Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World

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Veteran journalist Alan Weisman was part of a team assigned by NPR to document possible solutions to the world’s greatest environmental crises. His search led to war-torn, drug-ravaged Colombia, where he’d heard about the miracle of Gaviotas. He found a symbol of hope and triumph amidst a perilous world, and kept returning to chronicle its story.

A 10th anniversary edition of Gaviotas was published in September 2008, with a new afterword by Alan Weisman.

Reviews

“Alan Weisman’s Gaviotas is the ongoing saga of what real, hands-on sustainability means, calluses and all, practiced in the most demanding social and environmental circumstances conceivable. This inspiring story demonstrates that the best design comes from the severest limits.”
– Paul Hawken, author of The Ecology of Commerce and Natural Capitalism

Gaviotas is not merely a book of hope, but a story of twists and turns that remind us just how rich the human spirit and a human community can be. Alan Weisman proves again that he is among the best journalist-essayists North America has offered the world, toward the end of this millennium and the end of the Decade of Endless Hand-Wringing.”
– Gary Paul Nabhan, author of The Desert Smells Like Rain and Cultures of Habitat

“Alan Weisman has captured what we always knew but seem to constantly forget in our drugged industrial lives – that all the solutions are within us. It has taken a small town in Colombia to show us the way to go home. We need Gaviotas more than it needs us. May this book have a million readers.”
– Charles Bowden, author of Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America

“After the fall of so much idealism in Latin America, it is wonderful to discover this luminous book about a luminous place in Colombia. Alan Weisman takes us to Gaviotas via many stories. The path is completely engrossing.”
– Julia Alvarez, author of In the Time of the Butterflies and ¡Yo!

“Elsewhere they’re tearing down the rain forest. Here, we’re putting it back. If we can do this in Colombia, there’s hope that people can do it anywhere.”
– Paolo Lugari, founder of Gaviotas