Come on Pino, We’re going Home.. by Mattjin Franssen

Last week’s laboratory musings seems to have touched something wider than myself, as more than one fellow Doomer™, or Recovering Doomer™, or Post Doomer™, or Ex-Doomer™, or Non-Doomer™ (and maybe this is the week to retire that label entirely?) reported a resonance with my words. My friend and colleague John Ludi got right to the heart of it when he said “I think it is tied into the recent environmental/climate news building up.” Yep. Last week’s post was my first attempt to process and incorporate what I’ve been calling, in FaceBook City, the “extinction by mid-century meme.” That’s what I was chewing on last week. That’s what I’m still chewing on. I’ll get as far as I get today, and save myself the pressure of having to have it “all chewed up” by the end. We’ll see…

A meme (pron.: /ˈmiːm/; meem)[1] is “an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.”[2] A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures.[3]

I’m not really interested today in analyzing or assessing the Truth™ of that meme. I may not ever be. I don’t know that that’s my work anymore. And I sense that our Universe is too chaotic, and that there are too many unrecognized variables, for me, or us, to ever really Know™ how it’ll all turn out in the end. I just want to observe that this meme is out there, that, in the past year or three, the climate news has brought more and more people to the point where they are considering, and speaking about, the possibility of human extinction, and that this meme has seeped into my consciousness and is changing me. Part of me wishes to assert that this meme is nothing new to me at all, that I have long, and perhaps always, been open to this possibility. And there is truth in that. But of course another part of me knows that it’s one thing to consider the metaphor of the “fatal diagnosis” as a useful lens through which to view our present predicament, and another thing entirely to actually sit in the doctor’s office and hear the news. And it can take quite some time to let that news really sink in. Part of me wants to say that the news that “we’re all gonna die,” is hardly news, though it may feel like such to card-carrying members of an adolescent society convinced of their invincibility. But of course extinction is not the same thing as an individual death, and seems to require an entirely new conversation.

Which is the conversation I’ve been in most of my life, I think. And which feels risky to enter into now. Sally has long confronted me on my tendency to explore the “what’s so” at the expense of “what’s possible,” and she is right to do so, I think. Following Robert Fritz, in his book The Path of Least Resistance, it’s the “dynamic tension” that gets created when we hold a clear understanding of our present situation AND a clear vision of where we wish to go that provides the motive force for movement. Too much focus on the “present predicament” can keep one stuck or despairing. Too much focus on the “possible vision” can make one ungrounded. It’s the both, the paradox, the holding, the balance, that keeps us in tension. And, in tension, we have motivation to move toward resolution.

But, wow, it’s been so hard for me to find and hold onto vision and possibility in the face of peak oil, climate change, mass extinction, and population overshoot. Hard. Wow. I found the “what’s so” of our situation so overwhelming that I had to find a vision not outside or beyond or apart from my understanding of the reality of our collective situation on the material plane, but inside of that understanding.

Curiously, in this time of the ”extinction by mid-century meme,” I’m feeling more hopeful, more vision-filled, more engaged, more joyful, more powerful, than ever. I’ve long held that my habit of staring unblinkingly at the worst possible news of the world is a spiritual practice, as it strips away the bullshit and casts me into the NOW more than anything I know. If that’s the mechanism at work, then my practice has surely worked. But if I’ve got some new handle on vision and possibility, I’m only now beginning to figure out how to speak about it. And to tell the truth, speaking vision in the face of extinction feels pretty scary to me.

What is worth doing now? That’s the question that has bounced around in my head these past few months. I mean, really. If there’s truth to this meme, this analysis of climate change, if Charlie has stolen the handle, leaving no way to slow down, then what the fuck? As John Ludi said, “It’s understandable to be OK with the idea of the end of a largely rapacious global civilization…but the notion that we may be on the verge of creating conditions that could extinguish vast swathes of life on this planet itself is where you just can’t do much more than throw your hands up and make the best of whatever time you have left.” Right. And so what does it mean, to “make the best”? What is possible, even then? What matters now?

Must human extinction be considered a complete fail? Or is there another possibility?

Like I said, risky…

And I wonder this because, as an individual human sitting in that storied and metaphoried doctor’s office and hearing the fatal diagnosis, I know, or think I know, that it’s possible, even in that situation, to find a “win” before I die. It’s possible to decide, even then, to live the best life I can live. It’s possible to complete my mission here, to gain in maturity and wisdom, to love and be loved, to grow and evolve. It’s possible, as Khaled Hosseini wrote in The Kite Runner, that “there is a way to be good again.” It’s possible, I think, somehow, in a way that matters, to come home again. And if it’s possible for an individual, then I wonder what’s possible for a culture, a people, or a species.

I can’t go any further than this today, except to offer a number of things that have moved me over the years, as places where I intend to look for clarity and understanding and vision in the coming weeks and months.

The first thing that comes to mind is that Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth contains, if memory serves, a wonderful exploration of the meaning of human extinction in our time. He was exploring nuclear weapons and war, rather than climate change, but I think there’s something in there I need to read again, as I am not who I was when I first read it.

The next thing that comes to mind is Edward Abbey’s novel, The Fool’s Progress. This is the only Abbey I have ever read, and I remember it moved me deeply as a younger man. It’s about coming home before one dies. It’s about finding oneself in the face of the fatal diagnosis. And I remember it moved me to tears.

The movie Seeking a Friend For the End of the World comes to mind. It masquerades as a Steve Carell comedy, but I think it’s much more than that. I watched it twice in as many days, and it brought me to tears each time. There’s something there, the search for love and meaning even as the comet approaches, that speaks directly to our present time. Marvelous.

And then there’s this video about coming home, which some find brutal, and others find inspiring, and which brings me to tears of grief…

And there’s this video, also about finding one’s way home, which makes me weep not only with grief, but with some strange hope…

Sigur Rós - Ekki múkk from Sigur Rós Valtari Mystery Films on Vimeo.

Like Shirin in Daniel Quinn’s The Story of B, and like Sally, I’m a bricoleur. I weave things together from the pieces I find available around me, whether they be shards of tile, film clips, or ideas. These are the things I’ve found that move me, that speak to what remains possible even in the face of human extinction, that tell me, in some way only my tears seem to understand, that there is something that still matters. I don’t know how to put these pieces into some coherent whole. Or, if I do, I don’t yet know how to speak of it in a way that satisfies. For now, here are some pieces, sitting on my lab table, waiting to be contemplated and explored.

The day is sunny. Enough of this. I wish you all peace.

T

Here, in no particular order, are seventeen resources that sit within easy reach on the shelf in my laboratory. They serve as foundations to my current working, playing, thinking, feeling, and being here on Planet Earth. These works inspire me, inform me, shape me, calm me, guide me, challenge me, and teach me. If we’ve largely “lost our elders” in the dominant mainstream culture, these works, and the hearts and minds that created them, serve as elders in my life. These are all works to which I have returned more than once, and to which I expect to return again in the future.

Ishmael and The Story of B (and other works) by Daniel Quinn: It should come as little surprise that these come first to my mind. I’ve certainly spoken about their importance to me many times before. Quinn’s insights have been essential in my own work of learning to notice and call into question the deep, seemingly invisible cultural stories, beliefs, assumptions, and expectations which shape our lives, both personally and collectively. With Quinn, I mastered my ability to hear the whispered urgings of “Mother Culture.” Having heard her voice, I cannot unhear it. That has changed everything.

What to Remember When Waking by David Whyte: This audio presentation, done for Tami Simon’s SoundsTrue, moves me deeply. Whyte, an English poet now living in the Pacific Northwest, with his marvelous voice, his fierce yet gentle tone, his deep wisdom and enchanting words, feels like every elder I’ve ever wanted all rolled into one. This presentation works for me just as the title says: as a guide for living for those who have Awakened™. To me, his thoughts and words and images and stories form a method of divination, like an audio Tarot, a spoken I Ching. Dip into any place in this almost six hours of magic and I find something that fits right into the questions and challenges of my day.

Ultimate Flexibility, an interview with Adyashanti by Tami Simon: Thinking of David Whyte naturally brings me to this podcast, and for similar reasons. Though my own spirituality does not fall into any neat containers, any particular tradition, I find that what Adyashanti says here resonates with me very deeply. And like David Whyte’s work, it serves, for me, as a “how to” for navigating the emotional-psychological-spiritual terrain of this present unraveling/transforming world into which I was born.

Communion (and other works) by Whitley Strieber: This is the book that brought me back into an adult relationship with one of my childhood loves: the UFO phenomenon. Strieber adds a moving and poetic “human face” to the experience while managing to do one of the most important things (in my opinion) we civilized humans need to learn to do: he holds the questions and does not collapse into firm belief. While I consider the UFO phenomenon both Real™ and extremely Important™, I lose interest when any particular researcher or analyst tries to explain “what it all means” or “what is really going on,” as if they have the real, correct, true answer. The phenomenon seems intent on confounding us, and on confounding the overarching materialist paradigm into which most of us were born and raised. For that reason, I consider this topic directly related to the whole Doom™ thang, to which I give so much focus.

The Culture of Make Believe (and other works) by Derrick Jensen: If Daniel Quinn has served, for me, as the voice of the “elder” or “wizard,” Derrick Jensen has served as the voice of the “warrior.” I have found both roles to be very important, and do not consider them mutually exclusive. One can be both, I think, and the “warrior” and “wizard” archetypes have both always inspired me. Jensen’s keen mastery of cultural stories, beliefs, and assumptions compliments Quinn’s, rooting out some of the whisperings of the culture that Quinn did not. And his love for the living world is palpable to me. His earlier works were essential for my own path toward mastery, and resonate still within me, as though Jensen hit the gong of my soul with a soft, firm mallet and set it ringing forever.

UFOs and the National Security State, Volumes 1 and 2 by Richard Dolan: Were I to recommend books about the modern UFO phenomenon, I would recommend Dolan’s amazing histories as essential reading. While my own thinking and speculation about the Reality™ of the phenomenon may sometimes get way “fringier” (I can’t believe spell check is letting that one go by without comment…) than his, Dolan’s approach has been very helpful for me, primarily because he focuses so much on the human (government, military, scientific, etc.) response to the phenomenon and attempts to “peer behind the curtain.” Trying to think and feel my way into the hearts, minds, goals, and motivations of the hidden control levels is something I love to do. I also find Dolan to be a clear and entertaining speaker. I just like the guy. That’s a nice feeling.

The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot: I’ve probably read this book five times now, once out loud to Sally. That’s saying a great deal for somebody with as extensive a “to be read” list as I have. For me, it’s a “wow!” book. It takes pretty much every single topic that interests me and rolls them all together into a big, fun, intriguing ball of everythingness. Love it… a possible TOE (theory of everything) with clear scientific roots and spiritual branches. And once I learned to see the Universe in holographic terms, it has opened me to fun and intriguing new realms of thinking. To me, all that “peak oil, climate change, mass extinction, and population overshoot” stuff is not only about questioning such assumptions as “perpetual growth,” “human exceptionalism,” or “ruling the Earth.” It’s also about challenging the scientific/materialist paradigm that sits underneath our current collective predicament. This book does that.

Fingerprints of the Gods, Supernatural (and other works) by Graham Hancock: As may be obvious by now, I follow other guides besides just the “rational, scientific reasoning” I was taught to use as a member of the dominant culture. I follow intuition. I follow my excitement. I follow signs and portents and synchronicities. And I read the reviews on Amazon. In Hancock’s case, I must say, I never smile as much, and my heart never beats quite as excitedly, as when I’m in the middle of one of his analyses of our deep human past and our collective human situation. So many fear to wade into the “fringe” pool because it looks to them chock full of shouting, giggling nutballs tossing around beach-balls filled with groundless speculation, hopeful salvation fantasies, and unexamined filters and beliefs. You may find Hancock in that pool, but he’s up to something very different, I think. Speculative? Sure. Challenging? Yep. Rejected by mainstream historians and scientists? Largely. But Hancock does not feel like a giggling nutball. My discernment meter tells me that he’s a clear thinker who’s onto something important.

The Party’s Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies (and other works) by Richard Heinberg: I got the environment piece way earlier than I got the oil piece. My friend Tom tried to give it to me a couple of years before I was ready for it. Sally handed me Thom Hartmann’s The Last Hours of Ancient Sunshine, and Matt Savinar surely scared the bejesus out of me, but it was Heinberg’s book that sealed the deal. That may be largely due to Heinberg’s confident, calm voice. Sure, he says, this might be frightening. There are big changes coming. But let’s just sit together, take a breath, and think about how we might wish to respond. I can still feel astonished that the basic concepts of “peak oil” are still as up for question in the mainstream mind as they are. But then I have to be astonished at my astonishment.

F#A#∞ by Godspeed You! Black Emperor, American Woman by The Guess Who, Nantucket Sleighride by Mountain, The Power and the Glory by Gentle Giant, Remain in Light by Talking Heads, Ænima by Tool, and Version 2.0 by Garbage: Where would I be without music? I would be locked in a padded cell, my arms constrained, with a dab of spittle hanging from my chin. Music saved my sanity and my soul when I was a kid. It saves me still today. Okay, so maybe Sally would be enough to keep me out of the padded cell, but really, without music? Why would I want to even be here? As I continue to stare at the world situation, there are just some days when I need a reason to love my fellow humans. Music always brings me back to that. Always. There are thousands of other titles I could insert above. These are today’s.

The Importance of Human Beings by Terence McKenna: Though I have a used copy of McKenna’s Archaic Revival in a stack on my desk, I have yet to read it. I’m sure I will one day, but I find McKenna’s audio so compelling that I fear I may not like him as much in written form. I’m not sure which planet McKenna comes from, but it must be near my own. The man makes me laugh. He makes my eyes grow wide in wonder. He challenges me and pisses me off and loses me and holds my attention. And he gives me pieces I get nowhere else. This particular speech is one to which I’ve returned numerous times. It challenges what I see as the over-reactionary Doomer™ judgments regarding human exceptionalism, and the Scientific™ judgments regarding directionality in the Universe. Opening up these topics for dialogue is just the sort of thing I love to do in my lab.

Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (and other works) by Stephen Jay Gould: I pretty much read everything Gould wrote in my teen and early adult years. His popular books on evolutionary theory, punctuated equilibrium, and the history of science excited and informed me. One might think that Gould’s general insistence that evolution has no inherent drive toward long-term progress, no particular directionality beyond that of diversity, stands in direct opposition to McKenna’s address above. One might be right. I, for one, love paradox, and any chance I can find to hold seeming opposites together at the same time. To my mind, one must take such crazy steps, if one wishes to stumble into a new paradigm.

12 Monkeys by Terry Gilliam, 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick, Amadeus by Miloš Forman, The Big Lebowski by the Coen Brothers, Dead Man Walking by Tim Robbins, Fight Club by David Fincher, and Harold and Maude by Hal Ashby: (Yes, I know it is unfair to single out directors like this. Deal.) As with music choices, I could have named a thousand films. These are just a few that jumped out. Also as with music, films have helped keep me sane and in touch with something good at the times I’ve really needed those things. And, since the artists and creators behind both music and films are often struggling with the same questions about life, the universe, and everything with which I tend to wrestle, they’ve given me valuable signposts, images, words, and metaphors to use on my own journey. My lifelong love of films, books, and music also makes me a competitive player at Trivial Pursuit.

