on Sustainable World Radio, KCSB 91.9 FM PST
 also streaming live on www.kcsb.org, interviews posted later on  www.sustainableworldradio.com

        Join Jill Cloutier of Sustainable World Radio for an interview with Robyn Francis as she speaks about her past and future visits to Cuba where she and other Australian permaculturists have been credited with helping Cuba transform the islands agriculture to a more sustainable model through perrmaculture.

Joining Jill in studio will be Wes Roe and Margie Bushman of Santa Barbara Permaculture Network

        Climate Change and Peak Oil are topics on the minds of many Americans today.  There is much to learn from Cuba's response to the sudden loss of cheap and abundant oil in the early 1990's with the fall of the Soviet Union and the continued U.S. Embargo in place since the 1960's.  Cuba's industrial model of agriculture under the Soviets was highly mechanized with monoculture crops reliant on petro-based pesticides and fertilizers.  The era in Cuba following the Soviet collapse is known to Cubans as the "Special Period" when it lost more than 50 percent of it oil imports, much of its food, and 85 percent of its trade economy.  Transportation halted, people went hungry, and the average Cuban lost 30 pounds.

        Dictated by reality, Cubans began to bring agriculture into the city with urban gardens, cultivating vegetables wherever they could. A small group of Australians assisted in this grass-roots effort, coming to Cuba in 1993 to teach Permaculture, a system based on sustainable agriculture that uses far less energy.  With a grant from the Cuban government they set up the first Permaculture demonstration site, that evolved into the Foundation for Nature and Humanity's Urban Permaculture demonstration site located in Havana.  Today 50 percent of Havana's vegetables come from inside the city, while in other Cuban towns and cities, urban gardens produce from 80 percent to more than 100 percent of what they need.
       More recently Australians have come back to Cuba to assist after two devastating hurricanes wrought massive destruction throughout Cuba in September 2008.  The loss of crops, soil and organic matter from the torrential rains and flooding, challenged all the islands agriculture, including the permaculture sites.
Robyn Francis and the Cuba-Australia Permaculture Exchange (CAPE) toured the island to assess the damage, offer help, and take the opportunity to learn from the disaster to design more resilient systems for the future.

      Robyn Francis has just returned from a visit  to Cuba in June 2009 as part of Cuban-Australia Permaculture Exchange (CAPE) and will be reporting on her observation in her talk on One-Earth Footprint - Learning from Cuba's Experience.  Discover the key factors enabling Cuba to survive collapse, live within its ecological footprint, and how this relates to Permaculture and Transition design. Don't miss the chance to learn from one of permaculture's earliest pioneers.
  

        Robyn Francis is an award-winning international permaculture designer, educator, presenter and innovator, with over 25 years of permaculture work throughout Australia New Zealand, USA, India, Indonesia, Germany, Cuba, and Taiwan, and including projects ranging from outback communities to urban development. . Robyn was founding director of Permaculture International Ltd (PIL) in 1987, editor of the Permaculture International Journal, designer and creator of Djanbung Gardens (www. permaculture.com.au), one of Australia's leading permaculture centers.

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