Green Wednesday ponders life without oil

The tiny room, lined with about forty plastic chairs, one movie projector and plenty of tea and coffee buzzed with energy during Kwantlen’s fourth Green Wednesday, held Jan. 14.

The event took place at the Langley Campus and was hosted by the Green Ideas Network and Gary Jones, Kwantlen horticulture instructor and chair of greenhouse and retail production.

Jones began Green Wednesdays a year ago and says he does it “so that we leave our kids something to actually live on.”

Wednesday’s movie, The Power of Community: How Cuba survived Peak Oil, describes Cuba’s struggle after losing access to oil, “the first country to face the crisis we will all face.”

At first, buses ran only every three to four hours, blackouts to save energy made keeping food in the fridge impossible and people lost as average of 20 pounds as food was scarce.

The Cuban people adapted in a variety of ways and scenes of people planting lettuce and selling their bounty in local markets of tight-knit communities showed the possibility of living oil free.

Lee Carter, 62, says Cuba changed because they had the motivation “and for us it’s easier to go to the grocery store than it is to grow our own.”

Tom McMath, 65, a physics and engineering instructor at Kwantlen, says the film was really about the triumph of the human spirit. His wife Sharon McMath, 61, an avid gardener saw it as “the way the future should be.”

The second part of the evening featured the movie “Energy Efficiency and Renewables” and was wrapped up with a door prizes and a question-and-answer period with Tim Cooper, an instructor in the physics department a the University of the Fraser Valley.