Journeys Out of the Body (and other works) by Robert Monroe: I’ve read books about this since I was in high school - books on Near Death Experiences, Past Lives, Reincarnation, Remote Viewing, Shamanic Journeys, Psychedelic Trips, and Out of Body Experiences. (Look at all of the CAPITAL LETTERS!) There’s something obvious, exciting, and yet mysterious about the notion that our consciousness, whatever that is, is not strictly tied to our bodies, whatever those are. Though I’ve yet to really experience much of this myself (I’ve “dabbled” enough to get a few, vague “hits.”) I’ve read reports of studies that leave me fairly convinced that there’s something to it, even as I refuse to collapse into firm belief. Monroe stands out in my mind as a pioneer in the field. His books are great fun.

Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (and other works) by Richard Bach: There’s something about Bach’s writing that always stirs my heart and gifts me with tears. His simple stories are gentle yet firm, intensely grounded yet reaching toward the stars, and portray the very teachers and elders and seekers and visionaries I long to meet in my Real™ life. Like some of Quinn’s novels, Illusions feels like it was written directly to and for me. And there are so many pithy quotes to use, so many concise spiritual equations to hold in my heart and mind. I love quotes and equations.

Cosmos by Carl Sagan: Along with Stephen Jay Gould I was reading every book by Carl Sagan that I could get my hands on. While Gould took me into deep-time, Sagan took me into deep-space, from the Cosmos to the inner quantum. (Yes, I know, both of these gentlemen wandered further afield that I’m indicating here…) I remember watching the PBS series based on this book (or was it the other way around?) and feeling such soaring wonder about, love for, and connection with the physical Universe into which I was born. Seeing ol’ Carl resurrected by the Symphony of Science folks brought that all back to me.

Slapstick or Lonesome No More! (and other works) by Kurt Vonnegut. I could have named a slew of other Vonnegut novels – Cat’s Cradle, The Sirens of Titan, Slaughterhouse Five, Galapagos – and I could have named a passel of other writers – Larry Niven, Stephen Donaldson, Frank Herbert, Tom Robbins, Orson Scott Card, Russell Hoban - but for reasons known only to my dentist, Slapstick stands out this morning as the book to highlight. There’s always been something about this strange, post-apocalyptic tale of freaks and Presidents and variable gravity and creative genius that has resonated with my own life experience. Vonnegut always moves me with his fierce humanity, his astonishment, his wry assessment of our collective predicament, and his hopeless insistence on the basic goodness of people, even in the face of so much seeming evidence to the contrary. Like music and films, there are many novels which serve me simply by reminding me that there is good in the world. That, too, is true. As true as all the Doom™, all the horror, all the injustice, all the pain, all the destruction, all the insanity. I need those reminders.

I note, upon looking over my list, that, with the exception of Shirley Manson, Tina Weymouth, and Sophie Trudeau (who play in some of the bands named above) and Tami Simon (as an interviewer) my list seems to be constructed entirely out of white men. Rather than go back and toss Chellis Glendinning, Vine Deloria, or Malidoma Some into the mix in an attempt to “correct” this, I think I will just leave it as is, noting it with interest as just the sort of thing I like to look at in my lab.

Onward…

When I watch a movie, my thinking always wanders to the same few questions.

How is this a story for our time?

What does this film tell us about ourselves, our deepest feelings, our secret thoughts, our invisible yearnings?

And how conscious are the filmmakers themselves about these processes?

Because we seem to be living in a time of converging crises, and because I am sensitive to that, I view most films through that lens. Being both a filmmaker and a cultural critic, it is an occupational hazard that I quite enjoy.

As Copenhagen unfolds, I notice some patterns in the media conversation: new examinations of confusion and denial; repeated attempts to explain and convince; more proposals of crucial solutions and necessary policies; timely reports on the severity of the situation. One question that seems to wander through these articles and essays and reports is this: why can’t we seem to get our shit together when it comes to climate change? The failure of Copenhagen feels, to many, like a foregone conclusion. So, like, What the What?

Good question. One that seems to apply to much of the present predicament in which we find ourselves. And one, I think, that will benefit from a viewing of Ridley Scott’s 1991 “Zeitgeist-catching” road movie, Thelma & Louise.

Go watch it. I’ll wait.

OK. You back? Good. Let’s move on.

So, if the question is why can’t we seem to get our shit together when it comes to climate change? then most of the answers I hear seem to fall into one of three categories. It’s because we (or our leaders) are:

stuck in distraction and/or denial,
greedy, unprincipled and maybe even psychotic or evil or
just too stupid to go on living.

To me these are all reasonable explanations. Distraction and denial are surely in force, as are those other human possibilities: greed, psychosis, evil, and stupidity. If you view our movies, as I do, as the stories of Imperialism, which reveal how we view both the world and ourselves, then you’ll find overwhelming evidence to support these assessments. But I think I see something more at work here. Something more fundamental, perhaps, or more invisible. And invisible, maybe, because it just breaks too many rules, to speak about it.

Here’s what I see: our collective death wish at work.

Hang with me for a moment. I have no doubt that our egos have been left battered, bruised, and pretty much insane by the experience of being born into captivity in what Derrick Jensen calls “the culture of make-believe“. I’ve experienced that insanity intimately in my own life. And once I identified it, I could see it all around me, at work in the world. But I also have a sense that my true self, my essence, that good and beautiful being I came here as, has not been destroyed. My animal body senses, perceives, and moves through the world at levels above, below and beyond the warped and word-bound ego that thinks it is in charge. My essential self remains in close and constant connection with a reality that far exceeds any mental constructs my thinking might wish to lay on it.

What if, apart from the denial, stupidity, or greed to which our ego-bound thoughts and words are too often constrained, our bodies know exactly what’s coming down? What if the reason we’re not getting our shit together when it comes to climate change is because our essential selves are not buying a bit of what our egos are being told about how to address this “problem”? What if, in fact, at some deep level from which we cannot even speak, those parts of our being that have not been distorted, distracted or destroyed by the absurdities of Empire regard climate change, in some crucial way, not as a “problem” at all, but as a “solution”?

Hard to imagine? Let’s go back to Thelma & Louise.

This movie was a “huge critical success”, clocking in as the 88th best-reviewed movie of all time at metacritic.com. It was nominated for six Academy Awards, and won for Best Original Screenplay. If it’s correct to call this film “Zeitgeist-catching”, then what part of “the defining spirit or mood of our times” does it catch? Pull over there. Let’s check the map.

Thelma and Louise leave their loveless, abused, and unsatisfying lives behind for a weekend fling together. A bit of fun leads to the attempted rape of Thelma, in response to which Louise kills the offender. They run, sure that they’ll never get a fair hearing in a court of law, and their attempts to flee to Mexico spiral out of control. As the charges against them pile up, they find a surprising exhilaration in their unanticipated life of crime. It all comes to a standoff at the edge of a cliff. Trapped in a situation with no acceptable solutions, poised between a line of state troopers and the sympathetic detective who has been trying to bring them in on the one hand, and the vast unknown of that cliff on the other, Thelma and Louise choose the cliff. The film ends with that iconic freeze frame, as they launch themselves in their ’66 Thunderbird into the only freedom they can imagine.

If that’s the map, then the territory is our own world, our own culture, our own lives. If Thelma & Louise shows us the Geist, it’s the Geist of our own Zeit. And if we allow that as our starting point, then the connections come easily enough. Did not the culture of civilization, at some point, take off on a weekend fling of unexpected exhilaration that spiraled out of control, bringing the entire planet face to face with our present predicament? And have not many people’s lives, at least those lived here in the heart of Empire, become so loveless, abused and unsatisfying that we’re poised now to do almost anything to get out of them? Have we not truly managed to do something no other living creature has managed to do, which is to make ourselves, individually and collectively, miserable?

Aye, now I’ve done it. I’ve violated a deep taboo, spoken the unspeakable. Because, well, we’re so happy, we Americans. Aren’t we?

I mean, sure, we’ve got corrupt leadership, economic insanity, and the end of cheap energy to contend with. We’ve got climate change and population overshoot and mass extinction to think about. We’ve got dying oceans, dying forests, dying aquifers, dying krill, dying caribou, dying everything. We’ve got nuclear power and nuclear waste and nuclear weapons and depleted uranium. We’ve got fucked up political systems, health care systems, educational systems, economic systems, agricultural systems, and septic systems. We’ve got racism, sexism, narcissism, workaholism and fascism. We’ve got child abuse and elder abuse and spouse abuse and animal abuse. We’ve got rapes and murders and suicides. We’ve got unwed mothers and single parents and children having children. We’ve got addictions, distractions, obsessions and compulsions. We’ve got unemployment and underemployment and homelessness and debt. We’ve got boring, meaningless work, longer hours, longer drive times and falling real wages. We’ve got unsatisfying relationships, loneliness, divorce and broken homes. We’ve got mental illness, stress, busy-ness, depression, despair, medication and “the deliberate dumbing down of America“. We’ve got obesity, diabetes, asthma, cancer and heart disease and all those other “diseases of civilization“. And sure, all of these things seem to be spiraling out of control, as if Conquest, War, Famine and Pestilence just stormed onto our polo field and started to beat the ever-loving crap out of our players.

But, c’mon! We’ve also got 24,909 tunes on our iPods! We’ve got Trundled Duck Confit with a Gorgonzola Reduction! We’ve got shamanic excursions into the heart of the Andes! We’ve got that new James Cameron movie coming out! In 3-fucking-D! Surely it all balances out? Surely, surely, this all counts for something? I mean, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, right? And the upholstery in this ’66 Thunderbird is just luscious, isn’t it?

I’ve got to stop and wonder whether comfort and distraction have been confused with joy, fulfillment and meaning. I acknowledge that it’s possible to find moments of comfort and happiness even in prison. That doesn’t mean we’re not in prison. I view this as our deepest denial, the denial of the truth of our own life experience, the denial kept in rigid place by our desperate story of The American Way. As David Edwards says in his interview with Derrick Jensen,

What prison could be more secure than one we’re convinced is “the world,” where the boundaries of action and thought are assumed to be, not the limits of the permissible, but the limits of the possible? Democratic society, as we know it, is the ultimate prison, because who’s going to try to escape from a situation of apparent freedom? It follows, then, that we must be happy, because we can do whatever we want.

Copenhagen unfolds. The cliff approaches…

Go back to those last minutes in the movie. We learn, finally, how deep Louise’s wounds go, how vast is her pain. We see the chase. The attempted escape. The final capture. We see the line of police cruisers. The helicopter hovers menacingly overhead. The sniper rifles aim their way. The “good cop” has failed to bring them in but argues angrily for one last attempt. The “bad cop” uses his PA system to order them to give up. Thelma and Louise are not buying any of it. They’re fed up with living lives in prison.

Thelma looks at Louise. “Let’s keep going,” she says
“What do you mean?”
Thelma looks out over the cliff, nods her head almost imperceptibly.
“Go,” she says.
Smiles and tears flit across their faces.
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
They kiss, their faces a study in love and grief and terror and power.
Louise hits the gas.
They hold hands.
They speed toward the cliff.
And they’re gone…

Can we just hold silence here for a few seconds?

Thank you.

I think Ridley Scott failed in this moment, as Roger Ebert so gratifyingly pointed out. Having spent two hours building up to this point, Scott could not hold it. Rather then just sit with the tension, the grief, the surprise, the pain, or the exhilaration, his freeze frame dissolved way too quickly into white. And the white dissolved right into rolling end credits, that haunting score, and a snapshot review of their happier times. As Ebert said, “Can one shot make that big of a difference? This one does.”

But now, here in our Zeit, we are given an opportunity to correct that failure. In this time of seeming collapse, as we sit staring over our own collective cliff, perhaps because, 18 years since the movie’s release, we are more desperate now, or perhaps because we have each other, we can hold the shot that Ridley Scott could not. We can sit with that tension, that grief, that surprise, that pain, and that exhilaration. We can hold that freeze frame and feel it to the very depths of the canyon underneath. We can look at this hidden piece of Geist and see what it is that the public, as a whole, seemed to resonate with so deeply. And we can learn, perhaps, in doing that, what there is to be learned in this moment.

I wonder if we’re not getting our shit together when it comes to climate change because, at some level, we’re not buying it, just as Thelma and Louise didn’t buy it, no matter the assurances of the nice white guy in the suit, or the threats of the stern authority figure in the uniform. We’re not buying the notion that this predicament will somehow get “fixed” by any combination of carbon caps, emissions agreements, green shopping, alternative energies and new technologies under the sun.

Some months ago, the specter of 4 degree C temperature rise started bouncing around in the news. Just a few weeks back, there were new reports that we’re on our way to 6 degrees C if we keep going as we are. And another new study reports that global CO2 emissions have risen 29% in the past nine years, indicating our commitment to doing just that. Six degrees moves us into the realm of the End-Permian extinction event, during which roughly nine-tenths of the lifeforms on the planet said their last farewells.

It seems… well… unlikely… that corrupt and insane leaders will have much say in such matters, as energy, environment and economy slip rapidly from our hands, as if they ever really were in our hands to begin with. Conquest, War, Famine and Pestilence seem now to have made their way up to the clubhouse. Hard to believe that that padlocked gate is going to hold.

And I wonder if we’re not buying any attempt to fix this problem that has as its goal the preservation of the culture of Empire. I think, collectively, our bodies are not buying that. Our sane essential selves are not buying that. iPods and duck confit DO NOT outweigh the costs to our souls of lives lived in prison and the destruction of the community of life. And sadly, we do not see that anything less than global catastrophe will free us from our collective insanity.

It is forbidden to say this out loud, of course, even to ourselves. It’s just too painful, to face into just how miserable we have become as a people, how lost, how wounded, how stuck. And how pointless life seems. As we asked in What a Way to Go:

“Are we destroying the planet, as Dmitry Orlov asks, just ‘to be somewhat more comfortable for a little while’?”

It’s too much to bear. And truly, why should we? Maybe Warren Zevon was right. If the planet’s now headed toward six degrees, “as the mystics and statistics say it will,” why not go out like desperadoes, our foot on the pedal, our hair just flying in the wind, taking out Empire as we go?

And “heaven help the one who leaves.”

Ultimately, what I think we are not buying, body and soul, is the notion that this is all there is, this “physical reality” of corrupt leaders, insane systems, working, shopping and fucking and dying. We’re not buying this whole “materialism” thang, this deadened world, this end of magic, this loss of meaning. We’re not buying it. The costs are too high. The benefits too shallow. And the growing edges of our own science seem no longer to support such notions. The anomalies have been piling up in the corner for so long now that we can hardly get through the door. We can still sense, despite the bullshit that has been heaped upon our minds, a Cosmos far more wondrous than either the suit or the uniform can even begin to imagine.

Indeed. Go back to that last scene. Watch closely. Look at Thelma’s face. Watch Louise’s reaction. The excitement mixed with terror. The wonder fused with grief. The pain of wounds so deep they drive us over the cliff. If Thelma and Louise are running away in their final act, they are also running toward. It’s in their eyes. They can see it. Beyond that cliff lies not only the end of this madness, but the beginning of something new. A step into that unknown Cosmos that has never abandoned us, even as we abandoned it. Plunging over a cliff is not an act of control. It’s an act of intention. And surrender. And trust.

Climate change may be a fuck-all mess, but at least it’ll get us out of this nightmare, and take us to some place new.

Hit the gas.

“Go!”

