[Peakoil] Review of coming movie "What a way to go"

[Keith Thomas]

Here's a movie that looks like being the best broad coverage of peak 
oil and its fellow horsemen of the apocalypse.

There is a trailer of the movie at this page:
http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/1072/81/

WHAT A WAY TO GO: LIFE AT THE END OF EMPIRE February 28, 2007

A REVIEW OF THE DOCUMENTARY "What A Way To Go: Life At The End Of
Empire", by Tim Bennett and Sally Erickson
http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/1072/81/

I didn't say it would be easy; I just said it would be the truth.

Morpheus, from "The Matrix"

If anything is not easy to watch but absolutely the truth down to one's 
toenails, it is Tim Bennett's and Sally Erickson's doggedly transparent 
documentary, "What A Way To Go: Life At The End Of Empire." Nothing 
less than a 123-minute cat scan of the planet and its twenty-first 
century human and non-human condition, this documentary is indeed, "in 
your face" but with reverence, poignancy and solemnity yet sending 
world-class denial artists running to re-watch "Little Miss Sunshine" 
another one hundred times. While viewing it, I could see in my mind 
Carl Jung puffing on his pipe and pensively whispering under his 
breath, "Human beings can only handle so much truth."

Divided into four parts, Waking On The Train, The Train And The Tracks, 
Locomotive Power, and Walkabout, the film begins with Tim Bennett's 
personal saga of awakening in the eighties from lifelong slumber. 
Recounting the realities he has subsequently discovered is a tedious 
litany of human and planetary horrors that only those ready to awaken 
with him are likely to endure. To their credit, Bennett and Erickson 
offer no "happy ending chapter" at the end—no list of quick and 
painless fixes. Nothing about the world humans have created in the past 
several thousand years is painless, and nothing they might contemplate 
doing to remediate it could ever be quick. "What A Way To Go" is 
nothing less than two physicians presenting a diagnosis of terminal 
cancer to a patient who currently feels and looks "just fine". Still 
another metaphor might be the one that Bennett and Erickson present in 
the documentary's first chapter, namely, that of a suicidal individual 
standing on a ledge at the top of a very tall building, contemplating 
jumping to his death. It is an image to which the filmmakers return 
several times as the film progresses.

The issue of denial is addressed head-on as the documentary's numerous 
interviewees name it and its consequences. Those individuals include: 
Thomas Berry, Richard Manning, Stuart Pimm, Ran Prieur, Paul Roberts, 
William Schlesinger, Richard Heinberg, Chellis Glendinning, Derrick 
Jensen, Jerry Mander, and Sally Erickson. Specifically, Derrick Jensen 
speaks of the energy that it takes to remain in denial, and how humans 
who stop clinging to it discover that as a result, an enormous amount 
of energy is freed up to do whatever work the planet's terminal state 
calls them to do.

"What A Way To Go" names Peak Oil, climate change, mass extinction, and 
population overshoot, as the four pivotal and daunting challenges that 
humans must address and resolve if any species are to remain on planet 
earth. Equally terrifying, in my opinion, are two symptomatic offshoots 
of these four: nuclear holocaust and global economic meltdown.

So how do humans—that species which unlike all the others, is in the 
process of rendering earth uninhabitable—reverse the nightmare we have 
created? While for many of us, it may seem like a no-brainer, Bennett 
and Erickson emphasize that unless the issues are unveiled and talked 
about, no hope for solution exists. Given the documentary's unrelenting 
reminders of the lethal trajectory to which the human race has 
committed itself, the filmmakers' insistence on breaking one's own 
denial system is a crucial first step to all others.

As an historian I particularly appreciate Sally Erickson's assertion in 
the film that in order to begin addressing the issues, we must develop 
a historical perspective and understand how we arrived at this point in 
human history. This is exactly what I have attempted to do in my 
recently-published book U.S. HISTORY UNCENSORED: What Your High School 
Textbook Didn't Tell You. Americans in particular are loath to 
investigate causes and prefer to hastily "move on" to solutions; 
however, without understanding causes, it is impossible to construct 
viable solutions.

