Don't fight the tropics

By ROGER HAMILTON

These intellectual adventurers, led by a visionary named Paolo Lugari, founded their experimental community in 1968. More than a 16-hour drive from the nearest city, they quickly recognized that they would have to be inventive if they wanted to satisfy even the barest necessities for themselves and their families.

So invent they did: wind generators to produce energy, an airy hospital designed to keep cool even on the hottest day, and a solar kettle to sterilize drinking water. They even attached the school's seesaws and swings to pumps so that as the children played, they would pump their school's water from underground aquifers.

The community's spirit of invention seemingly knows no limits. Not even the days of the week are exempt. In the early 1980s, so many visitors were making weekend pilgrimages to Gaviotas that residents had no time to rest on their supposed day off. The solution: move Saturday to Wednesday.

In all, the village of Gaviotas has produced more than 50 designs for techniques to produce renewable energy, potable water, organic produce and herbal medicines.

Although Lugari and his fellow inventors refuse to patent their ideas, they manufacture products based on their designs and market them throughout the country to support the town's 30 families. To date, the community has sold more than 40,000 solar heaters, 8,000 windmills, and 700 microaqueducts.

In past years, the town also received some funding from the government as well as grants from international sources. But in the early 1990s, outside financial support began to dry up, so another sources of income had to be found. The solution came in the form of a 1,500-hectare stand of Caribbean pines that had been planted as part of a reforestation effort more than a decade before. The trees held a double promise. First, from an environmental standpoint, they did not pose a threat to local ecosystems because they would not compete with local species. Second, they had a great economic potential for their sap, a high-quality resin locally referred to as "green hope." After processing, the resin is used in goods ranging from paints to violin rosin. At the time, Colombian industry had to rely on imports of the two principal resin by-products, colophony and turpentine, for use in the production of fragrances, soaps, insecticides, solvents and paints. In 1991, some 3,300 tons of these products were imported from Mexico at a cost of $2.4 million.

Gaviotas needed to greatly expand its plantations to make resin production economically viable. So with the help of $1.9 million in financing from the IDB-administered Japan Special Fund, the community planted an additional 4,000 hectares of pines and built a plant with a capacity to distill 2,500 tons of resin. Additional land contiguous to the plantings was left fallow to encourage the growth of natural vegetation. A study also was conducted on the possibilities for expanding the project and building additional resin extraction facilities.

Today, despite transportation problems, insurgent groups and lack of government presence, Gaviotas continues to thrive. The community has a total of 7,000 hectares of tree plantations, and it hopes to have 20,000 hectares planted in the next 10 years.

Annual production of colophony now totals 500 tons, all of which is sold in the domestic market. Exports could begin in 2004, when production from maturing trees will allow the plant to operate at its full capacity of 2,500 tons annually. To date, the project has created 85 permanent jobs.

Meanwhile, the plantations have yielded unforeseen environmental benefits. Although not a part of the savannah ecosystem, the pines attract local birds, which are distributing seeds from regional indigenous trees. The seeds are helping to regenerate a forest that has not existed in this part of Colombia for hundreds of years.

"Elsewhere they're tearing down the forest," Lugari says. "In Gaviotas, we're putting it back."