I do not wish to be mistaken here, though I’m fairly certain that I shall be. I merely wish to point out that, from where I sit, these forces are alive in our collective heart. I know they are alive in mine. I have no idea whether Thelma and Louise made the right choice. I do not know that we “should” hit the gas, whatever that means. The full manifestation of current trends is poised to take out a great deal more than human beings. It already has. It would certainly be my wish to kill off just the culture, rather than the vast majority of the community of life. As Derrick Jensen said in What a Way to Go:

So many people are so very, very unhappy. And they want this nightmare to end. And they don’t recognize that the death that they want is a cultural death, and is a spiritual and metaphorical death.

This death wish is here, part of the spirit of the times, and I say that it’s exactly what Thelma & Louise tapped into, exactly what caught its viewers in the throat, exactly what caused the members of the Academy to honor that Best Original Screenplay. Our collective misery, and our wish for the death of the culture that underlies that misery, hover still in that great freeze-frame of our present predicament. If we fade-to-white too quickly, if we insist on our snapshots of happier times, then we will miss a deep truth of this moment, and the opportunity to learn from this moment what there may be to learn.

Our failure to respond may, indeed, spring from denial, greed, and stupidity. Those are all likely suspects. But it may also be grounded in the deep longing of our bodies and the wisdom of our souls. Whatever the reasons, when it comes to our collective reaction so far, we’re not buying what’s being sold. We do not seem eager to “save civilization.” It may behoove us to wonder why that is.

If we face into this death wish, if we stare into our collective misery, both as the conquered and as the conquerors, and allow the truth of our culture, a culture that would drive us to this cliff, to rise into conscious acknowledgment, we may find, in doing so, a choice that now eludes us. It’s a possibility. One that I don’t think we have much explored.

We’re sitting on a cliff in a ’66 Thunderbird, staring into the abyss of the insoluble predicament. None of the choices we can imagine are acceptable.

Now what?

Tim Bennett and I have just returned home from two screening tours of What A Way To Go. We toured 13 communities in the Northeast during August and 23 communities in the West and Midwest during October and early November. I’ve now got a finger on the pulse of current levels of awareness in the US about the seriousness of our global predicament. Our audiences I believe are the cream of the crop. They are the best, the most tuned-in, the most concerned. It was a pleasure to be with them. They shored up my waning fondness for humanity as a whole. But despite the obvious goodness of the ordinary people that I witnessed, I am not encouraged about our prospects.

I can say this with a fair degree of confidence: save for the few who are already fully awake, most people who are now looking at the world are just waking up to the four horsemen that we address in What A Way To Go: Peak Oil, Climate Change, Mass Species Extinction and Population Overshoot. They are just waking up and they have no accurate idea how late in the game it is.

What’s the game I’m talking about? The game of “civilized, industrial, technological life as we know it.” We are at the end of that game. And people are just beginning to wake up to the fact that it’s a game.

I’m talking about The Apocalypse, which, I’ve come to learn, literally means The Unveiling. We are on the verge of The Unveiling. We are beginning to pull back the curtain and see clearly what our civilization has actually been up to over the past two centuries and eight or ten milenia.

The Unveiling is upon us and only a small percentage of the people are waking up. Those that are, are waking up at the last minute. And they are waking up rather slowly and reluctantly. Most still imagine the full unveiling and revelation of consequences must be decades away. They believe it’s at least a generation or two off. Most, even after they see our movie, continue to think there’s time to create a mass awakening, a popular uprising, a reformation. They want to believe that there’s a revolution afoot, that “green building” and “hydrogen cars,” will save us, if only “we the people” will demand those things. They continue to think there’s decades yet ahead in order to turn away from catastrophe, that it’s possible to solve our energy and climate and ecological holocaust. But you don’t solve a holocaust. At best, maybe you survive it.

Hello. It’s not generations away. It’s not decades away. As Tim says in voice-over early on in the movie, “Turns out it may be just around the corner.” In fact, for most of the community of life, apocalypse is right now. Today, for two-hundred species, life ends at midnight, or noon, or even as I write this.

Two hundred species a day we are losing. Two hundred. As Daniel Quinn says in the movie, “This is calamitous.”

Many who have been studying peak oil for years now suggest that the “peak” may have happened a year ago. You can tell yourself that hundred dollar a barrel oil is just corporate gouging. That we can somehow make them stop the rising prices. But that’s delusion. No doubt the oil companies are going to make as much as they can manipulating the prices. But the prices are going up. And up. And up. There may be a few manipulated blips on the upward curve. But demand will outstrip supply, if it hasn’t already, and the price will continue to climb, blip, climb, blip, climb.

Likewise, the evidence that climate change tipping points have already started to tip is also mounting. Summer sea ice levels on the northern ice cap hit record new lows this summer, new lows that far exceeded past predictions. Extinction continues unabated, as does rising human population. Richard Heinberg, who published The Party is Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies in 2005, has just published Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines. The party is indeed over, and not just for oil, but for all the things we’ve become accustomed to, for all the stuff the culture has eaten up and spit out and landfilled and is now trying desperately to recycle.

People have no idea how late in the game it is. And, sadly, many don’t seem to want to know. If people wanted to know they would walk from a screening of What A Way To Go to their local library or independent bookstore and start ordering and reading books from the authors we interviewed. They would find our website and click links to the many sources of energy, climate, extinction and population information. They’d find and read The Oil Drum and Energy Bulletin. They would immerse themselves in the information because they’d want to know. But the truth is, most don’t want to know.

Having toured 36 communities with our movie in the last three months and having sat with over a thousand people in post-screening dialogue circles, I find myself sad and sobered. And I thought I already was sober. I thought I had a clue about how little consciousness exists with regard to the extent and consequences of our human impacts on the world. I thought that was the whole point of making a no-punches-pulled, hard-hitting, wide-lens documentary in the first place. We knew people were sorely uninformed and misinformed about how dire the situation is. But we were naive.

We were not naive about the lack of awareness. We were naive about the lack of desire for that awareness. People don’t really want to know. And a surprising number of people acknowledge that. They don’t want to know because they realize they are already depressed. They are depressed and discouraged. And they believe they would rather be numb and distracted. They don’t see a way through the depression and discouragement so they turn their backs and resolve not to look.

I’ve come to see that there’s a major paradox we now face, having made a documentary that is as comprehensive and thoughtful and hard-hitting as ours is, in the context of a populace that is as dumbed-down and disheartened and disempowered as America’s. I thought it would be an unequivocally good and empowering act to make a movie that is smart and compelling and that moves people emotionally. But in fact, for many, the movie actually becomes part of their sophisticated denial system. Having seen it they believe what is not true, and what is true seems to go right over their heads. Maybe it’s too smart. And paradoxically, maybe it’s too compelling. Most people don’t seem to want to think that hard. And they don’t seem to want to feel that much, either. So they don’t watch it again and again, as we have, to make sure they won’t go back to sleep.

As we listened to people, all too often we had the scary sense that they liked our movie because they wanted to get other people to watch it. They wanted other people to wake up. They wanted to believe that because the movie had been made it was an indication that things are getting better. They wanted to don a blank, hopeful, smile and declare weakly “People are waking up!”

Other people. Because it’s always other people that need to wake up. Not us. We already know. We are the choir. We don’t need preaching to. We get it. If we can just get this movie seen by other people, the people who really need to wake up, the masses, the leaders, the rest of the population, then everything will be okay. If only we can get this movie seen by everybody, then everything will be okay.

It’s not going to be okay. It’s too late for everything to be okay.

Soon after we had finished the movie, Marc Maximov wrote that What A Way To Go is an “ecological horror film”. When we read that comment in his article we laughed. We thought it interesting and startling that he would describe the movie that way, given that we had interviewed such luminary scientists as William Schlesinger and Stuart Pimm, and such amazing thinkers as Derrick Jensen, Daniel Quinn and Chellis Glendinning. I mean, who would have thought that Thomas Berry would appear in a horror movie?

But now I think Marc was on to something important. I think he astutely observed that in spite of the scholarship and intelligence and poetry in What A Way To Go, many people will respond to it as if it were a horror movie rather than as a documentary. When people don’t want to wake up to the nightmare, but are faced with an accurate and compelling assessment of their condition, they can, and will, relegate that experience to the file they’ve created in their heads labeled “Horror Movies and Other Things I Don’t Want to Believe Are True.”

Human beings are extremely creative when they want to be. That includes being psychologically creative. That includes being creative about constructing defense and denial mechanisms that serve to keep them numb and asleep. They seal off accurate knowledge about the world just as they’ve sealed off a thousand other real and unreal images that they’ve been exposed to via the media. They relegate the feelings that arise when confronted by the four horsemen of This Apocalypse to the same realms they relegate feelings elicited by Stephen King’s fiction, by terrifying dreams, and by the boogey man under the bed. They unwittingly label this documentary the way they labeled The Shining: Just Another Horror Movie. And, having filed the experience away, they then go back to sleep. They step into the fantasy that “green business” is selling: the solution to our environmental and social and resource problems is to be good consumers and to buy more stuff, green stuff. After all, people vote with their dollars don’t they? Wow, lacking real elections this is the deal: You can vote by spending! So the more you spend the more powerful you are. Wow. This is great! We can step into our powerful identities as consumers and accept our full responsibility as citizens. We get to vote every day we buy something. What a great fantasy: the destruction of the world will be stopped by spending more money.

The answer to these problems is simple, and everyone can be involved: one can shop. Because shopping is fun. And shopping can happen even at home or on the airplane. One can look adoringly at advertisements for hybrid SUVs. One can admire how Chevron is going green! One can fantasize about someday living in that wonderful solar heated, natural green home of 3-5 thousand square feet, with imported rugs on comfy, cozy, water-heated slab floors. And that next bedspread? Well, do consider hemp! That will make a real difference. Best of all, considering the time of year, it’s time to vow to make it a Green Christmas: buy beeswax candles and exotic fruit baskets and yoga mats. Buy imported things and support indigenous cultures. Buy big things and small things, green things and live things. And in so buying, we can all pretend that things will get better. That things are getting better. All one need to do is shop correctly. After all, shopping is fun. And stopping the destruction of the world should be fun.

I realize I’m on a bit of a tear here. I can’t help it. I sat with over a thousand people and I’m more discouraged about the awakening in the world than ever. And mostly I’m sad. I’m sad that as a group we are not getting it.

And the rest of the community of life is at risk. No. Wait. See how easily denial slips in? The rest of the community of life is not at risk. The rest of the community of life is being wiped out while human population numbers continue to increase, and shop.

On our tour, after the screenings, we avoided the typical Q & A. After all, while we admit to some extent of knowledge as a result of the last four years spent deep in research and analysis, we really aren’t experts, or authorities. We’re pretty smart and we’ve peeled off many layers of denial. And because of that we’ve let the magnitude of the global predicament hit us in the gut, over and over. But we don’t pretend to have answers or authoritative prescriptions. Not that anyone does. In fact we hold that anyone who says they have the prescription to stop the destruction and reform this system in order to make it work is either extremely ill-informed, lying, and or flat out delusional. There just aren’t any easy answers other than shutting down the industrial infrastructure yesterday. And that would not be easy.

So we didn’t do Q& A after screenings. We refused to be set up to be hit with people’s understandable projections and anger at all the authorities and experts who continue to confuse, disappoint, and exploit them.

Instead, on these tours, we invited people to pull chairs into a circle and talk with us and each other as concerned peers, to respond to the movie by expressing their feelings, by talking about what moved them, what emotions were touched. We knew this might be a stretch for many people. Most of us have been emotionally dumbed down as well as intellectually hobbled by this numbing and stupid culture. So we offered a menu of sorts to help people identify their feelings. We gave them a short list of the basic five: Glad, Sad, Mad, Scared or Ashamed. Turns out, this was a good thing to do. People actually reported on their feelings. They took the risk to do what is anathema for most Americans: they expressed their feelings, and they often did so in clear and heartfelt ways. I was touched and impressed. Circle after circle, people did this. They talked about their feelings with one another. Often it was quite moving. And on occasion I think the experience was not only cathartic but transforming for certain individuals. And probably it planted a fair number of seeds. I wonder, though, how many of those seeds will ever germinate into any kind of action. Despite the genuine expression of feeling in the rooms on those evenings, I don’t get the sense that the majority of these people went home to start radically changing their lives.

I say this because by the time the tour came to an end I began to see something that was fairly disturbing. The most frequently reported feelings were sad and glad, followed by ashamed and mad, with only the rare expression of people being scared. I think that’s backwards to what would best be experienced. I think if people were really letting the information sink in, if they were letting it past their denial and defense mechanisms, that they would, first and foremost, be scared.

Let me explain. If a person is not scared when confronted with the immanent demise of their lifestyle, then clearly they aren’t looking at it. They are relegating the information to the “horror movie” file and continuing to pretend. They are telling themselves that all this is going to happen in someone else’s lifetime. But, in fact, all this is happening RIGHT NOW. Preparations for dealing with this, for responding, for surviving it, for helping to heal it, needed to begin 300 years ago or 30 years ago. Or at least yesterday.

But my sense is that people aren’t preparing. They aren’t even considering what making preparation might mean. Way too often what I witness is that people see the movie and then continue to talk about careers and retirements and the future. Like the future will in any way resemble the past or even the present

I genuinely liked most of the people we sat in post-screening dialogue circles with. Their expression of concern and caring for each other and the rest of the community of life evoked fondness. I often said that the circles convinced me that the human species, at least some percentage of it, is worth saving. But I have to say that I don’t really think that one viewing of the movie or one sharing of heartfelt concerns actually changed very many people in any significant way. I still feel fondness for these members of my species. But I don’t hold any illusions that this movie is changing people, or moving them into action with any kind of appropriate speed or conviction.

So I feel compelled to say something. I hope many people who have seen What a Way To Go, or who will see What A Way To Go, will take this to heart:

Our movie is not evidence that things are changing. Once you’ve seen our movie, that does not mean you don’t need to radically and rapidly change your life in preparation for utter upheaval of how you’ve been living and what you’ve been planning and working for.

Please don’t watch our movie and then be glad that change is happening. Because the most prevalent change that is happening is that things in the real world of plants and animals and water and soil and climate are continuing to get worse. Rapidly worse. They’ve gotten worse since An Inconvenient Truth. And they’ve gotten worse since Al Gore got the Nobel prize. They’ve gotten worse since our movie was released on DVD and since we’ve traveled the country touring with it and sitting with people in circles to process it.

Things are getting worse and they are going to keep getting worse until industrial civilization either grinds to a halt or is stopped. Only when that happens will the great bulk of humanity that is enmeshed with industrial civilization stop destroying the community of life through the inexorable consumption of everything.

All evidence I see is that there isn’t going to be a popular mass uprising. So don’t be waiting around for THAT to happen. There isn’t going to be a technofix. And the aliens, if there are any, are not going to intervene and clean this up for us. It’s time to pay the piper, or the rats are going to continue to overrun our village.

So please, don’t wait for someone else to “get it.” Don’t wait for the leaders of your country, or company, or community to get on aboard. Don’t wait for someone else to wake up and make the changes happen. Because they aren’t going to get it.

I think what Upton Sinclair said is more true than we want to believe: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.” How many people’s jobs depend on them NOT understanding that capitalism is a dead end, that consuming is folly, and that technology is a hoax? Don’t depend on politicians or business people or even academics to understand what’s going on when their jobs, and their mortgages and their plasma television sets and probably their marriages depend on them NOT understanding it.

