Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World

(Modern-day real-life "The Man Who Planted Trees")

Retail price: $16.95
Our price: $11.83 (30%)
Edition: Paperback
Pages: 6"x9", 240 pages
ISBN: 1-890132-28-4
Book Details: B & W photographs and diagrams, bibiographies, index

By Alan Weisman

"Elsewhere they're tearing down the rain forest. Here, we're putting it back. If we can do this in Colombia, there's hope that people can do it anywhere."
-Paolo Lugari, Founder of Gaviotas

The eastern savannas of war-ravaged Colombia, known as the llanos, are among the most brutal environments on Earth, an unlikely setting for one of the most hopeful environmental stories ever told. Here, more than twenty-five years ago, an intrepid visionary named Paolo Lugari set out to create a village that could sustain itself agriculturally, economically, and artistically. He reasoned that if a community could survive in the Colombian llanos, it would be possible to live anywhere. The new village was named after the graceful river terns common in the area, los gaviotas.

The early inhabitants of Gaviotas soon realized that if they wanted even basic necessities, they would need to be very resourceful. So they invented wind turbines that convert mild breezes into energy, super-efficient pumps that tap previously inaccessible sources of water, and solar kettles that sterilize drinking water using the furious heat of the tropical sun.

They even invented a rain forest! Two million pine trees planted as a renewable crop have unexpectedly allowed the rain forest to re-establish itself. Paolo Lugari and the Gaviotans, in their quest to create a model human habitat, serendipitously renewed an entire ecosystem. This is why Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez has called Lugari as "The Inventor of the World." To learn more about what other people have to say about Gaviotas, please visit the Friends of Gaviotas website Friends of Gaviotas

How this book came about

In 1994, a team of independent journalists was funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Ford Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to produce a special series for National Public Radio, which would document humanity's search for solutions to the greatest environmental and social problems threatening the world today. One member of that team, Alan Weisman, took his quest to an unlikely spot: war-torn, drug-ravaged Colombia. Twenty-five years earlier, he'd been told, a group of Colombian visionaries had decided that if they could fashion self-sustaining peace and prosperity in the most difficult place on earth, it could be done anywhere. Then they had set out to try.

For sixteen bone-breaking hours, Weisman traveled by jeep past roadblocks manned by army, paramilitary, and guerrilla forces to reach what those visionaries had forged in the harshest setting they could find: the extraordinary community called Gaviotas.

Chelsea Green's Editor-in-Chief Jim Schley heard Weisman's report on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" and immediately sensed the similarity between the Gaviotas story and Jean Giono's classic fable, The Man Who Planted Trees , a Chelsea Green book which has sold more than 150,000 copies since publication in 1984.

Schley contacted Weisman, who agreed to write a book about Gaviotas. Weisman returned to Gaviotas repeatedly, visiting extensively with the residents including the community's founder, Paolo Lugari, who has been called by Colombian author and Nobel prize winner Gabriel García Márquez "The Inventor of the World."

Here's what others have said about Gaviotas :

"In the wake of the fall of so much idealism in Latin America, it is wonderful to discover this luminous book about a luminous place in eastern Colombia. Alan Weisman takes us to Gaviotas via many stories-stories that make the path completely engrossing."
-Julia Alvarez, author of In the Time of the Butterflies and Yo! ,
as well as Chelsea Green's classic A Cafecito Story

"Alan Weisman has captured what we always knew but seem to
constantly forget in our drugged industrial lives, that all the solutions are within us.
It has taken a small town in Colombia to show us the way to go home.
We need Gaviotas more than it needs us. May this book have a million readers."
-Charles Bowden, author of Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America

"Alan Weisman's Gaviotas is the ongoing saga of what real,
ands-on sustainability means, calluses and all, practiced in
the most demanding social and environmental circumstances conceivable.
This inspiring story demonstrates that the best design comes from the severest limits."
-Paul Hawken, author of The Ecology of Commerce and Natural Capitalism

"Alan Weisman's Gaviotas is not merely a book of hope, but a story of twists and turns
that remind us just how rich the human spirit and a human community can be.
Weisman himself proves again that he is among the best journalist essayists
North America has offered to the world toward the end of this millennium
and at the end of the Decade of Endless Hand-Wringing."
-Gary Paul Nabhan, PhD., author of The Desert Smells Like Rain
and Cultures of Habitat