On Thursday, June 22, at 6:30 p.m. in Center for Natural Sciences Room 112, Ithaca College will host a short presentation by the TCLocal about our diminishing energy resources and what the Tompkins County community can do about the problem. This talk will be followed by a screening of the newly-released Community Solutions film, "The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil." This event is free and open to the public.
The era in Cuba following the Soviet collapse is known to Cubans as the Special Period. Cuba lost 80 percent of its export market and its imports fell by 80 percent. The Gross Domestic Product dropped by more than one third.
"Try to image an airplane suddenly losing its engines. It was really a crash," Jorge Mario, a Cuban economist, told the documentary crew. A crash that put Cuba into a state of shock. There were frequent blackouts in its oil-fed electric power grid, up to 16 hours per day. The average daily caloric intake in Cuba dropped by a third.
According to a report on Cuba from Oxfam, an international development and relief agency, "In the cities, buses stopped running, generators stopped producing electricity, factories became silent as graveyards. Obtaining enough food for the day became the primary activity for many, if not most, Cubans."
In part due to the continuing US embargo, but also because of the loss of a foreign market, Cuba couldn't obtain enough imported food. Furthermore, without a substitute for fossil-fuel based large-scale farming, agricultural production dropped drastically.
So Cubans started to grow local organic produce out of necessity, developed bio-pesticides and bio-fertilizers as petrochemical substitutes, and incorporated more fruits and vegetables into their diets. Since they couldn't fuel their aging cars, they walked, biked, rode buses, and carpooled.
The excerpt above is from an article that appeared in the special Peak Oil issue of Permaculture Activist, Spring 2006. The author, Megan Quinn, is the outreach director for The Community Solution, a program of Community Service Inc., a nonprofit organization in Yellow Springs, Ohio.