And don’t depend on yourself understanding it if your job and your current lifestyle depends on NOT understanding it. Denial is real and alive and most of us continue in it’s stranglehold.

Only when we wake up to that understanding will we begin to have some choices. Work your way to that place. Watch What A Way To Go thirty times or more, like we have. Read a bunch of books and websites. Choose to step out of delusion. It will probably mean you have to plan to quit your job. And maybe move. It will probably mean you have to consider a very different kind of life.

The good new is that, probably, a very different kind of life will be a life which has meaning and purpose and is grounded in the reality of soil and water and other living, breathing, feeling creatures. In some ways it will be a harder life that you’ll have to choose. But it will be better.

Feel your way into where you want to be and get there. Focus on the basics: water, food, non-fossil energy. Focus on how you can help to stop the destruction and start the healing. Listen to the voice-over at the end of What A Way To Go:

“The waters are rising. We’re going to have to let go of the shore.”

Listen to it again and again, and again. Until YOU get it. The waters are rising. It’s time to build an ark.

It’s time. Don’t wait. Build it now.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

Mary Oliver, Wild Geese

For the longest time, I found it really difficult to imagine, create, or buy into a vision for the future. People would hand me thick folders full of their ideas and plans. Others would send me links and attachments. Some, often after screenings of our documentary, would tell me face to face what it was they were excited about. And many other visions and plans came across my radar just by virtue of my being connected into the Doomosphere™. But by and large, whether it was the relocalization movement, the biochar revolution, or the audacity of hope, whether any of these might be good ideas or not, I just couldn’t manage to really feel the excitement that so many around me appeared to be feeling.

For the longest time, I felt like a failure. I felt like I was doing something wrong. And a few people even told me that that was true, that if I wasn’t envisioning a positive future then, by default, I was envisioning a negative one, making me a part of the problem. They complained that What a Way to Go didn’t have anything at the end that they could latch onto, nothing in terms of a vision for what we could do. There was no happy chapter. There was no this and this and that which, if only everybody would do, would allow us to find the solution. Some people very much wanted such a vision. They wanted to have something they could get excited about doing. They wanted to find a way out of the mess I had outlined in the movie. And I just didn’t have that to give to them.

And then one cold, wintry day, while we were driving through the Vermont mountains, a piece of clarity alighted on Sally and me from above, and that clarity has served me since: This is not the time for visions. At least not for us.

The sense of failure I’d been laboring under has not returned to haunt me.

Here’s what came to us that day: it makes sense (and it resonates with us) to view our collective situation - our present predicament, our long emergency, our powerdown, our doomsday, our danger/opportunity, our end of suburbia, our life after the oil crash, our nuclear holocaust, our great turning, our die-off, our financial Armageddon, our eleventh hour, our petrocollapse, our overshoot, our endgame, our final crash, our mass extinction underway, our six degrees, our final empire, our ascent of humanity, our revenge of Gaia, our end of the world as we know it - as an initiation into cultural maturity at a grand and terrible scale, as some sort of a vision quest for the collective heart, mind, and soul. If that is so, it may help us to remember that the initiate does not go into the vision quest with a vision already in mind. That’s what makes it a quest. Initiates go first into the sweat house or death lodge, or embark on some similar process, or simply find themselves in a “dark night of the soul.” During this time the elders urge them to shed what needs to be shed, to symbolically “die.” Only then are they released into the wilderness to prove themselves ready and worthy, to be given a vision by the gods. And only then, upon their return, having faced their trials successfully, can they be reborn as fully adult members of the tribe, vision in hand to offer as service to the greater good of their community, and to give them meaning for their lives.

No wonder I couldn’t seem to hold onto a vision! Sally and I were sitting in the death lodge, doing everything we could do to help the remnants of our old, Imperialist egos die away, such that we could then open up to the Universe and let the gods lead for a while. It was not for us to concoct a plan or vision for saving the world. In fact, we were busily letting go of any inflated notions that “we” could do such a thing at this point.

We were working to get quiet and still, to sit for long days and nights, fasting from the ideas, assumptions, and energies of the dominant culture, and to learn, in the poet David Whyte’s words, to be in conversation with the Universe, rather than in control. The old visions? The visions given us by the culture in which we were raised? The visions of control and domination, of fixing and solving and making things happen, of even “benignly” ruling the world? Those we were shredding as quickly as we could. As I said in What a Way to Go, this culture’s arrogance, its adolescent sense of invincibility and entitlement, must be sloughed off to make room for a more mature sense of interdependence with, and responsibility to, the community of life. This is the work of initiation. This was the work we were doing, and still do to this day.

Over and over we confront, Sally and I, our egoic minds’ desire to know what to do, and then we face, again and again, the stunning realization that we cannot have what those minds want. Over and over, we take our current worldview gently in our arms and hold it while it breathes its last. Over and over, we go out into the wilderness and get still. The voices and visions do come: a whispering of wind, a rumbling of rock, a susurrus of stars, a trembling of trees. In bits and pieces, the next steps are given to us, a sense of the right actions, the best choices. Slowly, we make our way down this wilderness path.

There is little to figure out here. Little to reason through. Little to analyze, plan, and make happen. There is mostly the heart pounding with love, the blood rushing with excitement, the mind touched with snippets of poetry and image, the rough scratching of fingers in soil and the tickling of toes in the grass or the scuff of heel on concrete. It seems as though the whole of our reality, and of our collective predicament, surpasses our minds and egos. The vision can’t be known right now, it seems. But it can be felt. It can be sensed and intuited. It can be aligned to and resonated with. We are the children of this planet, after all, as surely as the deer and the dragonfly. We can belong here, if we choose. Like the birds and beasts, we can hear the tsunamis coming and make our way to whatever higher ground there is. We can sense the hunters coming and protect our cubs. We can find shelter in the storm, and joy in the dance.

Part of what Sally and I sense is that the vision will be found collectively, through a process of which most of us are unaware, and are reluctant to seek: the process of entering together this death lodge, where we confront as a group the inner and outer conflicts, sift through the machinations of ego, and find the precious grains of truth that all of our positions, assumptions, and desires, hold in their hearts. This is the work that most calls us. There’s room in the lodge, should you wish to join us.

Here, let me get that flap, then I’ll scootch around and make some more room. Sit with us for a while, with this group of open, often tattered souls crowded tightly together under these tarps, a pit of red-hot rocks in the circle’s center, and utter darkness all around. Sally throws water on the rocks, to sear our faces and fill our lungs with a burst of steam. Someone laughs. Another cries. A third rages and a fourth prays. One last cup of water on the rocks. One last cloud of steam. One last sloughing off. Then we push open the flap and crawl, together and one-by-one, out into the night, naked, shivering, our bodies steaming in the firelight and starshine. We don our clothes and make our way out into the wilderness, to find the spots we chose earlier in the day. We begin our fast, to show the gods our deep longing and sober intent. We sit and stare into the night, and soon we start to reflect.

We’re at a crossroads now. Who we’ve been, as a culture, is no longer working. The visions with which we used to operate can now be seen as unhinged and insane. The rules have changed, and we don’t know what to do. Every time we try to control the situation things just get worse. We’re tired. Scared. And so very, very sad. We’re close to bottom now. The ground is rising up rapidly beneath us. It looks as if we’ll smash onto the rocks at any moment.

And yet the galaxies spin overhead as they always have. The grasses still whisper in the breeze. The ground underneath holds us up just like it did the day before. The moon still lights our way. There is life, still, all around us, holding on in spite of this culture’s blind attempts to kill it all off. “We’re not dead yet,” the world of life calls out to us. “You’re not alone. We’ve missed you. We’re glad to have you back.” And beyond our tiny circles of struggling to know and do and think and work and own and have and understand lies a Universe so vast and so mysterious that we cannot hold it in our grasp. And in that moment, we can see, and even trust, that perhaps this is the only sort of vision we need right now: the vision that lets us see what is there all around us. Perhaps that is enough, for now. This is initiation, after all. The gods are leading this process. Maybe we can just concentrate on staying open, so that we can hear them when they speak to us.

Thomas Berry told us, back when we interviewed him in 2005, that “young people need to be educated in the context of the 21st century, and with the realization that they can’t depend on anything handed down to them from the 20th century.” That’s a stunning statement, I think. We can’t depend on anything handed down to us from the 20th century. Yet it resonates with my own sense of things. Linda Travis and Cole Thomas, in my new novel All of the Above, have to come to the same realization, as the reality they thought they were living in gets torn from underfoot. They, too, must allow their old worldview to die away, in order to see the world anew, arising all around them. And they, too, must meet the trials before them, before they will be allowed to find some new vision that aligns with the will of the gods.

Who will we be when the old visions die, and the old strategies no longer work? Whether fictional or flesh and blood, I believe we will all be given the opportunity to find our answers to that question.

Contrary to popular lore, independent filmmakers are rarely affluent. Most, in fact, go into deep debt making a film and only occasionally get back out of debt. We made What A Way To Go through local fundraising, investing our own capital, and thousands of hours of sweat equity. We are not in debt and feel very grateful.

We’ve decided to release the movie for free Internet viewing with the intention of being of service. However, we have never made even minimum wagefor the thousands of hours we put into the making of the movie.

If you value what you see here, please show your appreciation by purchasing a DVD or Bonus footage discs, downloading the movie through Filmbaby, or making a donation.

Thank You!

Full Movie:

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-5

Chapter 6 - Peak Oil

Chapter 7 - Climate Change

Chapter 8 - Mass Extinction

Chapter 9 - Population Overshoot

Chapters 10 - Ancient Origins

Chapters 11-15

Chapters 16-17

Chapters 18-19

Chapters 20-24

Chapters 25-27

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 ” 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 and 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 seven years we joined forces, both personally and professionally, to offer a wake-up call. 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 provoke lengthy dialogue about what is most pressing at this time in human history. Will we choose to create ways for humans to inhabit the earth that regenerate and renew the life-support systems we depend on?

DATA FILE

Movie Title: What A Way To Go: Life at the End of Empire

Year: 2007

Production Company: VisionQuest Pictures

Director/Writer: Timothy S. Bennett

Producer: Sally Erickson

Narrator: Timothy S. Bennett

Interviewers: Sally Erickson, Tony Mayer

Interviews - Authors, Academics, Scientists and Analysts:
Thomas Berry, William Catton, Gerald Cecil, Douglas Crawford-Brown, Sally Erickson, Lyle Estill, Chellis Glendinning, Otis Graham, Richard Heinberg, Derrick Jensen, Jerry Mander, Richard Manning, Stuart Pimm, Ran Prieur, Daniel Quinn, Paul Roberts, William Schlesinger

Interviews - Friends and Family:
Hannah Bennett, Jack Bennett, Kate Bennett, John Delafield, Stacey Emerick, Andy Erickson, Sarah Erickson, Steve Erickson, Tom Grizzle, Harvey Harman, Nancy Harman, Tui Hayes, Laurel Hopper, Barbara Janeway, Stacye Leanza, Judith Lessler, Barbara Lorie, Kevin Mayer, Tony Mayer, Ray Milosh, Carla Royal, Jim Senter, Sofia Simons, Iain Walsh

Music: Original score by Chamber Corps (Chris Rossi and James Hepler)
“Let’s Build a Boat” Written and Performed by Brian Hall

Genre: Documentary, Independent
Keywords: Culture, Environment, Collapse, Visionary

Technical Details: Color and B&W; Letterboxed 1.77:1; 1 soundtrack; Feature Runtime: 123 minutes

TAG LINE AND SHORT SYNOPSIS

Tag Line
A middle-class white guy comes to grips with Peak Oil, Climate Change, Mass Extinction, Population Overshoot and the end of the American lifestyle.

Short Synopsis
Disturbing, compassionate, sometimes humorous personal essay about coming to grips with climate change, resource crises, environmental meltdown and the demise of the American lifestyle. Friends and experts analyze historical, social and psychological factors driving us toward human extinction. Bennett’s ruthless assessment challenges the audience to face terrifying times with courage and integrity.

One-Page Synopsis

Tim Bennett, middle-class white guy, started waking up to the global environmental nightmare in the mid-1980s. But life was so busy with raising kids and pursuing the American dream that he never got around to acting on his concerns. Until now.

Bennett journeys from complacency to consciousness in his feature-length documentary, What a Way To Go: Life at the End of Empire. He reviews his Midwestern roots, ruthlessly examines the stories he was raised with, and then details the grim realities humans now face: escalating climate change, resource shortages, degraded ecosystems, an exploding global population and teetering global economies.

Bennett identifies and calls into question the fundamental assumption that has led to this unprecedented crisis in human history: that humans were destined to dominate the rest of the community of life with the Culture of Empire.

He pushes the dialogue where others have not gone.

Powerful interviews with well-known authors including Daniel Quinn, Derrick Jensen and Richard Heinberg, and noted scientists William Schlesinger and Stuart Pimm, fill in some important pieces. Scathing and humorous use of archival footage is balanced with very human snapshot comments from family and friends.

On Walkabout, Bennett ends with an invitation to join him with courage and consciousness on the unexplored shores of a future not yet written.

One path leads to despair and hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
Woody Allen

DETAILED SYNOPSIS

Note: Unattributed italics denote direct quotes from the voice-over narration. Attributed italics denote direct quotes from interview subjects.

OPENING CREDITS

Voices in the Dark

I’m standing on the ledge. In the darkness the moon rises overhead, Voices. I hear voices. Sadness. Regret. Fear. Our climate’s gonna go weird. Everything is out of balance. We’re all fucked. There’s gotta be a way. Nothing that I can do. It’s gonna change. The view from the sleeping car. I just tell myself it’s all gonna be OK. It’s not a happy thing to think about.

What a Way to Go

A recurring daydream in a fast food drive-thru. Nuclear holocaust and personal embarrassment. As the icy cold of my overturned Coke seeped into my jeans, I’d think to myself, what a way to go!

Yeah, I think that we might wipe ourselves off the Earth. Definitely. I feel like that’s where we’re headed.
Sarah Erickson, Student

PART ONE: WAKING ON THE TRAIN

Born on the Slope

Middle-class assumptions and cold realities. I was raised in the arms of an extended rural family. My world was a playground.

And I was born into stories. They were all around me. We didn’t even know they were stories. We just thought they were the way things are.

I was born half way up the population explosion. Rising CO2 levels. Mass Extinction. Oil Depletion. We were moving on up, toward that vast and glorious human future. All we had to do was climb a bit further. But the mountain we were climbing was not what we thought it was. The stories no longer make sense. Our human impact is destroying the planet.

Back in the 1980s, I began to wake up to that fact, as news of the ozone hole and global warming first hit me. But life went on. I had children to raise. There were things to do.

And at night I slept, but fitfully, clenched with worries, my dreams assaulted by vague rumblings from the future.

Worry Beads: A Nightmare

The nightmare of our current situation, an intense collage of poetry and image depicting the news of the world. The monsters we have created. Nuclear weapons, biding their time. Terrorism and leaking wastes and depleted uranium. Chemical and biological weapons and emerging diseases and mad cows.

Patented life, barely tested, quietly tested, let loose upon the land. As if their creators, having looked at the world, managed to learn nothing at all.

Dying forests dying oceans dying species dying cultures. And all the while the climate is changing. The balance undone. Tonight on the Weather Channel.

Oil extraction is peaking. Watch the bidding war rage from trade floors to battlefields. Watch the Pentagon plan and the Patriots act.