Especially validating for me was the perspective this documentary lends 
to the issue of Peak Oil in relation to climate chaos. While experts on 
hydrocarbon energy such as Richard Heinberg leave no doubt in the 
viewer's mind that Peak Oil is a frightening reality, those same 
experts, including Heinberg, acknowledge the gargantuan climate change 
monster that could surpass Peak Oil not only in its consequences but 
how quickly those consequences manifest the collapse of civilization 
and make the planet uninhabitable.
As for the tiresome "technofix" argument—you know, the one that says 
that because humans are the superior specie and have created such 
highly sophisticated civilizations, we will ultimately invent 
technology that will adequately reverse the "Big Four" pivotal 
challenges, Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael and The Tales Of Adam, 
compares humans living in developed countries to people living in very 
tall brick buildings who every day go to the bottom of their building 
and remove 200 bricks and bring them to the top of the building. 
Obviously, such ludicrous behavior is unsustainable and will inevitably 
result in the demise of the building's foundation and its collapse.

Ultimately, "What A Way To Go" meanders into the root causes of our 
planetary nightmare: our disconnection from ourselves, each other, and 
the earth; the cultural stories that have been forgotten and replaced 
with newer, self-destructive ones about growth, domination, and hubris; 
the systems we have created and the addictions that feed those systems, 
and of course, our denial.

In Part Four, "Walkabout", we are given not hope, but the challenge of 
creating options, the first being, the decision to grow up, forsake our 
denial, and become adults. Richard Heinberg reminds us that, "We have 
been so infantilized by civilization that we can no longer survive 
without it. 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."

Both Erickson and Bennett have incorporated their own children into the 
documentary with brief comments from Erickson's daughter and Bennett's 
son. Erickson herself states that in terms of future generations, "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.'?"

Earlier I used the analogy of two physicians announcing to a patient 
that she/he has terminal cancer, and it is appropriate here to ponder 
what cancer actually is, namely, the growth of cells out of control, 
thus the more archaic reference to a cancer as a "growth." Growth has 
become for Western civilization a cancer that is destroying its 
inhabitants, the ecosystems, all other forms of life on earth and the 
planet itself. Or as the author, William Kotke notes, "Civilization is 
a mental/material world of culturally transmitted illusion." Growth 
must cease, and it will cease, whether we choose to participate in that 
process or whether we don't. Civilization will collapse, and that 
collapse offers opportunity as well as crisis. It may occur suddenly, 
or it may transpire as the economies and infrastructures of developed 
nations are hollowed out over time.

Appropriately, Bennett and Erickson have chosen the subtitle, "Life At 
The End Of Empire." In his recent book Nemesis, historian Chalmers 
Johnson notes that an empire and a democratic republic are inimical to 
each other. Where one exists, the other cannot. If a nation chooses 
empire, its democratic republic will dissolve and ultimately perish. 
Should it choose to retain democratic republic, it must forsake empire; 
it cannot have both. The United States has chosen empire, and its 
citizens are allowing the shredding of its Bill of Rights and the 
evisceration of its civil liberties. All empires inevitably collapse, 
and everyone reading these words is living that collapse in this 
moment.

At this writing, world financial markets are reeling from yesterday's 
sell-off bloodbath in China and Europe. The day before, a U.S. 
government auditor warned that U.S. debt to other nations is spiraling 
out of control. Virtually every project of Western civilization is 
unsustainable, especially its debt. An equally frightening but 
enormously important documentary that every thinking American must see 
is "In Debt We Trust" which illumines another locomotive out of 
control, imminently headed for a bottomless chasm. While I don't wish 
to prognosticate that this week's plunge of financial markets is the 
beginning of that economic train wreck, I know that the centralized 
financial systems which manage the United States government are 
behaving like the individuals mentioned above who carry the bricks from 
the bottom of their building to the top of it, leaving the foundation 
in peril of collapse. The fundamental difference is that when the 
American people behave in such a manner, they remain in the building 
and will be victimized by the collapse, whereas members of centralized 
financial systems have helicopters waiting at the top of their 
buildings which allow them to abscond with the bricks, turn them into 
gold, and deposit them offshore.

While no one wishes to jump off the ledge like the one on which the man 
at the beginning of "What A Way To Go" has perched himself, there is a 
sense in which all of us must either jump or have something far more 
momentous than our physical existence annihilated. The documentary 
quotes Andre Gide:

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

In the final moments of the documentary, Bennett offers an invitation 
to the viewer: "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."

Bennett concludes the documentary by stating that he doesn't know if he 
will survive the collapse but that he is committed to showing up in the 
world and telling his truth. It's almost as if his physical survival is 
much less urgent than that commitment—in which case, I must concur with 
his and Erickson's message: What a way to go!

--------------------------------------------
Keith Thomas
www.evfit.com
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