it financially possible.
When the military plane that had carried us to Gaviotas (for all of 6 hours) and to Marandua/Gaviotas II (for an overnight) took off to return us to Bogota, it left behind Dr. George Chan, a consultant for Zero Emissions Research Initiative (ZERI), and Scott Huffman, a recent graduate of the ZERI training program. The two spent the next two weeks building and installing two biodigesters that would use anaerobic decomposition to turn pig manure into methane for use as fuel for the community.
Using Chan's integrated biological farming systems approach, the residue of the digested manure turns out to be nutritious food for plankton that will become food for fish to be raised in 4,000-square-foot lagoons. In other projects that Chan has implemented, this method produces 10 times the standard yield of fish! And the system doesn't stop there. The fish waste provides a rich substrate for growing shitake mushrooms, another cash crop. The mushrooms, in turn, break down the substrate into a material that is now healthy feed for—guess what—pigs and chickens!
Chan envisions 4,000 such family farms, each taking up just 10 percent of a 12-hectare (30-acre) plot and growing pigs, fish, and mushrooms. The remaining 90 percent of the land is to be reforested with a mixed crop of African palm (a source of biodiesel fuel), cashew, rubber, and pine trees. Thus, each family who will live in Gaviotas II will be producing revenue and food to support themselves and many others. And the forest will provide cash crops that will employ, feed, and supply energy for many more.
Upon seeing a community like this, one that seems to really have its act together, we might be tempted to call it a "utopia." But the word "utopia" happens to come from Greek roots that mean, literally, "nowhere." So Lugari calls Gaviotas a "topia," because it really exists!)
The power of this community and the example it provides is that these same principles, adjusted for other localities and climates can be applied all over the world. Perhaps you can see why author Alan Weismann titled his 1996 book about this amazing community, Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World (Chelsea Green Publ., 1998).
Postscript: Last fall, Pauli led a group of 30 scientists, government officials, philanthropists, and others to Gaviotas and Gaviotas II. The visitors included Ricardo Sanchez, Director General of the United Nations Environment Programme for Latin America and the Caribbean. They followed the same itinerary we had followed the year before. Their report is available at <http://www.zeri.org/resources_gaviotas.htm>.
A member of Chestnut Hill (Pa.) Friends Meeting, Hollister Knowlton is available to travel to Monthly, Quarterly, and Yearly meetings to give presentations on Gaviotas and other topics. She offers workshops, such as "Our Ecological Footprint" and "How Are We Called to Respond to Climate Change?" She is one of a half dozen Quakers trained as facilitators for "Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream," a symposium, developed by the Pachamama Alliance in response to a request by the Achuar, an indigenous tribe of Ecuador, to "change the dream of our brothers and sisters of the north." Her e-mail is <h.knowlton@comcast.net>
or 215/247-0718 . •