We’re driving a high-speed train to the end of life, and we’re taking the rest of the planet, trillions upon trillions of living souls, along with us.

And all of this is wrapped inside an insane culture of denials and lies. Finally we awaken, in the still hours of early morning, to the realization that our leaders will not find an answer.

What a nightmare.

Alarm Clocks and Snooze Buttons

There has always been a part of me that has suspected that I would see the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it in my lifetime. There is an inevitability built into the situation. People have known this for a long time.

The world looked insane to me, but nobody else seemed to notice, so I buried my thoughts, and muddled on. Deep inside, this was tearing me to pieces.

Daniel Quinn and Derrick Jensen helped me understand the cultural underpinnings of our situation. Like the German people during the Nazi regime, the people of our culture are trapped in stories. Stories that threaten the community of life itself. Stories of separation and greatness and inherent human flaws. Stories about utility, progress, growth and the one right way to live. Stories of power and domination and control

I was not alone. There were other people looking at the world situation and seeing what I saw: our present system cannot continue on as it is.

But the collapse still seemed far away. There was time. There was hope. Somewhere, there were people taking care of it all. So I lived the stories I had learned as a child and tried to ignore the fear.

Then I started to work on this documentary.

After three years of research it is clear: the situation is dire. It’s as though we’ve awakened to find ourselves on a runaway train.

PART TWO: THE TRAIN AND THE TRACKS

The culture of Empire works always to distract us. What happens when we look where the conjurer does not want us to look? Four aspects of our predicament stand out. Let’s look more closely at the train, and the tracks, and the terrain through which we’re speeding.

Peak Oil

At some point, since oil is a finite resource, you can’t keep raising production.
Paul Roberts, The End of Oil

I spoke with Richard Heinberg and Paul Roberts, who have both written books on the oil depletion situation. Our use is profligate, and technological advances cannot trump the laws of physics in order to keep up with demand. As Gerald Cecil from UNC-Chapel Hill explains, when supply cannot meet demand, you have a problem.

Jerry Mander explains how the fundamental structures of this present system cannot exist without cheap energy. Heinberg explains how our current economic system will collapse without continuing growth in energy supply. Harvey Harman and Richard Manning point out how agriculture is highly dependent on cheap fuels. And Ray Milosh points out that resource competition will likely result in more war, exploitation and domination.

Petrochemicals, fossil fuels, have become embedded in our food supply. If we run out of fossil fuel, that strategy will collapse in a heartbeat.
Richard Manning, Against the Grain

It’s a permanent state of affairs. The fuel crisis will be over in a couple of hundred million years when everything has settled down and there’s a lot more having been made from all of us having, you know, been squished back under.
Ray Milosh, Scientist

Climate Change

Scientists used to talk about climate change in terms of centuries. Now they’re talking about decades. Now they’re talking about next year. Now they’re talking about now.

We’re going to run out of air to burn before we run out of fossil fuels to burn.
Richard Manning, Against the Grain

William Schlesinger and Stuart Pimm at Duke University explain the basics. Greenhouse gas buildup has caused an increase in global mean temperatures. Animals and plants are being impacted by this, sometimes to the point of extinction.

Ran Prieur and Douglas Crawford-Brown explain how the increase in CO2 levels is making the ocean more acidic, threatening planktons and corals and disrupting food chains and oxygen production.

Douglas Crawford-Brown and William Schlesinger explain the idea of tipping points and abrupt climate change and the possible shutdown of global ocean currents. And there are a number of self-reinforcing feedback loops now in operation.

We have a lot of carbon stored in the permafrost, and those permafrosts are starting to defrost and when they defrost that carbon is going to be oxidized to carbon dioxide or brought out as methane, and that will be a dramatic increase in greenhouse gases.
Douglas Crawford-Brown, Director, Carolina Environmental Program, UNC-Chapel Hill

This may get out of hand and we’ll suddenly be looking at a very rapid warming of the planet.
Stuart Pimm, Doris Duke Professor of Conservation Ecology, Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences, Duke University

What if we run into a tipping point where we have this kind of accelerated scenario of climate change? We’re gonna get our butts kicked.
Paul Roberts, The End of Oil

Climate change may be out of our control at this point. As Richard Manning points out, global warming is a really severe punch.

Is it inevitable? Who will we be in the face of this?

Mass Extinction

We have black holes in the ocean. There are no fish in places in the ocean. What’s happened to the fish? What’s happened?
Barbara Lorie, Teacher and Activist

We have to live on the planet. So if we’re gonna destroy where we’re living then that’s gonna be a problem.
Jack Bennett, Writer

As Manning, Pimm, and Daniel Quinn point out, we are living in a period of extinction that ranks with the great extinctions on this planet, driving species to extinction at a rate 1000 times greater than it should be. It cannot continue indefinitely without the whole ecosystem collapsing.

Civilized humans consume 40% of the planet’s productivity on land, a third of the production from the oceans, and half of the available fresh water. Most large fish species have been reduced down to 10% of their previous populations. Ten percent. And in addition to consumption, we are now poisoning every square inch of the planet.

Trillions of people will live in a biologically impoverished world if we don’t stop our human impacts now.
Stuart Pimm, The World According to Pimm

Daniel Quinn compares our situation to a brick building in which we continue to knock bricks out from the walls of the lower floors to build ever higher. He compares the loss of 200 species each day to 200 bricks per day.
It seems stable. Right up to the point where it collapses.

Population Overshoot

We’re approaching full-tilt, I think, in terms of what the planet can sustain.
Stacye Leanza, Artist

William Catton explains how it’s possible to exceed carrying capacity, but only temporarily, as that excessive population destroys the systems upon which it depends. As important as the total population is the lifestyle by which that population lives, and the damage that that lifestyle does to the planet. The Earth supports as great a collective mass of ants as it does people. It can do so because ants aren’t building 6000 square foot homes, driving two hours to their jobs, buying plasma TV sets, and killing each other with depleted uranium munitions.

Catton and Otis Graham explain how we Americans do way more damage to the planet than people in many nations. It cannot be sustained for much longer. There are many ways in which our population could be reduced. Richard Manning explains how humans represent a resource to microbes.

Can we meet this issue with intention and create a softer landing, or will we fly blindly toward catastrophe?

Humanity’s never been in this: this is new. This is new. And this is big. And this is not being talked about.
Otis Graham, Professor History Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara

Our global population is going to be reduced.
William Catton, Jr., Professor Emeritus, Sociology & Human Ecology, Washington State University

What choices do we now have? What is inevitable at this point? And what remains to be created, if only we awaken to our power? Most importantly, why have we not already awakened?

We can’t survive apart from the Earth. And we’re killing it!
Carla Royal, Beyond Therapy

PART THREE: THE LOCOMOTIVE POWER

There are other issues we could have looked at: a long rolling list of them.

Thirty six years after the first Earth Day, forty-four years after Silent Spring, the planet is closer now to ecological meltdown than it has ever been. If what we want is to stop the destruction of the life of this planet, then what we have been doing has not been working. We will have to do something else.

It’s time to look more closely at the culture of Empire.

How Did We Get Here?

Ancient Origins:
It seems it began with the development, approximately 10,000 years ago, of our current form of food production, agriculture both catastrophic and totalitarian in nature. This new style of agriculture fueled new levels of population growth, and led to hard work, poor health and more settlement, which in turn led to wealth and inequity, increased levels of conflict, environmental degradation and the rise of a new form of culture based on cities.

The rise of cities was key. Since cities exceed the carrying capacity of their local environments, the people in them must, by necessity, beg, borrow, buy, steal and/or fight for resources.

Science and Technology:
Using the power of technology, we could break through the limits and laws and rules that kept the community of life in balance for millions of years, temporarily.

That power went to our heads, but it was based on faulty assumptions about the limits of science and the inherent qualities of technologies. The myth of the technofix held us in its sway, and still does, blinding us to the deeper cultural issues that motivate our actions.

Disconnection:
The culture of civilization cut us off from the natural world, and our technology cut us off from our own experiences.

We can build a culture that sits between us and the world, and it mediates our behavior toward the world. It mediates what we do and what we perceive. If you have a spear it becomes a lot easier; you don’ have to kill somebody right in front of you. You can kill somebody thirty feet away. And that distance makes it easier to kill.
Ran Prieur, Civilization Will Eat Itself

If you’ve been sent into war with a B2 bomber strapped to your back and an array of high-tech sensors at your fingertips, you can kill Iraqis with no more thought or feeling than you might have wasting the Covenant on your X-Box at home.

This disconnection left us confused and wounded.

Our relationship with the universe becomes a use relationship. Now that’s disastrous. Just like to say to another being, human, “you used me,” is about as terrible a thing as a person can say. Now the planet Earth is telling us “you used me”.
Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth

Cultural Stories:
All cultures are based on stories. Civilization is based on stories of growth and progress and power, stories of ownership and rights and resources.

We’re in a culture of two-year-olds where we just won’t look at the limits.
Sally Erickson, Producer

Dominion over the Earth in Genesis didn’t mean to leave this pillaged and smoking.
William Schlesinger, Duke University

Daniel Quinn explains the basic stories of Empire, which tell us that civilization is the best culture ever, that it’s the one right way to live, and that it’s how we were meant to live. The most dangerous story of all, to Quinn, is the one that tells us that humans are superior to all other creatures.

Expansion and Colonization:
Ran Prieur recounts The Parable of the Tribes (from a book by Andrew Bard Schmookler), which explains how and why a culture based on power and violence can overrun an entire planet.

Daniel Quinn speaks of how we’ve forgotten that humans once knew how to live on the planet.

They were living in a way in which humans could live for millions of years. Tens of millions of years. And that’s something. Man, now we’re saying “how many decades can we have?” And if we go on living this way it’s not many.
Daniel Quinn, Ishmael

Cultural Blinders:
Stories can blind us to our own greatness. Not all human cultures have followed the path of civilization and destruction. Human capacities and characteristics have always been mediated by the larger society. Always.

Richard Manning speaks of how our strongest instincts are geared to the immediate, to the tiger that could kill you at any moment. And yet the Haudenosaunee evolved a culture that balanced those strong instincts. They make decisions based on their impact on the seventh generation.

As Paul Roberts explains, Empire is rarely able to recognize a limit coming from even thirty years out. So climate change and oil depletion go unnoticed.

When living in a culture that cannot look long term, processes such as exponential growth, population dynamics and unintended consequences are all difficult to see.

What Keeps Us Trapped Here?

It isn’t working out the way we’ve been taught to think it will. Why do we keep destroying the planet? Even now, when the evidence that we are doing so is overwhelming?

Systems and Structures:
We’re trapped in an economy that must grow or die. And of course this is an absurdity because we have physical limits.

We’re assaulted by corporately controlled media that keep us delusional. We’re mislead by TV and the glorified images that betray the lies of our lives.

There’s a great line by Zygmunt Bauman. He says that rational people will go quietly and meekly into a gas chamber if only you allow them to believe it’s a bathroom.
Derrick Jensen, Endgame

And I’ve lost all hope that my government is capable of looking clearly at the situation.

Much of our educational system leaves us totally unprepared to question the dominant culture. We need to turn people into machine parts.

Questions are not encouraged.

If your experience is that your food comes from the grocery store and that your water comes from a tap, you will defend to the death the system that brings those to you because your life depends on it. If your experience is that your water comes from a stream and that your food comes from a landbase, you will defend to the death that stream and that landbase because your life depends on it.
Derrick Jensen, The Culture of Make Believe

Who would create such systems?

Disconnection and Delusion:
We’ve gotten lost in a hall of mirrors. Everything we see, hear, taste, touch and smell comes from humans and machines. That gives us an inflated sense of self and a warped sense of reality.

We’ve begun to lose our sanity in the solitary confinement of cities and civilization. We end up believing that humans are superior. Out of that sense of superiority, Empire has conquered the world. But that conquering has wounded the conquerors themselves.

If you look at the people who have been assimilated into Empire, and if you look at the Imperialists themselves, you find an incredible dissociation from reality.
Chellis Glendinning, My Name is Chellis and I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization

Dissociated from the natural world, we do not defend it. As Richard Manning explains, we’ve caged ourselves in cities, and like any animal in a cage, we’ve become psychotic.

The disconnection is everywhere. In the crib. In the television. In our lack of community. In our social settings. Our economy thrives on this. The stores are filled with bandages for the wounds of Empire.

Abuse and Addiction:
Derrick Jensen considers the dominant culture an abusive system which leaves its members suffering from complex post-traumatic stress disorder.

Everything within an abusive family structure is set up to protect the abuser. Everything. And by the same token, everything within this culture is set up to protect the rich. That’s what this culture is about.
Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words

We identify with this system, at the expense of our own lives, and the life of the planet. Over the years I’ve begun to break my own identification with the dominant culture.

We can also view the culture through the lens of addiction. Our deepest needs never get satisfied, but we stay trapped in an endless search to meet those deep needs in the only ways this culture allows. After centuries of this, it looks like we want to hit bottom, simply to end the nightmare.

The Response So Far:
Lost in denial, trying to hit bottom, we fail to see the cause of our pain, or the fact that this culture is killing everything. We fantasize about Somehow, with no clear idea how to get from here to there. Our voices of helplessness and resignation fill the night sky. We don’t know what to do. It’s going to take a catastrophe. There’s no way to stop the train. Fuck it. Might as well go out and party.

With resignation this profound, it seems as though there is little left to do but to make the prison as comfortable as is possible.

It all adds up to this: this culture is not only killing the planet, it is destroying us as human beings.

The train plunges forward at blinding speed. Charlie stole the handle. So who are we going to be?

PART FOUR: WALKABOUT

If we dont change our direction, we are likely to wind up where we are headed.
Chinese Proverb

The people of Empire have no clear idea where we are, and no clear vision of where we want to go. Born and raised in captivity, we’re now so institutionalized that few of us can even see the prison bars. But we all know our cell numbers.

Daniel Quinn reveals the Secret Plan: this culture will not stop until it destroys everything. And as Richard Heinberg points out, we have been so infantilized by civilization that we can no longer survive without it.

One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
Woody Allen

The American lifestyle is unsustainable. That means that it can’t be sustained. It’s coming to an end.

Science, as Thomas Berry points out, gave us the power to run the universe, but not the wisdom. We’ve forgotten that we’re part of the living community, says Quinn.

If we don’t figure out what our place in the universe is, we’re not going to have a place in the universe.
Kevin Mayer, Artist

I didn’t say it would be easy. I just said it would be the truth.
Morpheus, The Matrix

Those who write about the world situation feel compelled to add a Happy Chapter at the end. But I can’t do that. I have no list of quick and painless fixes, no plan that will keep the train rolling forever on this track. I see no way for that to happen. If there is going to be a happy chapter, we shall have to write it together, with the rest of the community of life, on the pages of the living world.

Otis Graham dreams of his grandchildren blaming him for this mess.

I think they’re going to look back and shake their heads and say: What happened to those people? How did they lose sight of such basic things?
Sally Erickson, Producer

The time of the lone wolf is over. Gather yourselves! We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.
An unnamed Hopi Elder, Hope Nation, Oraibi, Arizona

There is a new story arising in the world: the story of The Great Turning, a turning away from a culture of domination and death, and a turning toward a culture that is life-sustaining and life-renewing.

We get to choose. Who are we going to be?

