The Power of Community – How Cuba Survived Peak Oil
The Power of Community
The documentary, "The Power of Community – How Cuba Survived Peak Oil," was inspired when Faith Morgan and Pat Murphy took a trip to Cuba through Global Exchange in August, 2003. During their first trip to Cuba, in the summer of 2003, they traveled from Havana to Trinidad and through several other towns on their way back to Havana. They found what Cubans call "The Special Period" astounding and Cuban's responses very moving. Faith found herself wanting to document on film Cuba's successes so that what they had done wouldn't be lost. Both of them wanted to learn more about Cuba's transition from large farms or plantations and reliance on fossil-fuel-based pesticides and fertilizers, to small organic farms and urban gardens. Cuba was undergoing a transition from a highly industrial society to a sustainable one. Cuba became, for them, a living example of how a country can successfully traverse what we all will have to deal with sooner or later, the reduction and loss of finite fossil fuel resources. In the fall of 2003 Pat and Faith had the opportunity to return to Cuba to study its agriculture. It was a wonderful trip. They saw much of the island, met many farmers and urban gardeners, scientists and engineers – traveling more than 1700 miles, from one end of Cuba to the other. It was all they had hoped for and more. The goals of this film are to give hope to the developed world as it wakes up to the consequences of being hooked on oil, and to lift American's prejudice of Cuba by showing the Cuban people as they are. The filmmakers do this by having the people tell their story on film. It's a story of their dedication to independence and triumph over adversity, and a story of cooperation and hope. Several Cubans expressed the belief that living on an island, with its natural boundaries, breeds awareness that there are limits to natural resources.
For more information about this film and for resouces on holding a screening, please visit www.communitysolution.org/cuba.html
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August 23rd, 2007
The Community Solution's Power of Community
This documentary's title is quite apt. The Power of Community tempers the realities of oil peaking and depletion with a hopefilled message. Megan Quinn, Faith Morgan, and Pat Murphy form the core of the Community Solution Team, this is their story of the exploration of Cuba's artificial peaking of oil imposed on that island by the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The documentary opens with an explanation of what Peak Oil is for the uninitiated, before going on to explain that what occured in Cuba with the withdrawl of fossil fuel resources from a highly industrialized and sophisticated society. The film examines the tough experiences that the average Cuban experienced in what Fidel Castro described as the 'Special Period', that period of national emergency when Cuba was forced to adjust to the absense of much of the fossil fuel that their society had come to rely upon.
The film features many Peak Oil experts, among them Post Carbon Institute president, Jullian Darley and senior research fellow, Richard Heinberg, but it also talks with many community leaders from Cuba. These leaders describe aspects of lifestyle change including rationing, transportation, medicine, education and most importantly, agriculture. The documentary provides a good broad brush stroke about permaculture and how that form of agriculture was at the core of Cuba's survival as a country. Many Peak Oil documentaries are very frightening in their message, so much so that for a person new to the concept, the message may be too much and create a sense of hopeless apathy, the Community Solution differs in this regard in that, it gives the bad news and tempers it with a hopeful vision that the solutions lay locally with the people of a community working together to find viable solutions to the predicament that faces them. It is a message that the viewer can take heart from and learn from. See the Community Solution, it is relatively short at just over an hour of running time and is inspiring in its message. 3 and a half stars out of 4.