Portland Peak Oil presents film: "The Power of Community ? How Cuba Survived Peak Oil" March 15, 2006

NOTE: The first 20 minutes of the evening, Amanda Fritz, candidate for City Commissioner, will be speaking to the group on energy issues and Portland. There will also be Q&A, so bring your tough questions! Portland Peak Oil does not officially endorse any City candidates at this time; we simply aim to provide the service to the community of hearing the candidates speak about relevant issues. The film below will likely start at 7:30pm.


This showing is free and open to the public. It's a new film and a few of us saw the beta version that Richard Heinberg showed at his workshop here in January. It's excellent!

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. That year Pat had begun studying and speaking about worldwide peak oil production. In May Pat and Faith attended the second meeting of The Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, a European group of oil geologists and scientists, which predicted that mankind was perilously close to having used up half of the world's oil resources. When they learned that Cuba underwent the loss of over half of its oil imports and survived, after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990, the couple wanted to see for themselves how Cuba had done this.

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.

In 2004 Community Service, Inc. (CSI) began raising money and organizing a third trip (October), to film in Cuba. Greg Green, cinematographer, director and editor of The End of Suburbia documentary, was the chief videographer. Faith Morgan shot the second camera, John Morgan did still photography and Megan Quinn, Outreach Director of CSI, was sound director. After their return from Cuba, they secured assistance and direction from Tom Blessing IV, producer, and Eric Johnson, post-production supervisor and editor. Together, they bring over 40 years combined experience in film and television production.

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.

Everyone who has worked on the documentary hopes that, seeing this film, people will also see the world on which we live, as another, much larger, island. Read more here.

www.portlandpeakoil.org