I don’t think life for most Americans, despite our affluence, is all that it’s been cracked up to be. And people are afraid to talk about that. They’re afraid they’re the only ones who are experiencing deep dissatisfaction.
Sally Erickson, Producer

Be bold, and mighty forces will come to your aid.
Basil King

Is this who we are? Are we destroying the planet, as Dmitry Orlov asks, just to be somewhat more comfortable for a little while?

I think we are much more than we’ve ever been allowed to believe.

What does a life well-lived look like?
Harvey Harman, Sustainable Designer

As all of this starts to shift and change and disintegrate and collapse there’s the opportunity, in fact, to come back to ourselves. To grow up, fundamentally, as people and as a culture.
Richard Heinberg, The Party’s Over

We’re in a time of initiation, folks. We can do this, but only if we choose to. Only if we lay down our weapons in this insane war against the world. Only if we surrender control, and move back into relationship.

We can have unlimited growth. Growth in relationship. In self-awareness and spirit and love and community and connection. All of life is on our side.

Is civilization what we want?

What does it mean to dismantle civilization? What it means is depriving the rich of the ability to steal from the poor and to destroy the world. I can’t give a better definition than that.
Derrick Jensen, Endgame

There’s no real reason why the entire country of the United States couldn’t face reality. You just have to drop the idea of capitalism. You have to drop the idea of corporations running things. You have to drop the idea of economic growth. It could be done.
Jerry Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred

There was a great tradition among the Cheyenne dog soldiers: They would get a tanned rope, called a dog rope, and a picket pin that’s used to stake horses to the ground. They would attach the picket pin to the sash, the dog rope, that was attached to them. And then in battle they would drive the picket stake into the ground. And that was done as a mark of resolve. Because once it’s driven, you can’t leave until either you’re dead or you’re relieved by another dog soldier or the battle’s over and everyone is safe. So the question I ask people is: Where will you drive your picket pin? Where will you stake yourself out and say I’m not going to retreat any more?
Derrick Jensen, Endgame

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
Anais Nin

It’s time to be thoughtful and learn what’s going on. A paradigm shift will require that we question our deepest and most fundamental assumptions. And that will require that we take our current worldview gently in our arms and hold it while it breathes its last.

It’s time to be truthful: the dominant culture is destroying us. What would happen if we let ourselves feel our feelings about all of this?

Our feelings are the swiftest path back to our forgotten selves.

It’s time to surrender to the fact that we cannot solve this on our own. It’s time to ask for help, to listen to the wisdom of the land, and the community of life itself, and then speak our truths in our own lives.

It’s time to act with great intention. There is much work to do to re-localize, power down, scale back, and heal both ourselves and the land. Find your work and do it.

But what about that speeding train? Do we wait for it to crash, and hope that it doesn’t kill everything? Or is it possible to stop that train before it hits the end of the line?

We humans once knew how to live on this planet. A few still do. And that’s the good news. It can be done. We can do way, way better than Empire.

“One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.”
Andre Gide

Let’s jump off the train and build a boat: a lifeboat, an ark, a galleon of adventure and imagination destined for unknown lands. Build it now. The ice is melting. The waters are rising. We’re going to have to let go of the shore.

I don’t know if I’ll survive the crash of civilization. What I do know is that I have a choice in how I meet it. I’m going to show up in the world, and tell my truth. And I’d love it if you would join me.

Together, we will set forth, to find that new land.

What a way to go.

END CREDITS

WHO’S WHO

Fr. Thomas Berry, PhD
Historian and Geologian
Author of The Dream of the Earth and The Great Work

William Catton, Jr. PhD
Professor Emeritus, Sociology & Human Ecology, Washington State University
Author of Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change

Gerald Cecil, PhD
Professor of Astrophysics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Douglas Crawford-Brown, PhD
Director Carolina Environmental Program, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Author of Mathematical Methods of Environmental Risk Modeling

Sally Erickson, M.Ed.
Producer, What a Way to Go

Lyle Estill
Vice President of Stuff for Piedmont Biofuels, Pittsboro NC
Author of Biodiesel Power

Chellis Glendinning, PhD
Psychologist and Activist
Author of My Name is Chellis and I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization and
Off the Map: An Expedition Deep into Empire and the Global Economy

Otis Graham, PhD
Professor History Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara
Author of Unguarded Gates: A History of America’s Immigration Crisis

Harvey Harman
Sustainable Designer/Developer at Walk Softly LLC and Earth Renewal Shelter

Richard Heinberg
Core Faculty member of New College of California
Author of The Party’s Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies,
Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World and
The Oil Depletion Protocol: A Plan to Avert Oil Wars, Terrorism, and Economic Collapse

Derrick Jensen
Environmental Activist and Author of A Language Older Than Words,
The Culture of Make Believe,
Endgame, Volume 1: The Problem of Civilization and
Endgame, Volume 2: Resistance

Jerry Mander
Co-Director and Founder: The International Forum on Globalization
Author of Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television and
In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations

Richard Manning
Journalist and Author of Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics, and Promise of the American Prairie and
Against the Grain: How Agriculture has Hijacked Civilization

Stuart Pimm, PhD
Doris Duke Professor of Conservation Ecology, Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences, Duke University
Author of The World According to Pimm: A Scientist Audits the Earth

Ran Prieur
Writer and Blogger @ www.ranprieur.com
Author of Civilization Will Eat Itself (zine) and many essays

Daniel Quinn
Author of many books including Ishmael,
The Story of B and
The Tales of Adam

Paul Roberts
Journalist and Author of The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World

William Schlesinger, PhD
James B. Duke Professor of Biogeochemistry
Dean, Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences, Duke University

THE FILMMMAKERS

Timothy S. Bennett, Writer/Director is an artist and filmmaker who now lives in a small coastal town in Maine. Born and raised in rural Michigan, he began his inquiry into environmental and cultural issues in the late 80s. His academic background is in anthropology, religion, education and film. He is the father of three grown children.

What A Way To Go is his first feature-length documentary. His talent for “big-picture thinking,” along with his ability to see through the taboos, denials, and orthodoxies of the dominant culture, combined with his poetic writing style, makes for a documentary experience that is both compelling and informative.

Sally Erickson, Producer, is an artist, psychotherapist, community organizer, and organizational consultant. She was born in Washington State where she developed a love of, and commitment to, the natural world. Experiences of wilderness vision-questing deepened that commitment. She now lives with husband Tim Bennett in Maine. Sally is the mother of two grown children. She brings maturity, insight, organizational development expertise and inspiration to What a Way to Go.

VISIONQUEST PICTURES

VisionQuest Pictures is a film production company owned by Timothy S. Bennett and Sally Erickson. It was formed in 2003 to produce documentaries on the most critical environmental, political, and social dilemmas of our time.

What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire is their first feature-length documentary production. It was funded largely out-of-pocket, aided by local community-based fundraising events. This is a venture that walks its talk, fueled with great intention, artistic vision and urgent integrity.

“A city could be defined, almost, as a human ecosystem that grossly exceeds the carrying capacity of its local environment.”

William R. Catton, Jr. (born January 15, 1926) is an American sociologist best known for his scholarly work in environmental sociology and human ecology. His intellectual approach is broad and interdisciplinary. Catton’s repute extends beyond academic social science due primarily to his 1980 book, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. Catton has written three other books, including From Animistic to Naturalistic Sociology. In addition he has authored numerous scholarly articles, book chapters and book reviews. In 2009 he published a new book, titled Bottleneck: Humanity’s Impending Impasse. He is retired from academic life and lives in Lakewood, Washington, USA. (From the Wikipedia entry.)

“… our lifestyles, mores, institutions, patterns of interaction, values, and expectations are shaped by a cultural heritage that was formed in a time when carrying capacity exceeded the human load… That carrying capacity surplus is gone now, eroded both by population increase and immense technological enlargement of per capita resource appetites and environmental impacts. Human life is now being lived in an era of deepening carrying capacity deficit. All of the familiar aspects of human societal life are under compelling pressure to change in this new era when the load increasingly exceeds the carrying capacities of many local regions—and of a finite planet. Social disorganization, friction, demoralization, and conflict will escalate.”

William Catton, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change

More and More Feet Getting Bigger and Bigger from VisionQuest Pictures on Vimeo.

William Catton is one of the most articulate writers on the implications of human population and carrying capacity overshoot. Read more about him and watch a video clip from What A Way To Go.

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 ” 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 and 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 seven years we joined forces, both personally and professionally, to offer a wake-up call. 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 provoke lengthy dialogue about what is most pressing at this time in human history. Will we choose to create ways for humans to inhabit the earth that regenerate and renew the life-support systems we depend on?

DATA FILE

Movie Title: What A Way To Go: Life at the End of Empire

Year: 2007

Production Company: VisionQuest Pictures

Director/Writer: Timothy S. Bennett

Producer: Sally Erickson

Narrator: Timothy S. Bennett

Interviewers: Sally Erickson, Tony Mayer

Interviews - Authors, Academics, Scientists and Analysts:
Thomas Berry, William Catton, Gerald Cecil, Douglas Crawford-Brown, Sally Erickson, Lyle Estill, Chellis Glendinning, Otis Graham, Richard Heinberg, Derrick Jensen, Jerry Mander, Richard Manning, Stuart Pimm, Ran Prieur, Daniel Quinn, Paul Roberts, William Schlesinger

Interviews - Friends and Family:
Hannah Bennett, Jack Bennett, Kate Bennett, John Delafield, Stacey Emerick, Andy Erickson, Sarah Erickson, Steve Erickson, Tom Grizzle, Harvey Harman, Nancy Harman, Tui Hayes, Laurel Hopper, Barbara Janeway, Stacye Leanza, Judith Lessler, Barbara Lorie, Kevin Mayer, Tony Mayer, Ray Milosh, Carla Royal, Jim Senter, Sofia Simons, Iain Walsh

Music: Original score by Chamber Corps (Chris Rossi and James Hepler)
“Let’s Build a Boat” Written and Performed by Brian Hall

Genre: Documentary, Independent
Keywords: Culture, Environment, Collapse, Visionary

Technical Details: Color and B&W; Letterboxed 1.77:1; 1 soundtrack; Feature Runtime: 123 minutes

TAG LINE AND SHORT SYNOPSIS

Tag Line
A middle-class white guy comes to grips with Peak Oil, Climate Change, Mass Extinction, Population Overshoot and the end of the American lifestyle.

Short Synopsis
Disturbing, compassionate, sometimes humorous personal essay about coming to grips with climate change, resource crises, environmental meltdown and the demise of the American lifestyle. Friends and experts analyze historical, social and psychological factors driving us toward human extinction. Bennett’s ruthless assessment challenges the audience to face terrifying times with courage and integrity.

One-Page Synopsis

Tim Bennett, middle-class white guy, started waking up to the global environmental nightmare in the mid-1980s. But life was so busy with raising kids and pursuing the American dream that he never got around to acting on his concerns. Until now.

Bennett journeys from complacency to consciousness in his feature-length documentary, What a Way To Go: Life at the End of Empire. He reviews his Midwestern roots, ruthlessly examines the stories he was raised with, and then details the grim realities humans now face: escalating climate change, resource shortages, degraded ecosystems, an exploding global population and teetering global economies.

Bennett identifies and calls into question the fundamental assumption that has led to this unprecedented crisis in human history: that humans were destined to dominate the rest of the community of life with the Culture of Empire.

He pushes the dialogue where others have not gone.

Powerful interviews with well-known authors including Daniel Quinn, Derrick Jensen and Richard Heinberg, and noted scientists William Schlesinger and Stuart Pimm, fill in some important pieces. Scathing and humorous use of archival footage is balanced with very human snapshot comments from family and friends.

On Walkabout, Bennett ends with an invitation to join him with courage and consciousness on the unexplored shores of a future not yet written.

One path leads to despair and hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
Woody Allen

DETAILED SYNOPSIS

Note: Unattributed italics denote direct quotes from the voice-over narration. Attributed italics denote direct quotes from interview subjects.

OPENING CREDITS

Voices in the Dark

I’m standing on the ledge. In the darkness the moon rises overhead, Voices. I hear voices. Sadness. Regret. Fear. Our climate’s gonna go weird. Everything is out of balance. We’re all fucked. There’s gotta be a way. Nothing that I can do. It’s gonna change. The view from the sleeping car. I just tell myself it’s all gonna be OK. It’s not a happy thing to think about.

What a Way to Go

A recurring daydream in a fast food drive-thru. Nuclear holocaust and personal embarrassment. As the icy cold of my overturned Coke seeped into my jeans, I’d think to myself, what a way to go!

Yeah, I think that we might wipe ourselves off the Earth. Definitely. I feel like that’s where we’re headed.
Sarah Erickson, Student

PART ONE: WAKING ON THE TRAIN

Born on the Slope

Middle-class assumptions and cold realities. I was raised in the arms of an extended rural family. My world was a playground.

And I was born into stories. They were all around me. We didn’t even know they were stories. We just thought they were the way things are.

I was born half way up the population explosion. Rising CO2 levels. Mass Extinction. Oil Depletion. We were moving on up, toward that vast and glorious human future. All we had to do was climb a bit further. But the mountain we were climbing was not what we thought it was. The stories no longer make sense. Our human impact is destroying the planet.

Back in the 1980s, I began to wake up to that fact, as news of the ozone hole and global warming first hit me. But life went on. I had children to raise. There were things to do.

And at night I slept, but fitfully, clenched with worries, my dreams assaulted by vague rumblings from the future.

Worry Beads: A Nightmare

The nightmare of our current situation, an intense collage of poetry and image depicting the news of the world. The monsters we have created. Nuclear weapons, biding their time. Terrorism and leaking wastes and depleted uranium. Chemical and biological weapons and emerging diseases and mad cows.

Patented life, barely tested, quietly tested, let loose upon the land. As if their creators, having looked at the world, managed to learn nothing at all.

Dying forests dying oceans dying species dying cultures. And all the while the climate is changing. The balance undone. Tonight on the Weather Channel.

Oil extraction is peaking. Watch the bidding war rage from trade floors to battlefields. Watch the Pentagon plan and the Patriots act.

We’re driving a high-speed train to the end of life, and we’re taking the rest of the planet, trillions upon trillions of living souls, along with us.

And all of this is wrapped inside an insane culture of denials and lies. Finally we awaken, in the still hours of early morning, to the realization that our leaders will not find an answer.

What a nightmare.

Alarm Clocks and Snooze Buttons

There has always been a part of me that has suspected that I would see the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it in my lifetime. There is an inevitability built into the situation. People have known this for a long time.

The world looked insane to me, but nobody else seemed to notice, so I buried my thoughts, and muddled on. Deep inside, this was tearing me to pieces.

Daniel Quinn and Derrick Jensen helped me understand the cultural underpinnings of our situation. Like the German people during the Nazi regime, the people of our culture are trapped in stories. Stories that threaten the community of life itself. Stories of separation and greatness and inherent human flaws. Stories about utility, progress, growth and the one right way to live. Stories of power and domination and control

I was not alone. There were other people looking at the world situation and seeing what I saw: our present system cannot continue on as it is.

But the collapse still seemed far away. There was time. There was hope. Somewhere, there were people taking care of it all. So I lived the stories I had learned as a child and tried to ignore the fear.

Then I started to work on this documentary.

After three years of research it is clear: the situation is dire. It’s as though we’ve awakened to find ourselves on a runaway train.

PART TWO: THE TRAIN AND THE TRACKS

The culture of Empire works always to distract us. What happens when we look where the conjurer does not want us to look? Four aspects of our predicament stand out. Let’s look more closely at the train, and the tracks, and the terrain through which we’re speeding.

