Filmmakers’ Statements
Timothy S. Bennett, Writer and Director
Something happens when you read four hundred articles on climate change. And half a dozen books on oil depletion. Something happens when you spend a day Googling “mass extinction”, or “dying oceans”, or “depleted uranium”. Something happens when you spend three long years delving deeply into the present global predicament, and into the economic, political, spiritual, psychological and cultural forces that have brought us to a point in history where we can seriously ponder the extinction of the human species, and the mass extinction of much of the life on this planet. Something happens when you not only look at it, but also allow yourself to feel it - the grief, the outrage, the loneliness, and the fear.
Something happens. Denial fades away. Denial cannot endure in the face of that much information, and that depth of feeling.
After long decades of activism and effort, planetary ecosystems are closer to collapse than they have ever been. I can think of three basic reasons for this. First, we have largely failed to look at the whole thing at once. Second, we’ve refrained from deeply feeling our predicament. And third, we haven’t been asking the right questions of the right people.
What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire is an attempt to fill in these missing pieces. By looking at as much of the whole as we can, by creating a feeling experience of that whole, and by asking the deep questions of culture, psychology and spirit that lie at the root of our situation, it is our intention that What a Way to Go will break through the denial that has us locked in inaction.
Sally Erickson, Producer
Since the early 1970’s I knew something was wrong with how we were living. Years of psychotherapy, involvement in building and living in an intentional community, and a variety of spiritual practices allowed me to create a life largely outside the mainstream. After twenty years as a psychotherapist, with my children grown, I realized that I had an itch to do something more than alleviate the suffering of individuals in my private practice. There was something bigger, much bigger, that needed to be addressed.
And then I met Tim Bennett who told me he wanted to make a documentary about how we are destroying the planet, what that’s doing to us, and why nobody’s talking about it.
Over the last three years we joined forces, both personally and professionally, to sound an alarm. The human species is teetering on the edge of extinction. It’s time to start talking about that. It is my intention that What A Way To Go will provoke lengthy dialogue about what is most pressing at this time in human history. Will we choose to turn away from the culture of empire and instead create ways for humans to inhabit the earth that regenerate and renew the life-support systems we depend on?