transcribed by Katherine Baldwin
This is Peak Moment. We are living in a peak of human innovation, information, wealth, and health; but we are also at a peak of population and consumption, with rising temperatures and declining resources fueled by cheap oil and gas. Peak Moment Television, bringing you examples of positive responses to energy decline and climate change through local community action.
Janaia Donaldson: Hi, welcome to Peak Moment, I'm Janaia Donaldson. In the world of localization groups, some groups are out ahead of the rest of us, and I have a wonderful guest today that's part of that. I'm with Megan Quinn, whose the outreach director for The Community Solution, which is a project of community service in Ohio. Welcome, welcome -- we're in Oregon here, very different?
Megan Quinn: Oh very different, yes. It's beautiful, though.
Janaia Donaldson: We like it, we like it here on the west. Well, you've been at this longer than a lot of the relocalization groups, looking at this whole issue of peak oil and so on. The exciting buzz around the community at this point is the film that you have just come out with. Tell us the name of it, tell us what it was like doing it.
Megan Quinn: We just finished producing "The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil". It's a project that's been going on for about three years in our organization, collecting research and going down there to film. What we researched, what we found out about was that when the Soviet Union collapsed, Cuba lost half their oil overnight.
Janaia Donaldson: So we're dealing with the early 1990s?
Megan Quinn: Yes, the early 90s, and what they've done since has been amazing. They've transitioned to all organic agriculture, developed urban gardens, renewable energy sources, some innovative transportation things. We thought it was really critical to document what they're doing there and bring it back to the U.S. as we face our peak oil crisis.
Janaia Donaldson: So they're a model for us.
Megan Quinn: Absolutely.
Janaia Donaldson: How long did it take you in the filming. You were part of the crew, right?
Megan Quinn: Yeah. We went down there in October of 2004, for ten days to do the filming, and have been in post production since and are glad to get that film out there in the world. We've heard some great responses so far, from it. It's being used in public screenings all around the country to raise awareness about Peak Oil, but also to give people some hope and some options for what they can do in their own communities.
Janaia Donaldson: You're doing the right ingredients there, because if we give the news of Peak Oil, it's like 'Oh my God, the world's going to end' and people will stop and then stay in denial. So if we come and say, 'but look, there's a model, there's transitions, it's possible for us.'
Megan Quinn: Absolutely.
Janaia Donaldson: There's certainly some different factors in their country than our country, right?
Megan Quinn: Absolutely, yeah.
Janaia Donaldson: Let's take a look at those, because those are some of the lessons we're going to learn from. They had a tough time, for a while, which we might also. What was that like, and how long?
Megan Quinn: In the early nineties it was a hard crash. There was an economic depression, their GDP dropped by a third -- and this is happening in a period of weeks, so it was really sudden for them. Malnutrition started giving rise, their average calories were cut by a third. There were cases of blindness because of the malnutrition. It was really a tough time for Cubans.
Janaia Donaldson: They were doing industrial agriculture, like we are now, so with no oil they can't run their machines and tractors and all that.
Megan Quinn: Exactly. Cuba was on the industrial path, they were on the Soviet path, so it just blind-sided them. But, they took action, in their communities, as individuals, to survive. They took these series of steps that has led them to a much more sustainable way of life. They now realize that they were going in the wrong direction before, so it's really amazing to see that turn around in Cuba.
Janaia Donaldson: If you would describe the after, I mean, here they are. What do you find in terms of health, agriculture, transportation, way of life, calories?
Megan Quinn: Well, their calories are back up to where they were before the crisis, but they're eating much more healthy food. They're eating locally grown greens; in Cuba, basically people ate pork, beans, and rice before the crisis and now they're demanding all these great vegetables and herbs and everything. Certainly their health has improved, they're bicycling more and they're walking more, so their health has also improved because of that. There's a lower incidence of heart-attacks and lower cholesterol, that kind of thing. That's been great. Also, just in agriculture, really agriculture has been their greatest accomplishment and their most sustained accomplishment since the crisis. Eighty-five percent of their agriculture is now organic.
