Nadia’s blog

In Lecture 4, Tony showed us a video called The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil.

A summary of what the film is about can be found here. You can learn more on the Power of Community website.

‘Peak’ oil refers to the point at which oil production reaches its height (after this, there is always less produced). However, peak oil is just the beginning; the same process will occur with natural gas, coal and uranium.

Most developing countries have the wrong vision for the future, in terms of sustainability. For example, China and other developing countries aspire to be like America, in that, they want to consume like America. However, even America won’t be able to consume like America at some point.

The major use of fossil fuel is on food production (which surprised me).

With relation to Cuba, they fell into a deep economic crisis (known as the ‘Special Period’ after the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. The average Cuban lost 20 lbs. There was no imported fuel and blackouts for hours on end. You would have to wait three or four hours for a bus that might be full anyway.

The US “suffocated” Cuba by denying any ship that docked in there access to the US for six months.

A lack of fuel led to a lack of food. Out of sheer need, Cuba made drastic changes.

There was a major effort to convert every piece of arable land to agriculture. Any idle plots in the city were converted to ‘urban agriculture’. Cuba has become a shining example of the ‘permaculture‘ movement.

Today Cubans are much more self-sustainable. They work and study closer to home and eat local produce. Farmers are among the highest paid workers (they are also at an advantage as they already have food, and can also sell it) and others are able to supplement their income through permaculture.

Cubans also use more sustainable sources of energy, like solar power, particularly for schools and clinics.

Cuba has changed its entire social ethos. From being a country that used to use huge amounts of pesticides, to being one which has 80 per cent organic produce is a huge leap. Cubans truly live on the land – “The first ethic is to take care of the land, the earth, if we don’t take care of the earth, the earth will take care of us, get rid of us”. They work with nature, not against it.

And it is about community
• “It’s not the technology, it’s the human relations”
• “Recovering the sense of neighbour is not going backwards”
• “We need more friendship, more love because we only have one world and it’s for all of us”

Whilst I feel we can all learn valuable lessons from Cuba’s example, the cynic in me says that in prosperous societies, little will change until it has to. In Cuba, they didn’t change their ways until it was forced upon them, and I feel that the same will happen for us. Whilst it is a matter of life and death, it is, to most people, not something that feels real. Until it feels real, there will be very little action taken.

The visualisation above shows Fidel Castro and Kevin Rudd saying the same things. These are all the messages Fidel Castro would have had to deliver to his people in the midst of the oil crisis or ’special period’. Imagine how Australians today would react if Kevin Rudd told us we had to change our ways so drastically. Would anyone make these changes voluntarily? We already complain that our public transport system isn’t good enough – who would voluntarily wait three or four hours for a bus?

Whilst the Cubans provide an excellent case study of how to deal with a crisis in a way that promotes a beautiful society in which community and environmental values are held in high regard, it is hard to envision Australia in this light until it reaches its own crisis point. It would only be then that we could see the messages the Prime Minister would inevitably have to deliver as a positive message, hence the negative/positive execution of the piece.