There’s a great book out there that I want to recommend called Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World, because today in the NY Times there is a feature on this village. It’s celebrating 40 years of existence.

What is Gaviotas? It started as a science research station in the arid, near-lifeless plains of Colombia, accessible only by plane. Colombia has been a big investor in solar energy for a long time, and you’ll find solar electricity or heating systems in many government buildings and universities.

Out on the plains, scientists experimented with different ways to create energy and to power things. They built a solar kettle to sterilize water. They built a water pump powered by a children’s seesaw (families were encouraged to join the scientists in Gaviotas, and the research station was more of a community). Today, the research station has become a community of locals who continue the original goals of living as sustainably and self-sufficiently as possible using appropriate technology and closed-loop systems.

One of their greatest successes came not from energy technology but biology. The plains surrounding them were harsh, and nothing much grew wild except hardy shrubs. For years, they searched for something that would grow in the soil and withstand the sun, wind, and desert temperatures.

Finally, after so many failed attempts, they discovered a species of tropical pine that could be grown to seedlings in a greenhouse, and then transplanted to the plains – and it survived. The pine groves supplied the community with resin that they converted to biofuel, and a great chapter in the book is the awe of the community members out harvesting resin in the pine forest island, surrounded by the unforgiving, shrubby plains.

The established pines fixed nutrients into the soil, pulled up water buried deep in the ground, and provided shade and protection from the harsh conditions of the plains. In the much nicer pine grove environment, other plants volunteered to grow, continuing a cycle of growth, soil improvement, and more growth that turned the pine grove into a tropical rainforest.

It was then estimated that this rainforest must have stretched from the Amazon to the Pacific Ocean, and that at some point part of that rainforest had shriveled up and turned into the plains that stand today. The Gaviotas scientists had inadvertently reestablished an ancient rainforest.

There are a lot of ways that humans manipulate the environment, and many times we hear about the negative effects these efforts cause, such as when they set all those mongoose free in New Zealand to take care of the rat problem, but the mongoose preferred to eat and send to extinction hundreds of rare native bird species instead. The rainforest at Gaviotas is an example of a positive effect by humans, how we can work with the environment to mutually beneficial ends.