The lessons of Cuban peak oil

I interviewed visiting Cuban environmentalist Roberto Perez for Earth Matters.

You can download the podcast from the 3cr website.

With oil hitting $110 a barrel, Cuba provides a powerful example of how an industrialized country can survive a so-called “peak oil” scenario, where oil availability goes into an inevitable decline.

When the soviet union collapsed, Cuba lost a huge percentage of its vital oil imports.

The country also lost important trading partners which provided the country’s food needs and important export revenue.

Cuba was pushed into an immediate food and energy crisis, a situation compounded by long-standing US embargoes.

After responding to the crisis with a more localised economy and organic food production system, Cuba is now being celebrated as a model of self-sufficiency.

It was the only country in the 2007 World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet report that met a set of criteria for sustainable development.

Roberto Perez is a cuban biologist and permaculturist who is currently touring Australia.

He’s been telling audiences about Cuba’s experience and what it means for oil-dependant countries like Australia.

More information about Roberto’s Australian tour is available at http://www.permaculture.com.au

Quandongs for breakfast

This week I attended a fantastic community forum called Think Global: Eat Local in Byron Bay.

After a screening of the film Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil, there was a panel discussion featuring Cuban permaculturist Roberto Perez, Robert Pekin from Brisbane-based CSA Food Connect and Russ Greyson from the Australian Community Gardens Network.

It was all very stimulating and exciting for people like me interested in the relocalisation movement.

But it was when the panel opened for questions from the floor that the evening climaxed.

An empassioned woman grabbed the mic with gusto and started to talk about the importance of growing your own food locally.

She talked from her own experience about how she’d planted hundreds of fruit trees in the rental houses she’d lived in over a twenty year period in the area.

“Living in a rented house and think you can’t plant trees? No excuse,” she said.

When she heard that the Government was handing out fines for people planting unregistered banana trees she started planting more and more banana trees than ever before.

On one occasion kids snuck into her front garden to secretly take bananas from a tree she had planted.

When she suddenly arrived back home, the startled youngsters started to apologise profusely for ’stealing’ her fruit.

She said to them, “don’t apologise, I planted it for everyone to enjoy”.

But the clincher was a story about something that had happened to her at the Woodford Folk Festival.

Part of the ticket price for the festival was directed to planting native trees to offset the festival’s environmental impact (and presumably to create a nice glowing feeling for participants).

But the woman said she didn’t want a native tree planted from her money. She wanted a fruit tree.

The guy said it was not possible.

An argument ensued but the festival representative was adament that only native non-food-growing species would be planted.

The woman drove her point home with a classic comment that really challenges us to think about whether planting natives really is the best strategy for reducing our environmental impact and improving the amenity of our public places.

“What did you have for breakfast?” she asked the young man, “Quandongs?!”

For those that don’t know a quandong is an Australian bushfood.

Quandongs have amazing nutritional properties and are being developed for commercial production.

But quandongs, like many bushfoods, are still not a core part of mainstream Australian diet. And you wouldn’t live for very long subsisting on them, even if you could afford going price of ninety dollars a kilo.

So until we have a nourishing and abundant bushfood cuisine, I wholeheartedly agree that we should be planting fruit trees and other edibles in our public place.

In the face of real food security threats from peak oil and climate change, planting fruit trees is a great strategy.

In confining food production in remote rural areas we become alienated from how our food is grown and depend on fossil fuel-based agriculture with its ineffecient transportation model.

This makes it easier for farmers stick with industrial farming and its toxic chemical dependency issues.

Bring the food home I say.

Quandongs anyone? You can get them here.

Diet with a little meat uses less land than many veg diets

A new study by Cornell University researchers challenges the widely help assumption that a purely vegetarian diet is the most ecological way to eat.

For want of a better word I was “vegetarian” for a few years but am now a selective omnivore. I respect people who go vego but I also think think vegetarianism isn’t the solution to all our social, ethical or environmental problems. And that’s what this study seems to suggest.

The researchers say a low-fat vegetarian diet is very efficient in terms of how much land is needed to support it. But the report added an important caveat to this, that some dairy products and a limited amount of meat may actually increase this efficiency.

“The findings of their new study, which concludes that if everyone in New York state followed a low-fat vegetarian diet, the state could directly support almost 50 percent more people, or about 32 percent of its population, agriculturally. With today’s high-meat, high-dairy diet, the state is able to support directly only 22 percent of its population, say the researchers, ” an article in Science Daily reports.

The study, published in the journal Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems, is the first to examine the land requirements of complete diets. See the article here:
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071008130203.htm