How Cuba Survived Peak Oil (good read!)

[phusion]

Havana, Cuba -- At the Organipónico de Alamar, a neighborhood agriculture project, a workers' collective runs a large urban farm, a produce market and a restaurant. Hand tools and human labor replace oil-driven machinery. Worm cultivation and composting create productive soil. Drip irrigation conserves water, and the diverse, multi-hued produce provides the community with a rainbow of healthy foods.

In other Havana neighborhoods, lacking enough land for such large projects, residents have installed raised garden beds on parking lots and planted vegetable gardens on their patios and rooftops.

Since the early 1990s, an urban agriculture movement has swept through Cuba, putting this capital city of 2.2 million on a path toward sustainability.

A small group of Australians assisted in this grass-roots effort, coming to this Caribbean island nation in 1993 to teach permaculture, a system based on sustainable agriculture which uses far less energy.

continued...

[Viva_La_Revolution]

1. bad link?

page cannot be displayed. :(

[phusion]

3. fixed...

thx! ;)

[Viva_La_Revolution]

4. Your welcome. We were actually discussing this at the MeetUp

last Saturday.

We all need to learn to grow our own food again. Composting and earthworms are great ideas.

[phusion]

8. Absolutely...

While becoming self-sufficient, we can also expand and strengthen communities and start to reconnect with nature's cycle. There are so many benefits to implementing these types of projects that it would be foolish to ignore them.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

2. This is something everyone should be thinking about doing this year

thanks for the information.

[FloridaPat]

7. I started looking into that last year. It is not easy. I became a

master gardener so I could find out how to grow stuff. My orange trees are finally mature enough to have enough to eat and share with the various critters in the neighborhood. Only took 10 years. There is a gardening forum here at DU.

[FloridaPat]

5. They also work together to make sure everyone in the path of a

hurricane is safe. They group together and move people, needed items, and animals into safety. I wonder if Cuba is poor because Castro is an idiot or the US sanctions have made them so.

[Sammy Pepys]

6. They have "hybrids"

When I was there several months ago, they were using a lot of cars...but they convert them to run on pretty much anything they have available (mostly kerosene). All the Cubans joke about their "hybrid vehicles."

They do have mass transit...but it's not of the style that I think would go over well here.

[blindpig]

9. The Application of Deep Ecology in Cuba.

Here is a good but a little dated view of Cuba from a Deep Ecology perspective.

http://trumpeter.athabascau.ca/content/v16.1/martin.html

The day will come when the boats are going in the opposite direction.

[phusion]

10. link is bad...

http://trumpeter.athabascau.ca/content/v16.1/martin.html

thanks for the article!

[blindpig]

11. Thanks for the fix.

Can't read my own scribble.:(