| "They always put social experiments in the easiest, most fertile places. We wanted the hardest place. We figured if we could do it here, we could do it anywhere." -Paolo Lugari |  |
"The only deserts are deserts of the imagination. Gaviotas is an oasis of imagination." -Paolo Lugari |
| In 1965, when Paolo Lugari first glimpsed the Orinocan llanos—nearly barren lands in the eastern part of Colombia—he began to have visions of the kind of society that could develop there. He had a hunch that someday the world would become so crowded that humans would have to learn to live in the planet's least desirable areas. In South America alone, there were 250 million hectares of fairly empty, well-drained savannas like the llanos. He was convinced that one day they would be the only place to put bursting human populations. He felt that the llanos were a perfect setting to design an ideal civilization for the planet's fastest-filling region: the tropics. |
"Gaviotas is a sum of random occurrences born out of chaos. It's a place where chance can incubate, where cooperation replaces competition." -Paolo Lugari
Engineering | Pine Forest | Bibliography and Links
from: Weisman, Alan. Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World. White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 1998.