In addition to speaking about Cuba, Robyn will briefly share her design work in Australia with Djanbung Permaculture Gardens & Education Center, Jarlanbah Permaculture Hamlet, and Rivendell Eco-Village, with greywater systems, composting toilets, rainwater harvesting tanks and many other sustainable design features we can only dream of in place since the early 1990's.  An incredible body of work, go to www.permaculture.com.au to see what she has been up to for the last 20 years, and with our new Calif  greywater codes, we might be able to emulate soon.

Santa Barbara Permaculture Network
 Permaculture Around the World Series
with Robyn Francis from Australia speaking on
Permaculture in CUBA
459ec1 1.jpg  459f0f 1.jpg 459f5d 1.jpg 459f9b 1.jpg
Saturday, August 8, 6:30 - 8:30pm 2009, Donation $5
Santa Barbara Central Library, Faulkner Gallery


     Santa Barbara Permaculture Network continues its Permaculture Around the World series, this time welcoming Robyn Francis from Australia 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.

        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.
        
        The event takes place on Saturday, Aug 8 , 6:30-8:30 pm at the downtown Santa Barbara Public Library, 40 East Anapamu St, Santa Barbara, CA. Donation $5, no reservations needed.  For more information visit our website at:
www.sbpermaculture.org


Sponsored by Santa Barbara Permaculture Network Non-Profit &
 Quail Springs Learning Oasis and Permaculture Farm


-end-

Santa Barbara Permaculture Network
   an educational non-profit since 2000
(805) 962-2571
P.O. Box 92156, Santa Barbara, CA 93190
margie@sbpermaculture.org
www.sbpermaculture.org

"We are like trees, we must create new leaves, in new directions, in order to grow." - Anonymous

First Annual Southern California Permaculture Convergence August 2008
http://socalifornia.permacultureconvergence.org