Las Gaviotas: Sustainability in the Tropics

In the early 1970s, facing overwhelming obstacles, a young visionary named Paolo Lugari set out to build a sustainable village on los llanos, the remote plains of Colombia, some 500 kilometers east of the country’s capital, Bogotá. Lugari and a diverse and creative team of collaborators worked on the supposition that if it could be done there, it could be done anywhere. Supported by ingenious renewable energy technologies, hydroponic farming techniques, and—improbably—a regenerating rainforest, Las Gaviotas has survived and flourished for 30 years, even in the midst of Colombian internal conflict.

The son of an Italian geography professor whose fieldwork led him to settle in southwest Colombia, Lugari first visited the inhospitable llanos in the 1960s.Here, during the Decemberto- April dry season, a merciless tropical sun bakes the savannah; the rest of the year, severe rains inundate the landscape, making the unpaved roads impassable for several months. In this climate, forests exist only alongside permanent streams, which thread the savannah like tendrils creeping upland from the massive rivers that drain the eastern slopes of the Andes into the Orinoco River and finally the Caribbean Sea.

At a time when the OPEC oil embargo was creating worldwide energy shortages, the restless Lugari conceived the idea of returning to the llanos to build a sustainable village that would support itself with renewable energy...