Roberto Perez in Bristol on tuesday
Roberto was awesome at the Green Left fringe at Bolivar Hall, he inspired a 90 strong audience with a clear set of solutions to oil addiction, showing that the future has to be ecosocialist and based on grassroots democratic community, one of the most inspiring people I have had the pleasure to meet…so if you are in the West Country catch him on tuesday. He will be speaking at the convention of the left. We also had an awesome Cuba Solidarity fringe at Green Party Conference where we watched ‘the power of community’.
Being ecosocialists and having the friendly cooperation of a couple of Latin American states in putting on the event we did not need to charge for the Green Left fringe but I appreciate some organisations need to pay for venues, etc…any way on to the Bristol event.
So catch Roberto on Tuesday September 16th - 7.30 p.m. The Cube Microplex, Kings Square, Kingsdown, Bristol £4/£3
Image by: The Power of Community
19:00 16/09/2008
(Tues 16th / 730PM / £4/£3)
With speaker ROBERTO PEREZ, noted Cuban biologist and permaculturist
who is featured in the film.
When Cuba lost access to Soviet oil, fertilizers and export trade market in
the early 1990s, the country faced virtual overnight economic collapse and an
immediate crisis - feeding the population. The story of the Cuban people’s
hardship, ingenuity and triumph over sudden adversity - through cooperation,
conservation and community - to create a low energy society is inspirational.
Cuba’s transition to organic agriculture and rapid relocalisation based on
decentralised health care and higher education, bicycles and public transport,
and community response to radical change is both thought provoking and empowering.
Roberto Perez, who has recently completed a hugely popular speaking tour of
Australia and New Zealand is currently touring Britain and will provide a rare
opportunity to hear about the Cuban experience first hand. The film will be
followed by discussion of practical ways we can meet the challenges of climate
change and make the transition to a low energy society.
Director Faith Morgan
http://www.powerofcommunity.org
advance tickets available from the Better Food Company
Proving House, Sevier Street
St Werburghs, Bristol BS2 9QS
0117 935 1725 | admin@betterfood.co.uk
Lots of Roberto at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal:
http://links.org.au/node/332
http://links.org.au/node/416
Comment by Terry Townsend — 15 September, 2008 @ 8:11 am
Roberto also found time to visit the National Assembly for Wales for an informal and inspiring meeting with Plaid Cymru AMs Leanne Wood and Nerys Evans. Read LW’s blog post about it here, very interesting:
http://leannewoodamac.blogspot.com/
Comment by Luke Nicholas — 16 September, 2008 @ 2:59 pm
I and a colleague dropped Roberto off at the Assembly, I have to say that it was a real shame that he couldn’t have stayed in Cardiff for a week (or a year)!! as just the chat I had with him over a cup of tea was a consciousness raising experience & really clarified a lot of eco-socialist thinking and ideas on activism.
Some things he said were quite funny, for example, he said he was interested to visit Britain as the land where the allotment was born, dig for victory and all that, though he said the folks back home would not believe that people here got in a car to drive to there allotment far away, isn’t the whole idea that it should be local, and he talked about the community gardens and allotments where people grew food together. He spoke of growing food as part of working class and individual self-determination and fundamental to public health & nutrition and giving people back self-respect robbed from them by the likes of Tesco’s.
He also had some interesting comments on permaculture. For example, in Britain permaculture courses are expensive, whereas in Cuba these skills are taken very seriously and courses are free so that the skills can percolate into the community. He also spoke of permaculture purists, but said I would rather see 100 projects with elements of permaculture than one perfect permaculture farm.
He spoke of the need for permaculture in Britain to really become rooted in working class communities rather than lifestyle options for the middle class tucked away in rural idylls.
Another interesting dynamic was the decentralisation of Havanna University. Which was broken up, so that every community had a local campus where pedagogy was taking place. This had implications for democracy too and he discussed how the idea was to embed the university in the community rather than the ivory tower. Can one imagine in Britain university teaching taking place on council estates?
Comment by Adamski — 19 September, 2008 @ 10:36 am
#3 Adamski…. sounds like you really enjoyed the time with Roberto. This stuff is all very inspiring. Given the burgeoning economic crisis here we can all start to play a role in our own communities promoting the practical development of permaculture. For example, 2 weeks ago I was coming back from picking blackberries on wasteland on the edge of our estate and passed an empty plot of land sandwiched between two houses and a woman was on the street washing her 15 year old Ford Escort. We had a chat about the weather which turned to the disused land… she didn’t know who owned it but when I suggested we could turn it into a community garden [just like the stuff they have in Habana] she was really enthusiastic. Nothing has come out of this idea yet. But is not at all utopian for socialists to take practical leadership on issues like developing local permaculture projects.
As the economic crisis bites and unemployment grows….we don’t need to set up organisations that act like religious sects promising pie in the sky to accumulate a primitive cadre. We can start to ‘Dig for Victory’ again and alongside our neighbours we can work the land in common and make the wastelands grow.
The Chartists when they were defeated organised the Great Chartist Land Scheme.
Where I live is just a couple of mile from the last of these settlements, Dodford. The Chartist retreat from political struggle and back to the land utopianism can be turn around 160 on. We can use our own local land schemes as a practical solution to the “credit crunch” to create space and time to discuss with our neighbours how we can politically build a new democracy in England. Plus despite all the hard work involved the labour is not ‘alienated’ at least you get fair shares in some tasty produce.
Comment by mark anthony france — 19 September, 2008 @ 11:02 am
There is a long tradition of this kind of DIY activity from the Diggers of 1649 at St Georges Hill to guerilla gardening. Maybe people in cities need to occupy land in the middle of towns and start growing. The Communist Party in the 1930s was highly involved in rambling including the celebrated mass trespass in Manchester immortalied in the song “The Manchester Rambler” - ‘I may be a wage slave on Monday, but I am a free-man on Sunday”
Part of the problem re. allotments is that there seems to be a shortage of land made available, here there are big waiting lists and often the allotment is not as local as you might hope. I know near where I grew up the allotment is now some flats. There has been some talk here of the Welsh Assembly moving to see more land made available, I am sure that Luke will be more acquainted with these areas of public policy. Cuba provides an example where they take land in the middle of cities. One of the interesting innovations in Cuba was precisely the real pushing of the concepts of urban gardening. Food grown slap bang in the middle of the city means that instead of lots of food miles and carbon emissions transporting it, people can get it from where it is produced.
One of the things I found interesting about Perez’s thinking was how he talked of acting locally but not without losing sense of the global perspective & always emphasising how can we enable people to take control of their own lives.
Comment by Adamski — 19 September, 2008 @ 11:15 am
#4 I went to a very interesting dayschool on Chartist Co-Ops in South Wales that produced food, one of the very inspiring things discussed was how the co-ops were heavilly intertwined with trade union struggle and working class mass movements. With many of the co-ops virtually funding strikes and feeding families
A short report here:
http://cardiffrespect.blogspot.com/2008/09/welsh-history-day-school-report.html
Though the papers will be found in the next journal of Llafur - the Welsh People’s History Society.
Comment by Adamski — 19 September, 2008 @ 11:18 am
By the height of the war allotments were apparently producing 3 million tons of food.
Comment by Adamski — 19 September, 2008 @ 1:00 pm
I was at the Bristol Event, thanks to Derek for posting this on the website! I must say I was inspired!
Shows we can live well and within our means, without being slaves to big oil.
Comment by Green Socialist — 20 September, 2008 @ 8:34 am