Janaia Donaldson: Truly?
Megan Quinn: Yes.
Janaia Donaldson: That's remarkable.
Megan Quinn: It is remarkable. The key thing is they're growing food where people are. They're growing food in urban areas, in Havana especially, which is home to 2.2 million people. There's larger urban farms, as well as gardens on people's patios and rooftops, and they're just cultivating food wherever they are.
Megan Quinn: Yeah.
Janaia Donaldson: So on the gardens in town, are they state run? How does the government play into this, because you've got a dictatorship there.
Megan Quinn: Right.
Janaia Donaldson: That's got some pluses and minuses. I mean, one thing about a dictator is he says, if we're all going organic gardening, we all go organic gardening.
Megan Quinn: Yes.
Janaia Donaldson: So there's a different play to that than we might have.
Megan Quinn: Certainly. The government has done a lot of things to incentives, which I'll get to in a moment. At the beginning of the crisis, the government really couldn't do anything. Things were happening so fast. What they did was actually relinquish more control to the local communities. The CDRs, the block organizations in Cuba, actually identified plots of idle land within the community, cleaned them up, and formed urban gardens there.
Janaia Donaldson: So it began from the people.
Megan Quinn: It really came from the grassroots in Cuba. At the same time, the government really encouraged, they developed more research into organic agriculture and bio-pesticides and bio-fertilizers. Cuba's now exporting bio-pesticides and bio-fertilizers all over Latin America. The government is also-- They called 2006 the year of the energy revolution, and they're going around to homes all around Cuba, and they're giving them fluorescent lights, and more energy efficient appliances, and educating them about it so that they can reduce their energy use even more.
Megan Quinn: It's really amazing.
Janaia Donaldson: That is really, really exciting. What lessons did you bring back? What can you help bring us to our Western way of life here? What can you imagine for the American people?
Megan Quinn: Well the main thing is that America is very different from Cuba. First of all, we're a much more individualized country; in Cuba there was a greater sense of community and neighbor--
Janaia Donaldson: --Already there, still.
Megan Quinn: Already there, not only from their socialist past, but as an island nation that is continually under foreign domination, from the Spanish to the English to the U.S. We don't have that same sense of it, yet at the same time, if you go back a little bit more in our history, when we were predominantly a community of small towns and small communities, we did have that sense of a common vision as a community, helping each other and exchanging on a local level. I think we have that, but at the same time, we've come to this individualized, mass consumption society, so perhaps our biggest challenge is learning how to relate with each other again and have strong local relationships -- face to face relationships, not face to tube.
Janaia Donaldson: Face to tube, I like that. Or in our little metal boxes, all of us in our little vehicles in our little isolated world, which is the plus and minus of what oil has given us, certainly the mobility, but on the other hand the isolation for that. So that really kind of leads to the name of your project.
Megan Quinn: --Yeah, The Community Solution, absolutely.
Janaia Donaldson: What has your project been involved with? What are you seeing happening in the movement, broadly?
Megan Quinn: Our organization, essentially, proposes the fact that Peak Oil might actually be a good thing because we're going to be going back more into local relationships and local exchanges and out of our isolated little metal boxes and working together again. We really think that that's the source of human happiness, that consuming all of these fossil fuels and all the resources has not made us happy.
Janaia Donaldson: That's right, the happiness index has really been interesting to see, the wealthier that we're getting. At a certain point it's like the more and more stuff, and you're not happy anymore. People are finding people overwhelmed and overbooked and over-scheduled and the too-much-ness is sort of... This could be the blessing in peak oil to reduce that much-ness and come back to human connections.
Megan Quinn: Definitely. We think Peak Oil is an opportunity, actually, to return to a much more better and fulfilling way of life, healthier way of life, certainly. As you mentioned, getting our time back, and having more time for ourselves--
Janaia Donaldson: --And each other. We're social critters.
