Techno-topia : Methods Ancient and Modern Created the Visionary Commune of Gaviotas, Which Could Be a Model for the World.

On first reflection, Colombia doesn’t seem the most likely place on Earth to seek utopia. Instead of weather systems, the map in a Bogota newspaper displays current outbreaks of guerrilla activity--19 in all--scattered like storm cells throughout the land. Apparently, only four of them lie in the direction I’m heading: los llanos, the vast plains that begin near Colombia’s geographic center and spread nearly 600 miles to the Orinoco River on its eastern border. But even though the llanos constitute almost half the country, fewer than one-tenth of the population lives there, mostly so isolated from telephones or electricity that little of what goes on here is actually reported.

What separates the llanos from the rest of Colombia are the Andes. The craggy easternmost Andean cordillera looms so massively over Bogota that few here ever consider that the Orinoco’s enormous flood plain begins only a few kilometers away. Yet that neglected expanse, Paolo Lugari insists as we stroll through the vehicular paralysis of downtown Bogota, is crucial both to his country and to a world filling quickly with unprecedented numbers of people.

Although this is just four degrees above the Equator, Bogota’s elevation is nearly 9,000 feet, and everyone except Lugari is wearing woolens. Tieless, in a lightweight suit, he is a tall, strapping man in his early 50s with a graying beard, who orates in a booming basso over the wail of internal combustion engines.

“Millions of years ago,” he declares, “a group of African primates were running out of resources in the forest, so they ventured into the savannas. To defend themselves, they had to learn to stand upright in order to see predators.” The place where Homo sapiens emerged, Lugari says, was practically identical to the Orinocan llanos . “Today, the savannas of the tropics are the only big open spaces left. We have to learn to live in them again.”

It was just such a setting, exactly halfway between the Andes and the Orinoco, that Paolo Lugari chose for Gaviotas, the community he founded 23 years ago--a community that simultaneously harks back to the land and forward to the future. Despite its dubious location, many admirers in and beyond Colombia consider Gaviotas, with its ingenious strategies for tapping sun, water, wind and soil, a strong candidate for utopia status.

Lugari appreciates their sentiment, but argues with the term. “Not utopia,” he says. “Topia.”

I don’t recognize the word, either in Spanish or English.

“I invented it. In Greek, the prefix ‘u’ signifies ‘no.’ Utopia literally means ‘no place.’ Fantasy land. But Gaviotas is real. We’ve gone from fantasy to reality. From utopia to topia.”

Not just any reality: The hydrocarbon haze, bleating automobiles and architectural anarchy surrounding us aren’t Lugari’s idea of acceptable existence. Paolo Lugari is convinced that humans can do far better, but he harbors no nostalgic, pastoral illusions. The future he envisions will achieve harmony through--not despite technology. Although Gaviotas remains intentionally small--its population has fluctuated between 200 to 500 over the years--its accomplishments have attracted both a designation by the United Nations as a model to the Third World and an urban market for its technological resourcefulness.

I’ve already sampled one taste of topia. The Bogota condominium complex in which I’m staying has water heated by solar collectors developed at Gaviotas. Solar energy isn’t new, but it usually requires the sun. Here, although it’s rained all week, I’ve had hot showers every day. In fact, chilly Bogota is overcast about seven months a year, yet the Gaviotas solar system works so well that a few blocks away, in Colombia’s executive palace, it also warms President Ernesto Samper’s daily bath.

The world’s largest solar-water-heated public housing development--7,500 units--on the edge of town, as well as the next two runners-up, in Bogota and Medellin respectively, are also Gaviotas projects. The explanation is neither magical nor very expensive, Lugari tells me: Coating the rooftop panels with a reflective film helps them absorb diffused as well as direct light. At Clinica San Pedro Claver, one of the nation’s biggest hospitals, they’re installing not just heaters but solar water boilers, coaxing from Bogota’s meager sunshine temperatures sufficiently scalding to sterilize instruments round the clock.

A considerable amount of energy, pollutants and money are being saved in this cloudy city, and I wonder aloud why this isn’t done on a much greater scale in my allegedly technically superior country. Good question, Lugari says. And, he reminds me,what I see in Bogota is one small part of what Gaviotas has accomplished in the impoverished llanos . “Remember, the United States now has a lot more poor people than Colombia. You might need a Gaviotas more than you think.”