Peak Oil

At some point, since oil is a finite resource, you can’t keep raising production.
Paul Roberts, The End of Oil

I spoke with Richard Heinberg and Paul Roberts, who have both written books on the oil depletion situation. Our use is profligate, and technological advances cannot trump the laws of physics in order to keep up with demand. As Gerald Cecil from UNC-Chapel Hill explains, when supply cannot meet demand, you have a problem.

Jerry Mander explains how the fundamental structures of this present system cannot exist without cheap energy. Heinberg explains how our current economic system will collapse without continuing growth in energy supply. Harvey Harman and Richard Manning point out how agriculture is highly dependent on cheap fuels. And Ray Milosh points out that resource competition will likely result in more war, exploitation and domination.

Petrochemicals, fossil fuels, have become embedded in our food supply. If we run out of fossil fuel, that strategy will collapse in a heartbeat.
Richard Manning, Against the Grain

It’s a permanent state of affairs. The fuel crisis will be over in a couple of hundred million years when everything has settled down and there’s a lot more having been made from all of us having, you know, been squished back under.
Ray Milosh, Scientist

Climate Change

Scientists used to talk about climate change in terms of centuries. Now they’re talking about decades. Now they’re talking about next year. Now they’re talking about now.

We’re going to run out of air to burn before we run out of fossil fuels to burn.
Richard Manning, Against the Grain

William Schlesinger and Stuart Pimm at Duke University explain the basics. Greenhouse gas buildup has caused an increase in global mean temperatures. Animals and plants are being impacted by this, sometimes to the point of extinction.

Ran Prieur and Douglas Crawford-Brown explain how the increase in CO2 levels is making the ocean more acidic, threatening planktons and corals and disrupting food chains and oxygen production.

Douglas Crawford-Brown and William Schlesinger explain the idea of tipping points and abrupt climate change and the possible shutdown of global ocean currents. And there are a number of self-reinforcing feedback loops now in operation.

We have a lot of carbon stored in the permafrost, and those permafrosts are starting to defrost and when they defrost that carbon is going to be oxidized to carbon dioxide or brought out as methane, and that will be a dramatic increase in greenhouse gases.
Douglas Crawford-Brown, Director, Carolina Environmental Program, UNC-Chapel Hill

This may get out of hand and we’ll suddenly be looking at a very rapid warming of the planet.
Stuart Pimm, Doris Duke Professor of Conservation Ecology, Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences, Duke University

What if we run into a tipping point where we have this kind of accelerated scenario of climate change? We’re gonna get our butts kicked.
Paul Roberts, The End of Oil

Climate change may be out of our control at this point. As Richard Manning points out, global warming is a really severe punch.

Is it inevitable? Who will we be in the face of this?

Mass Extinction

We have black holes in the ocean. There are no fish in places in the ocean. What’s happened to the fish? What’s happened?
Barbara Lorie, Teacher and Activist

We have to live on the planet. So if we’re gonna destroy where we’re living then that’s gonna be a problem.
Jack Bennett, Writer

As Manning, Pimm, and Daniel Quinn point out, we are living in a period of extinction that ranks with the great extinctions on this planet, driving species to extinction at a rate 1000 times greater than it should be. It cannot continue indefinitely without the whole ecosystem collapsing.

Civilized humans consume 40% of the planet’s productivity on land, a third of the production from the oceans, and half of the available fresh water. Most large fish species have been reduced down to 10% of their previous populations. Ten percent. And in addition to consumption, we are now poisoning every square inch of the planet.

Trillions of people will live in a biologically impoverished world if we don’t stop our human impacts now.
Stuart Pimm, The World According to Pimm

Daniel Quinn compares our situation to a brick building in which we continue to knock bricks out from the walls of the lower floors to build ever higher. He compares the loss of 200 species each day to 200 bricks per day.
It seems stable. Right up to the point where it collapses.

Population Overshoot

We’re approaching full-tilt, I think, in terms of what the planet can sustain.
Stacye Leanza, Artist

William Catton explains how it’s possible to exceed carrying capacity, but only temporarily, as that excessive population destroys the systems upon which it depends. As important as the total population is the lifestyle by which that population lives, and the damage that that lifestyle does to the planet. The Earth supports as great a collective mass of ants as it does people. It can do so because ants aren’t building 6000 square foot homes, driving two hours to their jobs, buying plasma TV sets, and killing each other with depleted uranium munitions.

Catton and Otis Graham explain how we Americans do way more damage to the planet than people in many nations. It cannot be sustained for much longer. There are many ways in which our population could be reduced. Richard Manning explains how humans represent a resource to microbes.

Can we meet this issue with intention and create a softer landing, or will we fly blindly toward catastrophe?

Humanity’s never been in this: this is new. This is new. And this is big. And this is not being talked about.
Otis Graham, Professor History Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara

Our global population is going to be reduced.
William Catton, Jr., Professor Emeritus, Sociology & Human Ecology, Washington State University

What choices do we now have? What is inevitable at this point? And what remains to be created, if only we awaken to our power? Most importantly, why have we not already awakened?

We can’t survive apart from the Earth. And we’re killing it!
Carla Royal, Beyond Therapy

PART THREE: THE LOCOMOTIVE POWER

There are other issues we could have looked at: a long rolling list of them.

Thirty six years after the first Earth Day, forty-four years after Silent Spring, the planet is closer now to ecological meltdown than it has ever been. If what we want is to stop the destruction of the life of this planet, then what we have been doing has not been working. We will have to do something else.

It’s time to look more closely at the culture of Empire.

How Did We Get Here?

Ancient Origins:
It seems it began with the development, approximately 10,000 years ago, of our current form of food production, agriculture both catastrophic and totalitarian in nature. This new style of agriculture fueled new levels of population growth, and led to hard work, poor health and more settlement, which in turn led to wealth and inequity, increased levels of conflict, environmental degradation and the rise of a new form of culture based on cities.

The rise of cities was key. Since cities exceed the carrying capacity of their local environments, the people in them must, by necessity, beg, borrow, buy, steal and/or fight for resources.

Science and Technology:
Using the power of technology, we could break through the limits and laws and rules that kept the community of life in balance for millions of years, temporarily.

That power went to our heads, but it was based on faulty assumptions about the limits of science and the inherent qualities of technologies. The myth of the technofix held us in its sway, and still does, blinding us to the deeper cultural issues that motivate our actions.

Disconnection:
The culture of civilization cut us off from the natural world, and our technology cut us off from our own experiences.

We can build a culture that sits between us and the world, and it mediates our behavior toward the world. It mediates what we do and what we perceive. If you have a spear it becomes a lot easier; you don’ have to kill somebody right in front of you. You can kill somebody thirty feet away. And that distance makes it easier to kill.
Ran Prieur, Civilization Will Eat Itself

If you’ve been sent into war with a B2 bomber strapped to your back and an array of high-tech sensors at your fingertips, you can kill Iraqis with no more thought or feeling than you might have wasting the Covenant on your X-Box at home.

This disconnection left us confused and wounded.

Our relationship with the universe becomes a use relationship. Now that’s disastrous. Just like to say to another being, human, “you used me,” is about as terrible a thing as a person can say. Now the planet Earth is telling us “you used me”.
Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth

Cultural Stories:
All cultures are based on stories. Civilization is based on stories of growth and progress and power, stories of ownership and rights and resources.

We’re in a culture of two-year-olds where we just won’t look at the limits.
Sally Erickson, Producer

Dominion over the Earth in Genesis didn’t mean to leave this pillaged and smoking.
William Schlesinger, Duke University

Daniel Quinn explains the basic stories of Empire, which tell us that civilization is the best culture ever, that it’s the one right way to live, and that it’s how we were meant to live. The most dangerous story of all, to Quinn, is the one that tells us that humans are superior to all other creatures.

Expansion and Colonization:
Ran Prieur recounts The Parable of the Tribes (from a book by Andrew Bard Schmookler), which explains how and why a culture based on power and violence can overrun an entire planet.

Daniel Quinn speaks of how we’ve forgotten that humans once knew how to live on the planet.

They were living in a way in which humans could live for millions of years. Tens of millions of years. And that’s something. Man, now we’re saying “how many decades can we have?” And if we go on living this way it’s not many.
Daniel Quinn, Ishmael

Cultural Blinders:
Stories can blind us to our own greatness. Not all human cultures have followed the path of civilization and destruction. Human capacities and characteristics have always been mediated by the larger society. Always.

Richard Manning speaks of how our strongest instincts are geared to the immediate, to the tiger that could kill you at any moment. And yet the Haudenosaunee evolved a culture that balanced those strong instincts. They make decisions based on their impact on the seventh generation.

As Paul Roberts explains, Empire is rarely able to recognize a limit coming from even thirty years out. So climate change and oil depletion go unnoticed.

When living in a culture that cannot look long term, processes such as exponential growth, population dynamics and unintended consequences are all difficult to see.

What Keeps Us Trapped Here?

It isn’t working out the way we’ve been taught to think it will. Why do we keep destroying the planet? Even now, when the evidence that we are doing so is overwhelming?

Systems and Structures:
We’re trapped in an economy that must grow or die. And of course this is an absurdity because we have physical limits.

We’re assaulted by corporately controlled media that keep us delusional. We’re mislead by TV and the glorified images that betray the lies of our lives.

There’s a great line by Zygmunt Bauman. He says that rational people will go quietly and meekly into a gas chamber if only you allow them to believe it’s a bathroom.
Derrick Jensen, Endgame

And I’ve lost all hope that my government is capable of looking clearly at the situation.

Much of our educational system leaves us totally unprepared to question the dominant culture. We need to turn people into machine parts.

Questions are not encouraged.

If your experience is that your food comes from the grocery store and that your water comes from a tap, you will defend to the death the system that brings those to you because your life depends on it. If your experience is that your water comes from a stream and that your food comes from a landbase, you will defend to the death that stream and that landbase because your life depends on it.
Derrick Jensen, The Culture of Make Believe

Who would create such systems?

Disconnection and Delusion:
We’ve gotten lost in a hall of mirrors. Everything we see, hear, taste, touch and smell comes from humans and machines. That gives us an inflated sense of self and a warped sense of reality.

We’ve begun to lose our sanity in the solitary confinement of cities and civilization. We end up believing that humans are superior. Out of that sense of superiority, Empire has conquered the world. But that conquering has wounded the conquerors themselves.

If you look at the people who have been assimilated into Empire, and if you look at the Imperialists themselves, you find an incredible dissociation from reality.
Chellis Glendinning, My Name is Chellis and I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization

Dissociated from the natural world, we do not defend it. As Richard Manning explains, we’ve caged ourselves in cities, and like any animal in a cage, we’ve become psychotic.

The disconnection is everywhere. In the crib. In the television. In our lack of community. In our social settings. Our economy thrives on this. The stores are filled with bandages for the wounds of Empire.

Abuse and Addiction:
Derrick Jensen considers the dominant culture an abusive system which leaves its members suffering from complex post-traumatic stress disorder.

Everything within an abusive family structure is set up to protect the abuser. Everything. And by the same token, everything within this culture is set up to protect the rich. That’s what this culture is about.
Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words

We identify with this system, at the expense of our own lives, and the life of the planet. Over the years I’ve begun to break my own identification with the dominant culture.

We can also view the culture through the lens of addiction. Our deepest needs never get satisfied, but we stay trapped in an endless search to meet those deep needs in the only ways this culture allows. After centuries of this, it looks like we want to hit bottom, simply to end the nightmare.

The Response So Far:
Lost in denial, trying to hit bottom, we fail to see the cause of our pain, or the fact that this culture is killing everything. We fantasize about Somehow, with no clear idea how to get from here to there. Our voices of helplessness and resignation fill the night sky. We don’t know what to do. It’s going to take a catastrophe. There’s no way to stop the train. Fuck it. Might as well go out and party.

With resignation this profound, it seems as though there is little left to do but to make the prison as comfortable as is possible.

It all adds up to this: this culture is not only killing the planet, it is destroying us as human beings.

The train plunges forward at blinding speed. Charlie stole the handle. So who are we going to be?

PART FOUR: WALKABOUT

If we dont change our direction, we are likely to wind up where we are headed.
Chinese Proverb

The people of Empire have no clear idea where we are, and no clear vision of where we want to go. Born and raised in captivity, we’re now so institutionalized that few of us can even see the prison bars. But we all know our cell numbers.

Daniel Quinn reveals the Secret Plan: this culture will not stop until it destroys everything. And as Richard Heinberg points out, we have been so infantilized by civilization that we can no longer survive without it.

One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
Woody Allen

The American lifestyle is unsustainable. That means that it can’t be sustained. It’s coming to an end.

Science, as Thomas Berry points out, gave us the power to run the universe, but not the wisdom. We’ve forgotten that we’re part of the living community, says Quinn.

If we don’t figure out what our place in the universe is, we’re not going to have a place in the universe.
Kevin Mayer, Artist

I didn’t say it would be easy. I just said it would be the truth.
Morpheus, The Matrix

Those who write about the world situation feel compelled to add a Happy Chapter at the end. But I can’t do that. I have no list of quick and painless fixes, no plan that will keep the train rolling forever on this track. I see no way for that to happen. If there is going to be a happy chapter, we shall have to write it together, with the rest of the community of life, on the pages of the living world.

Otis Graham dreams of his grandchildren blaming him for this mess.

I think they’re going to look back and shake their heads and say: What happened to those people? How did they lose sight of such basic things?
Sally Erickson, Producer

The time of the lone wolf is over. Gather yourselves! We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.
An unnamed Hopi Elder, Hope Nation, Oraibi, Arizona

There is a new story arising in the world: the story of The Great Turning, a turning away from a culture of domination and death, and a turning toward a culture that is life-sustaining and life-renewing.

We get to choose. Who are we going to be?

I don’t think life for most Americans, despite our affluence, is all that it’s been cracked up to be. And people are afraid to talk about that. They’re afraid they’re the only ones who are experiencing deep dissatisfaction.
Sally Erickson, Producer

Be bold, and mighty forces will come to your aid.
Basil King

Is this who we are? Are we destroying the planet, as Dmitry Orlov asks, just to be somewhat more comfortable for a little while?

I think we are much more than we’ve ever been allowed to believe.

What does a life well-lived look like?
Harvey Harman, Sustainable Designer

As all of this starts to shift and change and disintegrate and collapse there’s the opportunity, in fact, to come back to ourselves. To grow up, fundamentally, as people and as a culture.
Richard Heinberg, The Party’s Over

We’re in a time of initiation, folks. We can do this, but only if we choose to. Only if we lay down our weapons in this insane war against the world. Only if we surrender control, and move back into relationship.

We can have unlimited growth. Growth in relationship. In self-awareness and spirit and love and community and connection. All of life is on our side.

Is civilization what we want?