Megan Quinn: We are. Janaia Donaldson: We've sort of gotten away from that.
Megan Quinn: Certainly.
Janaia Donaldson: What are you seeing happening in the movement at large, of the re-localization movement as other communities are waking up to what-- Your group has been ahead of the curve for many of us, are you in talk with others? Where are we going?
Megan Quinn: One of the great developments, I think, that's happened over probably about the past year, is incorporating global climate change into the message because I think that the solution that the government and corporations are really gonna come at us with is coal. Coal would just be devastating for the climate. I think that if we combine those two messages, it's a really powerful way to convince people that we need to start looking at our way of life and reduce our consumption and conserve and curtail our use of energy.
Janaia Donaldson: I expect they will give us both big coal and big nuclear. Now big nuclear isn't going to feed the climate change problem, but it has a whole other raft of problems.
Megan Quinn: Certainly, and it's not liquid fuels, as well, which is the challenge of replacing--
Janaia Donaldson: Yes, we can do liquified coal, but that's just not going to be... that's another front we're going to have to face at that point.
Megan Quinn: Yeah, certainly. I see that as a really good development of the two movements coming together. Peak Oil is really getting out there, among government policy makers and lobbying organizations it's becoming a buzz word. Gore and Clinton and Robert Redford all drop the Peak Oil phrase on TV. It's getting a lot of buzz, but at the same time, most of the environmental organizations that are working on Peak Oil or oil energy issues are proposing this whole raft of alternatives that are going to be able to replace everything so that the bottom line is that people don't have to take action. I think that's a dangerous message that they're getting out there.
Janaia Donaldson: When you're saying the environmental groups are putting out proposals for a whole bunch of other things,--
Megan Quinn: --Yes, particularly bio-fuels is I think really coming out strong now from environmentalists, but--
Janaia Donaldson: --We can get ethanol, and that will handle it, from corn, from sugar, whatever.
Megan Quinn: Absolutely, and they cite the Brazil example, of course, and they've done amazing things. First of all, sugar is not what corn is, and second of all, the main issue to deal with is the soil depletion that that causes. If we're continually extracting more and more of the resources out of the soil, it's just going to collapse even harder and the soil crisis is going to be just as bad as the oil crisis.
Janaia Donaldson: There's part of the point. If it were only oil, then we could go to some of these other solutions, but it's also fresh water, top soil, our fisheries, the oceans. We're looking at resource depletion all over in lots of levels. The only single answer that sort of comes back to that is, use less.
Megan Quinn: Yep, absolutely. Live more locally, as you talked about.
Janaia Donaldson: Right, which consumes less, in it's own way and nourishes more, actually, on different levels. That's a good point about the environmental communities having that sort of tact, it's not really--
Megan Quinn: I think that we need to educate them, and work with them, because, right now, they're really causing a lot of damage, actually. When people learn about Peak Oil, they think, 'Oh, I don't have to do anything.'
Janaia Donaldson: Yes, and I can see that, certainly, a topic as daunting as Peak Oil, plus climate change, the first response that I find from people is like, 'Oh my God... carry on with my life, somebody else will have to handle this, I'm just working to survive.' So if it looks like the environmentals have answers, if it looks like the government has answers, then we can stay in that hobbit-hole. I'm not sure the message is out that we can't sustain those bio-fuels, I mean the veggie-cars, people are getting excited about bio-diesel. Is that the same as you're thinking about, with the ethanol and the sugar and so on, that that also is not sustainable.
Megan Quinn: Absolutely. It is not sustainable. Really there is no combination of alternatives that's going to allow us to continue consuming as we have been. Even if there were alternatives, does that justify our use of them? Is this making us happy? What is the purpose of consuming these fuels? Is it giving us what it promised? I don't think so, I think there's a better way.