IT WAS 1964 WHEN PAOLO Lugari first crossed the Andes and saw the bleached grassland of Orinoquia, spider-webbed with languid rivers, nearly the size of Wisconsin. He’d been invited by his uncle, then Colombia’s minister of public works, on a inspection flight of nearly nothing. About the only project the government had ever undertaken in the llanos had begun 10 years earlier, when a previous administration briefly attempted to scrape a highway across the huge prairie.

At that time, the idea was to open the eastern portion of the country to refugees fleeing the bedlam under way in the western half. Nearly 200,000 people died in what is now recalled simply as “La Violencia,” a decade of civil mayhem waged between Colombia’s two major political parties, whose platforms barely differed. Many survivors, driven from their farms in the rich coffee highlands, wandered into the llanos . They didn’t find much.

Unlike the fertile Andean slopes, filled with wildflowers and coffee blossoms, nearly nothing grew in the sunbaked llanos except a few low-nutrient grasses and a squat tree called the chaparro. The palm groves lining the rivers seethed with malaria-bearing mosquitoes. During the nearly nine-month rainy season, any place the sod was broken turned to butterscotch-colored muck.

But young Lugari was mesmerized by this immense savanna that from the window of the DC-3 became wonderfully confused with the horizon. It was the most beautiful landscape he had ever seen, and he started having visions.

Today, the overland trip from Bogota to Gaviotas takes 16 hours by jeep, depending on the number of army or guerrilla roadblocks encountered. I don’t mind these so much: The car and body searches are a relief from the sensational pounding of the rutted track that is the highway that never was. And the dust: This is the dry season--the road is mostly impassable the rest of the year--and I am so coated with powdered clay that one sergeant doubts whether my passport picture is really me.

Fortunately, he also doesn’t recognize my companion, Bogota journalist Constanza Vieira, whom I first met when she worked for the now-defunct Soviet news agency Novosti. Constanza’s father was the former head of Colombia’s Communist Party and a founder of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias Colombianas, FARC, the country’s biggest guerrilla army. In 1985, many guerrillas and sympathizers accepted an offer of amnesty to form a legitimate party. Since then, right-wing paramilitaries have assassinated more than 1,000 of their candidates, including several of Constanza’s friends. Frequently, these private armies are financed by drug barons, whose sprawling ranches we cross for hours en route to Gaviotas. I’m traveling there to see sustainable technology created by and for the Third World; for Constanza, the compelling interest is that Gaviotas is considered an island of hope amid Colombia’s ongoing tragedy. We suspect there’s a connection.

The first time Lugari made this drive, he reached an abandoned road construction camp in two days. All that remained was a shed filled with weeds. Lugari staked a claim to 25,000 surrounding acres, including the camp, which was named Gaviotas--sea gulls--for the yellow-billed terns that fish along Orinocan tributaries so flat they barely seem to flow. One of these wound through his new property. Soon afterward, Lugari appeared in the office of Jorge Zapp, then head of the mechanical engineering department of Bogota’s Universidad de Los Andes. “True or false,” he demanded. “Can you build a turbine efficient enough to generate electricity from a stream with just a one-meter drop?”

Zapp thought a moment. “True,” he replied. “Why?”

Jorge Zapp knew about Lugari from the newspapers: the enfant terrible son of a brilliant Italian lawyer, engineer and geographer who’d found Colombia’s tropics so irresistible he married into a prominent family here and stayed. Educated mainly at home by his father, Lugari passed his university exams without attending classes. On the strength of an inspired interview, he won a U.N. scholarship to study development in the Far East. Upon returning from the Philippines, he launched a highly publicized, successful national campaign to save a historic village near Bogota from being drowned by a federal hydroelectric project.

“Come to Gaviotas and I’ll show you,” Lugari told Zapp. “Tomorrow.”

Next, he visited Prof. Sven Zethelius at the National University’s agricultural chemistry department. Zethelius informed him that soils around Gaviotas were only about 2 centimeters thick and high in aluminum toxicity--basically, the worst in Colombia. A desert.

