[Peakoil] Movie: "What a Way to Go - Life at the End of Empire"

[Keith Thomas]

Back in March I posted here advance notice of the movie "What a Way to  
Go - Life at the End of Empire". I have now seen the movie and written  
a review for the Nature and Society Forum website. We have provided  
space there for the comments of other viewers, so if you have comments  
after seeing it, please send them to us and we'll add them to our site:  
http://www.natsoc.org.au/html/movie_what_a_way.htm

Review: Today I watched the newly-released 2-hour movie “What a Way to  
Go”. From a long list of emerging crises, it focuses on human  
population overshoot, climate change, peak oil and mass extinction.

In dealing with these biophysical problems, it addresses the trajectory  
of human culture since the rise of agriculture in the context of our  
human nature, the two factors that have brought us to our present  
situation. And in doing this it asks the questions that repel most  
Americans, questioning and breaking the breaking the culture of  
silence. As such it confronts these systemic problems in a way that  
parallels the approach of Nature and Society Forum.

Derrick Jensen, Daniel Quinn (quotations from both of whom have  
appeared in our journal), William Catton (whose book was reviewed in  
our journal), Richard Heinberg (whose books and movie appearances you  
will have seen), Thomas Berry (at 93), Chellis Glendinning, Richard  
Manning (Against the Grain) and Jerry Mander feature throughout and a  
host of others add their own perspectives to the first comprehensive  
look at the problems occurring now. All these are white Americans, but  
that’s not inappropriate. Derrick Jensen sums up the first half of the  
movie: “Forests precede us and deserts dog our heels”.

Woven in between these scholars and thinkers are the views of ordinary  
people who are beginning to grasp the human place in nature and the  
scope and scale of the problems. Doing this puts us in the movie.

The movie deliberately eschews a “happy chapter ending”, and tells us  
what we must do to make the future liveable and to mitigate the most  
serious possibilities. These measures are simple, and we don’t really  
need this movie to remind us of them. What we do need - constantly - is  
the personal reminder from Dmitry Orlov who asks “Are we going to  
continue destroying the planet, just to be somewhat more comfortable  
for a little while?” That is, the solutions are not waiting on  
scientists to refine technologies they are political in the broad sense  
of the term. Others tell us, starkly, that the situation is unique in  
human history and that there is no one out there looking after us, thus  
faith in ‘technofixes’ is delusional thinking.

The documentary's weaknesses are its heavy use ironic of 1950s popular  
culture images and the loss of rigour you would expect when  
popularizers are interviewed for soundbites. The corny 1950s images can  
divert from us the more subtle and pervasive messages embedded in our  
culture today. The importance of the popularizers' contributions can be  
overlooked if we take the advice at the beginning of the movie: to "let  
it wash over you". These contributions deserve a second or third  
viewing and should lead viewers to read the authors' books where their  
arguments are fleshed out with rigour and coherence. Jerry Mander warns  
us in the movie about the limitations of audio-visual media, but his  
warning is fleeting: only those who have read his first book can  
understand what he is really getting at. But let’s not quibble. The  
movie's scope is impressive - greater than "An Inconvenient Truth" or  
"Crude Awakening" and it's totally celebrity-free. 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.
   
  Two detailed reviews of the movie are here:
   
http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/1072/81/
   
http://www.culturechange.org/cms/index.php? 
option=com_content&task=view&id=112&Itemid=1
   
  The DVD is available here:
   
http://www.whatawaytogomovie.com/purchase-the-dvd/
  Our copy of the DVD cost $US 24.00 and postage cost $US 12.50 coming  
to a total of $US 36.50. This converted to $AU 43.85 early August 2007.
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Keith Thomas
www.evfit.com
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