Janaia Donaldson: The better way. So part of what you're shaping as 'what's that vision, what's that better life on the other side?' Where we're more connected, where we're more local, where things are slowed down and we have time again. People responding to that? Are you finding people changing their behavior because of that message--
Megan Quinn: --Oh yeah, everywhere, definitely, especially in these localization movements. That's really what inspires me; seeing people that make those changes in their life and are more happy for it, seeing people start gardening and getting to know their neighbors. It's wonderful, and there's been amazing work that's going on. At the same time, people coming together in their communities to start educating the greater community, and taking action there. I think it's both important to make the changes in your own life and then work at the community level.
Janaia Donaldson: We're finding that it's a walk-your-talk place. Right? That's part of it.
Megan Quinn: Yes, Definitely.
Janaia Donaldson: The other thing, and part of why it struck me, I think why I got on board to work with Peak Oil, is that I think climate change is the big issue. That's the big one, that's the big wild card here. But Peak Oil is going to hit everybody.
Megan Quinn: Yes, and their pocket-books--
Janaia Donaldson: --Regardless of your stripes, regardless of the flags, your church, whatever, we're all going to feel it, and of course, the poor are going to feel it first. I am concerned for that community, which does lead me to ask: what are you finding are the topics that people don't want to talk about, what they don't want to face?
Megan Quinn: Well that's certainly a key one. Inequity, both nationally and globally. There's countries all around the world that are already facing Peak Oil because they can't afford the fuel. Fidel Castro, actually, recently said in a talk that no Latin American nation can pay a hundred dollars for a barrel of oil. --
Janaia Donaldson: --Because nobody can afford it
Megan Quinn: Nobody can afford it.
Janaia Donaldson: We're at what? 60 or 70 now, so it's going there--
Megan Quinn: Exactly. As it gets worse, what it's going to be is--If we try to maintain our consumptive level, then it's essentially taking fuel from the poor people. For them, they're not wasting it like we are. For them, the loss of oil is the loss of the water pump, it's the loss of the basic electricity that keeps them alive. It's a huge social justice issue as well.
Janaia Donaldson: I'm going to be the Devil's advocate here. I can hear the average American start thinking, that's too far away, that's not on my radar screen. Not that I'm a bad person, the average American, but if I want to get in my car and go over and get a six-pack of beer, that's my right as an American. I don't want to be that ugly about it, but --or get milk, whatever, or take my kids to school--
Megan Quinn: Well, it's a moral issue, is what it is. Another thing that I wanted to mention is the role of religion--
Janaia Donaldson: I was going to say, the church is --It's a moral issue.
Megan Quinn: It is certainly a moral issue, both from the standpoint of taking fuel from the poor people around the world, as well as from future generations, as well as the damage that we're doing to the environment and the other species. It is a very powerful moral issue and as things get worse, religions could play a role for either good or for bad. That's something that I think that we all need to be aware of, and to start working within to get the message out there.
Janaia Donaldson: I just had this sense as you just said just now that they may be a critical tipping point for attitude here. Given how strong the faith community is, as we've seen it in our recent elections, they have a real pivotal role. I was heartened to meet a man in Salem who is doing green development, zero energy development. So when we have to do development he's doing some--He's doing all the right kinds of things. As a Christian was very pleased to have a minister at a very very large church in Idaho, was talking about who stepped forward in his denomination to say, we need to be keepers of God's green earth. It sounds like the whole congregation, thousands of people, were on board. I find that heartening news, even though I haven't yet personally --I would ask you that, have you stepped into any of the church communities and begun to share that message, and what kind of responses are you getting?
Megan Quinn: I've primarily been with the Quakers and with the Unitarian, Universalists, already churches that have a strong social justice component to serve their spirituality. I haven't tried many more challenging ones. As well as the Catholic Church, actually, there's a lot of really progressive elements within the church that are starting to look at this issue.
Janaia Donaldson: How much would Jesus consume?
Megan Quinn: Yeah, right. How many barrels of oil would he use a year?