“Think of them as different soils,” Lugari urged. “The only deserts are those of the imagination. If we can solve how to exist in the most resource-starved region in the country, we can live anywhere.”

With the world’s population set to double within half a century, people soon would have to live on land previously considered unlivable, Lugari explained to the scientists, agronomists, engineers and doctors he recruited for his team. Here, they had three choices: burn down the Colombian Amazon; do the same to El Choco on Colombia’s western coast (the world’s largest intact rain forest); or move to the llanos . Gaviotas was a chance to plan their own tropical civilization from the ground up, instead of depending on models and technology developed for northern climates. “When we import solutions from the United States or Europe,” Lugari argued, “we also import their problems. In Colombia, we’ve got enough as is.”

Fifteen hours into our drive, bright aluminum sunflowers appear across the landscape, our first glimpse of what Zapp, Zethelius, their colleagues and graduate students have created here. Although this tropical plain floats atop a vast subterranean lake, destitute Indians and early settlers had to haul water from muddy, mosquito- and piranha-infested streams. Zapp’s mechanical engineers studied 58 different types of windmills before creating a custom model to pump the llanos . The result was a compact unit weighing barely 100 pounds, its blade tips contoured like airplane wings to trap soft equatorial breezes. Over the years, Gaviotas technicians have installed thousands of these across Colombia--in some places, gaviota is the local word for windmill.

Since Gaviotas refuses to patent inventions, preferring to share them freely, the design has also been copied from Central America to Chile. There is something serene and lovely about seeing them whirling in the meadows, especially after miles of electrified fences bordering the haciendas of narcotraficantes. But now we’re in Colombia’s far-flung Vichada province, whose motto reads “Land without people for people without land.” Suddenly, the temperature plummets 20 degrees and nearly horizontal rain collides with the windshield. Instantly, the road liquefies.

We slither on in four-wheel drive, negotiating potholes that are now ponds,aiming for an incongruous sight on the horizon. It is the unmistakable, fuzzy silhouette of a pine forest, bursting from these bare llanos , the result of years of experiments directed by Zethelius to determine what might flourish here. Earlier, Lugari had claimed that he planted more trees last year than the entire Colombian forestry department. I now see he wasn’t kidding.

When we finally slog into a compound of neat white cottages with laminated roofs, shaded by mango trees and bougainvillea, the sky is clearing. Gonzalo Bernal, for years school director and now administrator of Gaviotas, greets us with the news that more precipitation fell in the previous hour than Israel gets in a year. “The rainy season’s beginning. You may never leave.”

“Who wants to?” says Constanza, gazing around happily. The fresh air is gardenia-scented; yellow warblers and dazzling crimson tanagers sing in the mango trees. From the main office’s tiled porch, Bernal, a slim man in khaki shorts and a T-shirt with a sea gull logo, indicates guest houses, refectory, commissary, school and bachelor quarters. Across a soccer field, horses graze in front of a meeting hall with a radically vaulted roof. Its aerodynamic appearance is echoed by clusters of brightly painted, airy family dwellings, whose pitched roofs, studded with solar panels, consist of two triangular wings joined at their longest edges, rising to a crest that dips to resemble a beak.

“They’re gaviotas,” Bernal acknowledges proudly.

A dinner bell interrupts the evening birdsong. Gonzalo shows us how the ceilings in our rooms slide back to let in starlight, explains how to operate Gaviotas’ water-saving faucets and leaves us to grab solar showers.

Although families have their own kitchens, Gaviotans mostly eat en commune. In the open-air dining room, a hundred-plus men, women and children gather at long tables for a cafeteria-style meal of lentil soup, salad, rice, meat-and-potato stew, cassava and papaya juice. We join Bernal, his therapist wife Cecilia Parodi and Carlos Sanchez, who runs the hydroponic farm. Vegetables, beef, pork and fish are produced here, Sanchez adds; other foods, like grains and poultry, have been raised experimentally but still are cheaper to purchase. No one feels discouraged by the fact that Gaviotas hasn’t yet achieved total food self-sufficiency, or that when the brook flowing through Zapp’s mini-turbine becomes a trickle in the short dry season, they still resort to a diesel generator.