What does it mean to dismantle civilization? What it means is depriving the rich of the ability to steal from the poor and to destroy the world. I can’t give a better definition than that.
Derrick Jensen, Endgame

There’s no real reason why the entire country of the United States couldn’t face reality. You just have to drop the idea of capitalism. You have to drop the idea of corporations running things. You have to drop the idea of economic growth. It could be done.
Jerry Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred

There was a great tradition among the Cheyenne dog soldiers: They would get a tanned rope, called a dog rope, and a picket pin that’s used to stake horses to the ground. They would attach the picket pin to the sash, the dog rope, that was attached to them. And then in battle they would drive the picket stake into the ground. And that was done as a mark of resolve. Because once it’s driven, you can’t leave until either you’re dead or you’re relieved by another dog soldier or the battle’s over and everyone is safe. So the question I ask people is: Where will you drive your picket pin? Where will you stake yourself out and say I’m not going to retreat any more?
Derrick Jensen, Endgame

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
Anais Nin

It’s time to be thoughtful and learn what’s going on. A paradigm shift will require that we question our deepest and most fundamental assumptions. And that will require that we take our current worldview gently in our arms and hold it while it breathes its last.

It’s time to be truthful: the dominant culture is destroying us. What would happen if we let ourselves feel our feelings about all of this?

Our feelings are the swiftest path back to our forgotten selves.

It’s time to surrender to the fact that we cannot solve this on our own. It’s time to ask for help, to listen to the wisdom of the land, and the community of life itself, and then speak our truths in our own lives.

It’s time to act with great intention. There is much work to do to re-localize, power down, scale back, and heal both ourselves and the land. Find your work and do it.

But what about that speeding train? Do we wait for it to crash, and hope that it doesn’t kill everything? Or is it possible to stop that train before it hits the end of the line?

We humans once knew how to live on this planet. A few still do. And that’s the good news. It can be done. We can do way, way better than Empire.

“One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.”
Andre Gide

Let’s jump off the train and build a boat: a lifeboat, an ark, a galleon of adventure and imagination destined for unknown lands. Build it now. The ice is melting. The waters are rising. We’re going to have to let go of the shore.

I don’t know if I’ll survive the crash of civilization. What I do know is that I have a choice in how I meet it. I’m going to show up in the world, and tell my truth. And I’d love it if you would join me.

Together, we will set forth, to find that new land.

What a way to go.

END CREDITS

WHO’S WHO

Fr. Thomas Berry, PhD
Historian and Geologian
Author of The Dream of the Earth and The Great Work

William Catton, Jr. PhD
Professor Emeritus, Sociology & Human Ecology, Washington State University
Author of Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change

Gerald Cecil, PhD
Professor of Astrophysics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Douglas Crawford-Brown, PhD
Director Carolina Environmental Program, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Author of Mathematical Methods of Environmental Risk Modeling

Sally Erickson, M.Ed.
Producer, What a Way to Go

Lyle Estill
Vice President of Stuff for Piedmont Biofuels, Pittsboro NC
Author of Biodiesel Power

Chellis Glendinning, PhD
Psychologist and Activist
Author of My Name is Chellis and I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization and
Off the Map: An Expedition Deep into Empire and the Global Economy

Otis Graham, PhD
Professor History Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara
Author of Unguarded Gates: A History of America’s Immigration Crisis

Harvey Harman
Sustainable Designer/Developer at Walk Softly LLC and Earth Renewal Shelter

Richard Heinberg
Core Faculty member of New College of California
Author of The Party’s Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies,
Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World and
The Oil Depletion Protocol: A Plan to Avert Oil Wars, Terrorism, and Economic Collapse

Derrick Jensen
Environmental Activist and Author of A Language Older Than Words,
The Culture of Make Believe,
Endgame, Volume 1: The Problem of Civilization and
Endgame, Volume 2: Resistance

Jerry Mander
Co-Director and Founder: The International Forum on Globalization
Author of Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television and
In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations

Richard Manning
Journalist and Author of Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics, and Promise of the American Prairie and
Against the Grain: How Agriculture has Hijacked Civilization

Stuart Pimm, PhD
Doris Duke Professor of Conservation Ecology, Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences, Duke University
Author of The World According to Pimm: A Scientist Audits the Earth

Ran Prieur
Writer and Blogger @ www.ranprieur.com
Author of Civilization Will Eat Itself (zine) and many essays

Daniel Quinn
Author of many books including Ishmael,
The Story of B and
The Tales of Adam

Paul Roberts
Journalist and Author of The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World

William Schlesinger, PhD
James B. Duke Professor of Biogeochemistry
Dean, Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences, Duke University

THE FILMMMAKERS

Timothy S. Bennett, Writer/Director is an artist and filmmaker who now lives in a small coastal town in Maine. Born and raised in rural Michigan, he began his inquiry into environmental and cultural issues in the late 80s. His academic background is in anthropology, religion, education and film. He is the father of three grown children.

What A Way To Go is his first feature-length documentary. His talent for “big-picture thinking,” along with his ability to see through the taboos, denials, and orthodoxies of the dominant culture, combined with his poetic writing style, makes for a documentary experience that is both compelling and informative.

Sally Erickson, Producer, is an artist, psychotherapist, community organizer, and organizational consultant. She was born in Washington State where she developed a love of, and commitment to, the natural world. Experiences of wilderness vision-questing deepened that commitment. She now lives with husband Tim Bennett in Maine. Sally is the mother of two grown children. She brings maturity, insight, organizational development expertise and inspiration to What a Way to Go.

VISIONQUEST PICTURES

VisionQuest Pictures is a film production company owned by Timothy S. Bennett and Sally Erickson. It was formed in 2003 to produce documentaries on the most critical environmental, political, and social dilemmas of our time.

What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire is their first feature-length documentary production. It was funded largely out-of-pocket, aided by local community-based fundraising events. This is a venture that walks its talk, fueled with great intention, artistic vision and urgent integrity.

(Click on links to read entire review)

October 18, 2009
Revisionism… or humility? an essay in Reflections on the Transition.
“The essence of this returning is the honesty and unflinching ability to - as necessary - abandon everything we understand ourselves to be, admitting any illusions and mistakes, and like the phoenix, emerge from the ashes into our real destiny.”

March 19, 2009
Lost Generation, an essay on many documentaries including WAWTG by Ora Uzel.
“What we must look for is not to put hope or faith in established structures, but to put hard work and energy into establishing our own microcosmic structures: communities. These are already happening around the nation. Communities are coming together to build self-sustainable networks that responsibly hold and nurture the survival and thrival of small groups of 25 to 400 creative, artistic, innovative, and often spiritual people. Many of them are modeled off the sustainable small group communities in Native American cultures before the late 19th century diaspora induced by European-Americans. Some even call themselves tribes.”

Spring, 2009
“Movie Documentary Review: What a Way to Go - Life at the End of Empire” by Fred Elbel, in the Volume 19, Number 3 (Spring 2009) issue of the Social Contract Journal.
“Unsettling in its direct confrontation of the Culture of Empire, this documentary is highly recommended viewing for anyone who might have the ability to reshape our future”and that includes all of us. The film leaves the viewer with no quick solutions but rather the challenge to create new options.”

Sometime in 2008
Review: “What a Way to Go - Life at the End of Empire” by Lady Raven Ariana at Faeryshaman.org.
“At times watching the film feels overwhelming. It shears away our denial and brings us face to face with our personal grief and loss. A friend of mine… mourned for a long time after seeing this DVD. She is the one who suggested to me that … I purchase and watch it, then share it with others. ”

June 1, 2008
“Review of What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire, Part 1″ on The Mennonite by Tim Nafziger.
“Progress and Expansion: Stories That Undergird our Civilization” Part 2 of the review on The Mennonite by Tim Nafziger.
“One of the things What a Way to Go specifically refuses to do is give us a simple answer that we can go away with satisfied. Instead, it suggests some very general ideas like interdependence with the community of life, integrating ourselves with the earth rather than seeking to control it and building an ark of relationships around us to help us survive and imagine other ways. We need to begin to recognize the way the narrative of progress dominates so much of our life in unconscious ways if we are going to begin to heal ourselves and our world. “

April 20, 2008

“Movie Review of What a Way to Go” on GrinningPlanet.com.
“Elegant and almost poetic in tone, What a Way To Go gently takes us by the hand as it explains to us the harsh reality of how things really are, where they’re likely to go, and how difficult the challenge is”

March/April 2008
Changing the Story of Our Future by Matthew Gilbert. Mention in Tikkun.
“At this point the wisdom of our spiritual traditions and the findings of new science are converging to suggest a way out. And rather than convert the ideological loyalists of reductionist science or argue with religious fundamentalists until you’re hoarse, it may be time to just keep building a different paradigm, one that starts in the center of our own hearts and minds.”

December 9, 2007
Peak Oil at the Movies by Keith Akers. A comparison of WAWTG with “Crude Impact” and “A Crude Awakening.”
“While the first two films take a shot at examining our oil addiction, What a Way to Go takes its aim at industrial civilization itself — our lifestyle addiction, cultural addiction, and the stories and cultural blinders that accompanied our species’ rise and now threatens to destroy us and the earth along with it.”

November 5, 2007
Not Pushing the Snooze on Revolving Doors.
“… an unpolished and rugged 2-hour documentary about the mega crisis cocktail of global warming, peak oil, population overshoot and mass extinction.”

November 4, 2007

Film Review- What a Way to Go by Graham at Zone 5.

“What A Way To Go is a groundbreaking movie.”

October 17, 2007
“A New Beginning”, a Permaculture Activist Review by John Wages
“This movie lifts the veil from civilization to show us the hollowness of what we once thought hallowed.”

October 17, 2007
“What a Way to Go”, a Dry Dipstick Movie Review by Mick Winter
“A two-hour poem of great power and beauty… I have never seen a film quite like this before.”

October 17, 2007
Tim Bennett and Sally Erickson - What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire, a review by John Ludi
“What a Way to Go offers both a reflective indictment of our collective folly for the uninitiated, and gives that small attentive minority who are looking at the same facts and evidence and reaching the same conclusions the reassurance that we are not crazy.”

October 13, 2007
“What a Way to Go - A review of a new doomer cult classic” posted by JMG on Grist.org
” …the best movie on the big picture (peak oil, climate change, rate of extinctions, and population overshoot) a person can make.”

October 11, 2007
“What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire, a comparison with The 11th Hour by Keith Thomas at the Nature and Society Forum
“What a Way to Go is the advanced course for those who are intellectually and emotionally prepared to examine critically our way of life - the viewer takes away ideas, even subversive ones.”

September 28, 2007
What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire, a review by Phil Watson for Common Ground Magazine

September 15, 2007
What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire, a review by Thomas Naylor at the Second Vermont Republic
“A gripping documentary about the American Endgame.”

September 14, 2007
“The 11th Hour and Generation Z” by Kelpie Wilson at truthout.org<
“Beautifully written and intimate.”

August 23, 2007
“What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire”, a review by Keith Thomas at the Nature and Society Forum
“Despite its uncompromising challenges to viewers, I predict it will quickly acquire “cult status” because of its power to change lives and to motivate people to change events, and that we’ll be hearing a lot about it over the coming years.”

August 18, 2007
Movie Recommendation: “What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire” by GliderGuider at DemocraticUnderground.com
“They tell the whole story, without once looking away, without even blinking… This is the whole enchilada.”

August 17, 2007
MEET THE FILMMAKERS: “WHAT A WAY TO GO: LIFE AT THE END OF EMPIRE”
Peak Moment TV interviews Sally Erickson and Tim Bennett

August 10, 2007
Film Review: What a Way to Go by Urban Scout
“Timothy Bennett feels like the newer, cooler Michael Moore.”

August 6, 2007
Peak Moment Travels (includes comments on What a Way to Go) by Janaia Donaldson @ relocalize.net
“I suggest you see it with at least one friend so you can talk about it later.”

August 2, 2007
Film Review: What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire by Rob Williams, Vermont Commons

“An eye-opening look at our civilization’s future.”

July 11, 2007
A Review by Derek J. Wilson @ Oilcrash.com
“This is the most demanding wake-up call to all and sundry I have so far seen, a very hard kick in the groin, a straight punch to the face, no mean feat for any film, and essential viewing while there may still be a little time.”

June 27, 2007
A Short Review of What a Way to Go by Kevin Moore @ Oilcrash.com
“Stunning and captivating, this is surely the film we have all been waiting for.”

June 22, 2007
What a Way to Go, a review by Jason Godesky, The Anthropik Network
“It inspired me and brought me to the brink of tears; it lionized me and made me want to go to war; it’s completely the emotional wave the introduction warned me it would be. Let it wash over you, let it embolden you, and it will give you the courage to seize the future.”

June 4, 2007
What a Way to Go (Life at the End of Empire) A Documentary Movie Review by Dan Armstrong, Mud City Press
“If what Gore offered was an ‘inconvenient truth,’ What a Way to Go gives us the ‘whole truth.’”

May 20, 2007
What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire” Documentary by Jan Lundberg, Culture Change
“Perhaps the most important media message of our time.”

April 18, 2007
This Island Earth: As Ecological Anxiety Increases, The Search for Radical Solutions Begins, by Marc Maximov, The Independent Weekly
“A bleak, relentless, ecological horror film.”

March 1, 2007
What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire, Another CarolynBaker.org Exclusive, by Carolyn Baker
“Nothing less than a 123-minute cat scan of the planet and its twenty-first century human and non-human condition.”

Read a short summary, watch an interview clip, or check out the books related to these pressing issues highlighted in What A Way To Go:

Resource Depletion & Peak Oil

The 2008 crude oil price, $147 per barrel, shattered the global economy. The “invisible hand” of economics became the invisible fist, pounding down world economic growth to match the limitations of crude oil production.
—Kenneth Deffeyes (petroleum geologist)

Climate Destabilization

“We can take a lot of punches. Nature takes punches pretty readily. Global
warming is a really severe punch. And all that we depend on for natural systems and agricultural systems is about to be wiped out pretty drastically.”
Richard Manning, What A Way To Go

Mass Species Extinction

“A majority of the nation’s biologists are convinced that a “mass extinction” of plants and animals is underway that poses a major threat to humans in the next century, yet most Americans are only dimly aware of the problem, a poll says.

The rapid disappearance of species was ranked as one of the planet’s gravest environmental worries, surpassing pollution, global warming and the thinning of the ozone layer, according to the survey of 400 scientists commissioned by New York’s American Museum of Natural History.”

Joby Warrick, Staff Writer
Washington Post, April 21, 1998 (Note the date!)

Population Overshoot

“… our lifestyles, mores, institutions, patterns of interaction, values, and expectations are shaped by a cultural heritage that was formed in a time when carrying capacity exceeded the human load… That carrying capacity surplus is gone now, eroded both by population increase and immense technological enlargement of per capita resource appetites and environmental impacts. Human life is now being lived in an era of deepening carrying capacity deficit. All of the familiar aspects of human societal life are under compelling pressure to change in this new era when the load increasingly exceeds the carrying capacities of many local regions—and of a finite planet. Social disorganization, friction, demoralization, and conflict will escalate.”

William Catton, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change

Economy & Financial Meltdown

“All the structures that now exist – our urban formations, our transportation systems, our means of getting food, globalization as an economic model, capitalism as an economic model, which depends on constant expansion and growth and ever-more resources – cannot possibly continue to exist. Because they’re all based on – the root base of all of it – is the existence of cheap energy.”
Jerry Mander, is author of Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television and In the Absence of the Sacred.

Preparation and Transformation

As of all this starts to shift and change and disintegrate and collapse, there’s the opportunity, in fact, to come back to ourselves. To grow up, fundamentally, as people and as a culture.

~Richard Heinberg, What A Way To Go: Life at the End of Empire

Many people want to know WHAT TO DO. If you are one of those you may want to check out:

Post-Peak Living offers ONLINE COURSES.