Janaia Donaldson: That would be fun to say, this is Jesus' ecological footprint if he were here in 2006. That would be an interesting project, that's something to work on. What other kinds of topics are sort of, not OK to talk about here? I'm wondering, other's that you've thought about...
Megan Quinn: One that comes to mind is the issue of farming and food. I know our country has had this backward look at farmers like they're all stupid, rednecks, all the derogatory words that we use, but the fact is people are going to have to start getting involved in agriculture. I estimate somewhere between 25 and 50 percent of the population is going to be engaged in agriculture in some way.
Janaia Donaldson: Whoa, whoa, that's big.
Megan Quinn: If you take away tractors, what you have to replace them with this human labor. I mean you can use animal labor, but you also need humans to take care of the animals--
Janaia Donaldson: --And you need more land to take care of the animals to grow for the animals as well. Yes. That's a big percentage, 25 to 50. Now I realize that at the beginning of the 1900s--
Megan Quinn: It was about 50 percent.
Janaia Donaldson: Is that where we were.
Megan Quinn: About 150 years ago. Right now we're about 2 or 3 percent.
Janaia Donaldson: Right, because we've got all those mechanical slaves--
Megan Quinn: Certainly. Exactly, we've replaced people with oil.
Janaia Donaldson: So we've got this challenging prospect of how do we make a couple of tough things look appealing, be inviting, have incentives, look both --Consume less (I mean that sounds totally against the American way) and come back to farming, come back to working with your hands. We've moved from blue-collar up into an information technology world.
Megan Quinn: Right, where most people really aren't producing anything of real value. It's all this in-your-head and on the computer, but what do you eat, what sustains you? People are going to have to be more engaged in directly sustaining themselves, which is how humans have been doing it for millions of years.
Janaia Donaldson: I understand that historically something like 80 percent were working at farming and growing to be able to support the remaining 20 percent of the warriors, and priests and lawyers and kings and the clerics.
Megan Quinn: Right, and I think there's still going to be specialization. I don't think everybody is going to have to be a farmer, but at some level, at some level, the backyard garden or of your own food processing and preserving. People are going to have to take responsibility for their food.
Janaia Donaldson: We have a long way to go on that. We had a come home to eat event in our community and got to hear from a panel of about twelve farmers, CSA, free-growers, ranchers, grass fed beef, and what we learned is, only one of them was making it on just their farming. He said that the three dollars they earned extra last year, they went out and spent on a dinner out--Joked about that. It's not a lot.
Megan Quinn: Well, we're going to have to start taking care of our farmers more. In Cuba, a farmer has a higher wage than an engineer or scientist. They're really honored and respected in Cuban culture now.
Janaia Donaldson: We have a turn around to do, and to make it inviting to young people, that was one of the issues, that our average age is older and that knowledge and wisdom they've gotten--More that they will need to grow if it's not mechanized. What are we going to use for organic methods of pest control, or disease control? We have a lot of knowledge to keep.
Megan Quinn: We do, and too, a lot of new innovations, I think, will come with a resurgence of new farmers and new minds that are working with the issues of farming. I think it will be a period of great innovation in the next few years, as we take all these steps to adapt to a post-Peak Oil reality.
Janaia Donaldson: How do you--we've got only about six minutes here-- Do you have a sense of how our timing might shape up? I'm thinking about the young people needing to learn that farming and where we get the programs and whatever to make the transition. Got senses about that?
Megan Quinn: One thing that our organization has put forth is this model called Agraria. It's essentially a way to develop local agriculture, local work places, as well as have a center for training, re-training farmers. I think that there's going to have to be a lot of local level re-training of new farmers to get active in that. I don't really know how things are going to go, I'm not a prophet. I feel though, that right now, time may be our most scarce resource of all. I think that we really need to start getting a lot of these things in place, at least as models, for when the crisis really hits, so that people will have options to look to like they have in Cuba. I'd really like to see some communities in the U.S. become models for that transition.