Because everyone receives a salary, they must manufacture and market their windmills, pumps and solar inventions, an enterprise that keeps Lugari in Bogota much of the year. “But in 23 years, we’ve learned to cover 70% of our needs,” Bernal says. “The trees we plant more than compensate for any greenhouse gases we emit. Imagine the difference if the rest of the world lived like us.”

Lying under equatorial stars that night after a concert of musica llanera performed on guitar, harp and four-stringed cuatro by Gaviotas virtuosos, I try to imagine the rest of the world living like them. This began as a collection of researchers, students and laborers sharing communal vehicles, bedding, dishes, clothes--and decisions. In time, several of their families joined them and a permanent colony with individual houses emerged, but government was by consensus rather than written rules. The unwritten ones have been few and simple. To limit public disorder, alcohol is confined to homes. To preserve wildlife, dogs and guns are banished. After distinguished weekend visitors began arriving, like Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the president of Spain, Sundays and Wednesdays were switched so guests could see Gaviotas at work.

A need for police, jail or door locks has never arisen. Anyone who violates protocol, like a storekeeper who recently admitted overcharging to finance his honeymoon, is effectively ostracized by the community until his debt is repaid. Loafers aren’t tolerated, but with pay that starts above the Colombian minimum wage, plus free meals, medical care, school and housing, this isn’t a problem.

In 23 years, no murders nor rapes. “Not even crimes of passion?” I ask Cecilia Parodi. “Surely there’s adultery.”

“It’s hard to have adultery when there’s no marriage.”

“No marriage?”

She shrugs. “Gonzalo and I were already married when we came. But there doesn’t seem to be any need for it here. Most people live in free union. Partners sometimes change, but it seems to work. All these kids have pretty nice homes.”

It’s 7:30 a.m.; we’re at the preschool, watching children romp on a seesaw attached to a double-action pump. As they rise and descend, water gushes from a vertical pipe into an adjacent cement tank. Gaviotas has also installed these in villages across the country.

“There are no churches, either,” Cecilia continues. She watches as a family of titi monkeys swings into the foliage overhead, releasing a cloud of squawking parrots. “We see God in the birds, the animals, in the trees. The kids are taught to respect nature and love humanity. That’s the basis of any faith.”

It’s true: Beyond crosses in the small cemetery, we’ve seen no sign of religion. Missionaries and evangelicals who appear are welcome, Cecilia explains, but they usually don’t stay long. “After a while, the priest gives up and leaves. Same thing with political candidates.”

I am impressed by any society so evolved it ignores politics, but Constanza Vieira, who has seen colleagues massacred over ideology, is practically in tears that such a place exists. She can’t fathom how Gaviotas has resisted the surrounding maelstroms. This is guerrilla territory, and pickups filled with paramilitary vigilantes packing assault weapons prowl the savanna roads.

“We just stay neutral,” says Gonzalo.

“But how can you?” Constanza insists.

“Maybe I can show you. Later.”

First, we take a techno-tour of the llanos to see how Gaviotas has revolutionized life here. By a pool where tiny alligators sun themselves on rocks, a neighbor shows us a water ram, a small, upright cylinder containing a pressure valve that harnesses a river’s current to irrigate a field a kilometer away. “The technology is 200 years old,” Bernal tells us. “We updated it with modern materials.”

But their most significant invention is nearly as ubiquitous here as their windmills. It is a simple hand pump capable of tapping aquifers six times deeper than conventional models but requiring so little effort that children can operate it. In normal pumps, a heavy piston must be raised and lowered inside a pipe. Gaviotas engineers realized they could do the reverse: leave the piston stationary and lift an outer sleeve of lightweight, inexpensive PVC tubing instead.

“For our first 10 years, we had to carry buckets from the river,” says Julieta Martinez, one of the many neighboring ranchers who has incorporated Gaviotas technology, as she pumps clear water from a 100-foot well using just her little finger. Her children, she tells us, were born in the Gaviotas hospital and educated in its boarding school. “Gaviotas changed everything.”

