Las Gaviotas - A Sustainable Community Cut Off From the World Almost 40 Years Ago

The New York Times has a neat story about how a sustainable community has not only gotten by, but flourished, in the middle of the Columbian rainforest for over 4 decades:

Scientists, while largely avoiding Las Gaviotas now because of the surrounding violence, helped design the village’s cluster of homes, laboratories and factories, which still lie 16 hours by jeep from Bogotá, the capital.

Its 200 residents have no guns, no police force, no cars, no mayor, no church, no priest, no cellphones, no television, no Internet. No one who lives in Gaviotas has a job title.

But Gaviotas does have an array of innovations intended to make human life feasible in one of the most challenging ecosystems, from small inventions like a solar kettle for sterilizing water to large ones like a 19,800-acre reforestation project whose tropical pines produce resin for biofuel and a canopy under which native plant species flourish.

The story of Gaviotas gets me thinking about take-aways for us here in America (and around the world) as the movement to re-localize our resource use, and lead more independent lives that enable us to spend more time with our families, gains momentum.

Read the full NY Times Article>>
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