*Voices of Transition" free movie screening

By focusing on immediate profit and ignoring millennia of experience in agronomy, agroindustry is responsible for the unprecedented erosion of soils now occurring around the world. Add climate change and dwindling natural resources to the picture, and it would appear that even societies in the Global North are no longer safe from famines.

Voices of Transition is a film which is optimistic but clear-sighted. It makes clear that these current and impending crises are, in fact, positive challenges!

In France, farmers and researchers demonstrate that agroforestry techniques, which imitate natural ecosystems, have enormous potential for our agriculture. It would appear to be just a matter of time before our monocultural fields are tranformed (back) into abundant and biodiverse edible forests.

In England, the Transition Town movement is developing at an astonishing pace. It illustrates that food production must not be solely in the hands of rural farmers (or faceless corporations), but that we can bring it into the very heart of cities. City-dwellers are no longer mere consumers, but instead play a vital part in the transformation of their communities towards local resilience.

In Cuba, the fall of the USSR in 1990 and the US embargo led to the country to experience “peak oil” long before it was expected. Shortages in resources led the Cubans to develop innovative solutions, with the result that they became vastly more self-sufficient in food production. In Cuba, food is now produced organically, in a decentralised, community-supporting way.

A panel discussion with Ross Moster from Village Vancouver, Gerry Pinel from Golden Ears Transition Initiative, and David Dalley from Village Surrey will follow.