At Gaviotas itself, Omar Marin, who’s tended livestock here for 18 years, leads us to a windmill-fed cattle trough, surrounded by a sloping cement floor, where his cowboys have just brought several thirsty calves. “Miren la caca, “ he says.

We do what he suggests and observe that as the bovines drink, their dung slides down the slope into a gutter, which sluices it to an enclosed vat. Inside, anaerobic fermentation turns this cow-pie slurry into compost and methane.

The methane flows through pipes to an extraordinary building set on a rise. It is, Bernal tells us, the reason Gaviotas has been able to avoid taking sides in Colombia’s chronic internecine wars.

A Japanese architectural journal has named this, the 16-bed Gaviotas hospital, one of the 40 most important buildings in the world. It was conceived by Gaviotas engineers, doctors, nurses, patients and an architect, Esperanza Caro, whom we don’t meet because she is currently designing Tokyo’s new Wind Park. It is at once futuristic and ancient, a maze of angles formed by white walls, glass awnings, skylights, brushed steel columns and exposed supports trimmed in blue and yellow enamel. Like Egyptian pyramids, the interior is cooled with underground ducts whose hillside intakes face the prevailing northern breeze. Opposing layers of corrugated roofing create a series of air channels that further bleed away the llano s heat. The combined effect is cost-free, maintenance-free air conditioning.

Solar collectors attached to gleaming rooftop tanks alternately heat, boil and distill water. A solar clothes-dryer freshens the hospital linens. Electricity is from solar photovoltaic cells, Gaviotas’ only foreign technological import, still too expensive to produce here. These cells also run a pump that sends oil, solar-heated to 320 degrees Fahrenheit, through a closed system to the kitchen, where it circulates around sunken stainless-steel pressure cookers. The stove-top burners are fueled with home-grown methane.

This is the only hospital within a 12-hour radius. Patients arrive from across the llanos on horseback, bicycle or on foot, often leading a cow or hog to pay for medical care. At times, when guerrilla and army forces have clashed nearby and the Gaviotas airstrip was filled with helicopters, both sides have brought their wounded.

Sven Zethelius’ son Magnus, a doctor here from 1976 to 1981, once discovered that he had placed an army corporal and a FARC guerrilla in the same room. Hours earlier they had been trying to kill each other; now the one who could walk was bringing the other water. “The rule here is never to ask,” Gonzalo tells Constanza. “Like the Red Cross. Everybody respects us.”

That respect allowed Zethelius and doctors who followed him to venture unprotected into the llanos , paddling dugout canoes filled with medicine to communities of formerly nomadic Guahivo Indians. The Guahivo, now boxed in by settlers’ fences, suffer from malaria, tuberculosis and gastroenteritis. Yet they wouldn’t enter a hospital: To wall off someone away from his family was, to them, the ultimate unhealthy confinement.

Today, a short, vine-covered walkway connects the Gaviotas hospital to the maloka, a separate wing built by the Guahivo themselves. Instead of beds, patients and their families lie in hammocks hung from wooden beams under a great thatch ramada. Relatives of the sick earn their keep by tending tomatoes, lettuce, cabbage and onions in an adjacent hydroponic greenhouse.

If Paolo Lugari, the National University’s pharmacology department and Guahivo shamans have their way, this greenhouse will also one day become the finest medicinal plant laboratory in the tropics. But money is a critical factor and Colombia’s expanding government-owned oil and gas industry has dampened solar-collector sales recently by effectively blocking any tax benefits for investing in alternative energy. At the same time, revenue from windmills and pumps dropped as Colombian agriculture was battered by an unexpected onslaught of cheap imported foods, the unanticipated fallout of new free-market policies.

Before the 1990s, Colombia’s government was outfitting the president’s mansion with solar panels, issuing commemorative stamps honoring Gaviotas’ achievements and providing funds to the U.N. Development Program, which in turn supported the proliferation of Gaviotas’ technology in villages across the country. Today, a new law prohibiting government grants to nonprofit organizations has not only eliminated federal aid for the Gaviotas school and hospital, but killed funding for matching U.N. support as well.

“How can the U.N. allow that?” I’d asked Lugari back in Bogota. “Their pamphlets extol Gaviotas as a model to the developing world.”