Janaia Donaldson: Mmm, that's a great idea. Lay down the gauntlet for us.
Megan Quinn: I think that's what the localization movement is all about, really. I think that's really going to inspire people.
Janaia Donaldson: I think that people are feeling there's a sense of how to do that and there's a whole lot of space between here and there in accomplishing that. In the last bit here, are there things that--What inspires you? What other challenges do we have ahead of us here?
Megan Quinn: I think one of the challenges is media, and that's what's so great about your program, is that you're really putting out really relevant and important information for people in the Peak Oil community. We have this horrific media in our country that is just bombarding people with constant messages about consuming and really is aiming to mislead people so that they don't shake up the reality and change their way of life; consume less, essentially. I think we need to think about those issues and how we can get through to people. Part of it is on the more grass-roots level in our communities, but I think we also need to think about how we can be coordinating in the future.
Janaia Donaldson: I think it's true. We are the media, since the corporate media has got everything sewed up in his own pocket of that consumptive model, our great capitalist system here. I do find that people want this information, and they want to share it, and they want to learn what the new things are. I think that also, going back to your mention about the environmental groups misleading us, in a sense, this is a counter to that because we have people like yourself saying bio-fuels aren't going to be it. There's a real need for the very active, independent media, to be saying, look guys, here's the analysis. This isn't going to fly. We are able to then present information, like you're doing. We can have data that's accurate.
Megan Quinn: Absolutely, and there's a lot of great media out there. There's certainly what you're doing, Global Public Media, From the Wilderness publications. My organization takes very objective looks at all the alternatives, so I would encourage people to definitely check those out. At the same time we have an annual conference that we bring together for the movement, and we're actually going to have a panel on localization, really working out the tough issues of localization in terms of how much can we realistically localize. We're still going to have our computer chips coming in, obviously, we can't--
Janaia Donaldson: I don't think we want to give up our internet, I think that would be--I think that's actually one of the things that's part of the promise. We're not going to go back to the 1800s here. That global communications network is too precious for us. It's part of our being one whole planet, the view that we got, the view of Earth from space. So yeah, we're not going to have our computer chips made. We are, for sure, going to have to think regionally as well as just locally. Besides, we are just not going to manage to grow chocolate here, right?
Megan Quinn: Or coffee.
Janaia Donaldson: Right. So, some of what we--I mean, trading is part of our reality.
Megan Quinn: Absolutely. So how can that proceed in a post-Peak Oil world? I think there's a lot of great questions and there's going to be a lot of great people at our conference, September 21st through the 23rd.
Janaia Donaldson: Back in Ohio.
Megan Quinn: Back in Ohio. More information at communitysolution.org. Hope you'll be able to join us.
Janaia Donaldson: Oh I hope so too. That'd be fun to be there. We still have, however, we've got two minutes, we've got a post-script, a post-script.
Megan Quinn: OK
Janaia Donaldson: What do you love most about what you're doing? What do you love most?
Megan Quinn: Well, there's a great satisfaction in what I'm doing, not just for today but for future generations. I really feel that I'm doing good work for them. In meeting so many people around the country that care about future generations too, and care about the Earth, and it's so wonderful and empowering to be with those kind of people. It's just such a blessing to be part of this great movement, of wonderful exciting people that are getting active and taking responsibility for their own lives and for the lives of future generations.
Janaia Donaldson: You say it well. The community is already happening, by just these early, early pioneers in this movement. That you could probably feel welcome in nearly any community in America where this is beginning to take form. Thank you for joining me. This has been great fun.
Megan Quinn: Thank you so much.
Janaia Donaldson: My Guest is Megan Quinn of The Community Solution in Ohio. I'm Janaia Donaldson, and you're watching Peak Moment, Community Responses to a Changing Energy Future. Join us next time.
Peak Moment Television, presented by Yuba Gals Independent Media
Produced by Janaia Donaldson
Directed by Robyn Mallgren
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