Surviving peak oil

Thurman told me to look into this documentary, called The Power Of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil. Well, I found a video of it online, you can watch it here.

It's pretty fascinating, a real case study of a society experiencing and dealing with Peak Oil and its issues and problems. Gives me a more hopeful feeling than I've had, which I really needed.

There were some interesting points raised at the end. For one thing, the idea that we have used in 100 years half of the oil the Earth has been producing for hundreds of millions of years. As the man in the film says, it's absurd.

Secondly, they made reference to the way Cuba, like all island nations, have a sort of natural sense of limited resources. And it seems this island consciousness is what started the whole environmental movement, when we had for the first time an image of the whole world, as pictures of Earth from Space came out back in the late 1960s.

But it still hasn't sunk in for most of us on the necessary scale. Earth is an island of habitable, livable environment in a sea of inhospitible space. But we still think in terms of growth, endless growth. Not gonna happen. Especially if this century long spasm has used half of one of the most energy dense, versatile, easily used fuels ever known.