“They’re broke, too. Besides, we’re not a model, we’re a path. When it turns, we have to follow. Anyhow, adaptation stimulates invention.”

This is why, he told me, they have decided to downscale their manufacturing. But no one is getting laid off. “Gaviotas isn’t a company. We’re a community. In fact, the solution means that both employment and Gaviotas will grow.”

That solution is growing on nearly 20,000 forested acres. After no indigenous tree proved suitable for cultivation on the prairie, Gaviotas researchers imported Caribbean pines, found throughout Central America. In the thin llanos soils, they proved to be veritable sun-and-water-processing machines, growing, as Sven Zethelius marveled, “five times faster than any pine tree in Sweden.” In the last 12 years, Gaviotas has planted 1.6 million of them.

To the surprise of foresters, however, the Gaviotans chose not to cut their standing timber. Instead, Gaviotas is converting the windmill factory to process pine resin extracted from the sap of living trees, not unlike how maple syrup is produced. Until now, Colombia has spent $4 million annually to import such resins for manufacturing paint, turpentine and paper. Armed with that fact, Lugari persuaded the Japanese government to provide the seed money, via a grant through the Interamerican Development Bank, to begin tapping and processing resin for the domestic market.

On our final evening, the Gaviotas community assembles for a workshop by government forestry technicians, who arrived earlier in a chartered plane. Paolo Lugari was to have come as well, but he’s back in the city, preparing to receive the president of Guyana and prime minister of Jamaica, who want to begin a Caribbean Gaviotas.

We settle back to watch a video about building firebreaks. Afterward, the community elects to let the generator run past 9, when lights usually go out. No TV reaches here, and one of the foresters has brought a tape of the previous night’s World Cup tune-up match between Colombia and Mexico. For this occasion, the alcohol rule is relaxed. Bottles of beer and Coca-Cola are opened, and bets are taken. Anyone who might know the outcome is honor-bound not to wager.

Constanza and I slip away to Gonzalo’s house. Joined by his neighbor, school director Teresa Valencia, we lie on patio hammocks, listening to crickets and the muted clucking of toucans, and meditate on the future of this tropical topia. A recent agreement with the Universidad del Los Andes will bring a new generation of engineers here, to add to the hundreds of doctoral theses that have already emerged from Gaviotas. What they’ll invent to meet the coming challenges is anyone’s guess, but they’ll have plenty of advisers: Zethelius, now in his 70s, wants to inaugurate a colony for retired professors here, starting with himself.

And Bernal confirms that Lugari has dreamed up a new project: Gaviotas is going to build a dirigible. “It’s a perfect, cheap way to ship our products across the llanos ,” Paolo had told me earlier.

“You’re going to build it yourselves?”

“Sure. With imagination and perspiration, we can do anything. That’s how utopian miracles become topian truths.”

The power shuts down. As Constanza and I feel our way through the peaceful darkness of Gaviotas, we are surrounded by a little miracle that seems to justify such optimism. When environmentalists initially questioned the wisdom of introducing a monoculture of an exotic tree, Pinus caribaea hondurensis, into the llanos, Lugari countered that since nothing else grew there, Gaviotas was displacing no native species. In fact, quite the contrary. “You need to see for yourselves what’s happened.”

By the light of the rising moon, we can see it. In the moist understory of the Gaviotas pine forest, dormant seeds of native trees probably not seen in the llanos for millennia have sprouted. So far, biologists have counted nearly 40 species. Sheltered by pine trees, a diverse, indigenous tropical forest is regenerating here with surprising speed, and Gaviotas intends, over decades, to let it choke out Pinus caribaea and return the llanos to what many ecologists believe was their primeval state: an extension of the Amazon.

Already, the population of deer, anteaters and capybaras is growing. As this natural process continues, Gaviotas will keep planting more trees. They’ve already given away thousands of seedlings from their nursery to neighbors, and groves of young pines are thriving all over the llanos .

“Elsewhere they’re tearing down the rain forest,” Paolo Lugari says. “In los llanos , we’re putting it back. If we can create a topia in Colombia, there’s hope that humans can do it anywhere.”