Film Review- What a Way to Go

Film Review: What a Way to Go- Life at the End of Empire

“If we knew all the facts, we’d have discarded the myth of the techno fix a long time ago. To my eye, our crisis, at its deepest levels, is a crisis not of technology, but of meaning and purpose… “Talking about this is the first step. Without this catastrophe is inevitable.”- Tim Bennett

What a Way to Go is a groundbreaking movie.

I watched this week for the first time with a few friends, most of whom have been watching Peak Oil films and discussing the issues around them for much of the past three years.

Going far beyond “The End of Suburbia” in its dramatic depiction of the state that we and the planet are in, writer and narrator Tim Bennett strives to provide a visceral experience of what it means to be living at a time of collapse:

“The situation is desperate. It’s the world-wide eco-scam where climate crash goes head-to-head with the Peak Oil kid and over-shoot tears into mass-extinction.

It’s the smack-down at the end of the universe and tickets go on sale this Friday.

The American lifestyle is unsustainable- that means it cannot be sustained. It’s coming to an end…

“The dominant culture is not going to stop until it has destroyed everything. It cant. Its built on a foundation of faulty assumptions. I see no way it can be reformed. It can only be discarded so that something else can grow in its place. We have to look at this”.

Bennett invites us on a train ride that takes us through the film and gives us a window-view of the multiple crises we are facing: Peak Oil, Climate Change, Mass Extinction, Population Overshoot, global epidemics, loss of topsoil, war…the list goes on and on and we are given early in the film an intense assault on our senses as images of destruction and impending doom race ever faster before our eyes. Where other films tend to concentrate on the solutions to these problems and what we can do about them Bennett wants us to stay and look at them long enough to begin to feel what it means for us. He confronts us with the dark realities of living in this extraordinary time because everywhere there is a culture of denial. One of the contributors, Derrick Jensen says: : “Denial takes tremendous energy and if you have to work really hard to not acknowledge the fact that this culture is killing everything you’re not going to have much energy left over.”

Bennett himself goes on to say:

“It is the energy that I freed up when I stepped out of my own denial that has made this documentary possible. The more I let down any defences the more I find the power to look more deeply at the world”.

Bennett tells us a personal story of growing up in a loving farming family in middle America- secure, with plenty to eat and a strong community, and he paints an idyllic picture of his childhood on the upward curve of energy production, growth and economic prosperity in America.

But as alarms about climate change from the 80s onwards, and increasing warnings from the environmental movement that humans were dangerously exceeding the carrying capacity of the planet, the bubble of complacency surrounding his easy affluent lifestyle began to break. As Bennett becomes increasingly aware of the train gathering speed towards the abyss, he becomes more and more anxious, but had to deal with his awareness even when around him “nobody else seemed to notice”.

The second part of the film goes more deeply into some of the issues of but also contains an excellent section on the population explosion; it is not just the numbers, but the damage dome especially by the rich world which has many times the footprint per person that the global average.

The US has 70 times as many “energy slaves” as people in Bangladesh- making the US in those terms the population of 23billion…

In between contributions from Richard Heinberg, Derrick Jensen, William Catton, Thomas Berry and others we are shown short clips of people giving their reactions to this information: Is it all just going to end? Will we wipe ourselves out? The emphasis is on our reactions. Not content to just deliver the information on the coming catastrophes Bennett wants us to go deeper, to examine the cultural myths that have kept us asleep as the world burns: advertising, the myths of humans’ ability to control nature, consumerism the “somehow” story that “somehow” everything will be OK, that someone is looking after the situation.

Bennett posits then an alternative story: humanity has spent nearly its entire time living in small sustainable communities. For three million years we lived in a low-impact fashion with stable populations and consumption rates which could have continued, as Daniel Quinn argues, “for tens of millions of years. Now it’s more like how many decades- and if we keep living this way, it’s not many”. Somehow, something changed and we moved into a new lifestyle that began to abandon the careful husbanding of the earth that we had kept so long.

Agriculture began some ten thousand years ago and was inherently unsustainable because of its impact on the environment. It became more widespread however because it allowed the storage of food, insurance against hard times and the expansion of population. So successful was it that it eventually lead to the formation of cities as we became more and more adept at finding and storing the earth’s resources- wind-power, water-power, eventual coal, oil and gas with which we built the modern world.

This chapter on how different cultural beliefs can lead to a different relationship to the environment is a key part of the film and an important way of showing how the stories our culture has deeply embedded within it have shaped our lives and lead to the environmental crises.

Unfortunately however I’m not convinced that the particular story Bennett hits upon- influenced strongly by the views of Jenson and Quinn- is entirely accurate or useful.

It is true that some cultures remained, apparently, more “sustainable” for far longer than others, and that some took to raiding and farming and other practices with a heavier footprint earlier than others, until eventually all the traditional cultures were subsumed or destroyed by what Quinn, in Ishmael refers to as the “Taker” cultures, of which we are one.

An alternative view is that although early nomadic societies remained with a low impact for a long time, they did have a larger footprint than is often assumed. It may have been that over the long haul, they were ultimately unsustainable. A long slow incremental erosion of our resources- including the extinction of many animals through hunting, combined with localised climate change may have spurned us on to look for the potentially easier life of the farmer. This view is explored for example in Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel which set out to explain using environmental differences why ultimately Europe and north America became industrialised first and now dominate the world with their military and economic power.

This is a more strictly “ecological” view that gives precedence to the shaping of culture by environment. In this sense, looking back to early hunters for inspiration may not be the only thing we have to do- in reality, early peoples may not have understood the global economic system, nor the long-term issues of sustainability any better than we do, and which story we believe does make a difference I think in how we understand our predicament and find ways to respond.

The film also considers the psychology of addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder, symptoms of the dominator hierarchy culture that we have come to take for granted.

Jensen again, draws a parallel with an abusive family, where everything is set up to protect the abuser; in the same way, in the culture of domination of the modern world, everything is set up to protect the rich.

While these are useful and enlightening approaches, again, a more strictly ecological approach would give somewhat different emphases, on the inevitability of consuming whatever available energy there was, and consequently, the need to transcend our purely animal behaviour if we are to survive.

It would have been interesting to see how differently the film may have turned out had Bennett taken this somewhat different story as his guide.

Probably, the ending would be the same.

Bennett refuses to end with what he calls a “Happy Chapter” as in “12 Things to do to Save the World”. Taking his cue from Joanna Macey’s “Despair and Empowerment” work, which teaches that in order to find the power and motivation to really tackle the challenges presented to us, we have to go through a period of despair, to really feel the dark reality, to go into that deep dark place that most of our TV culture is striving to repress, Bennett’s film is aimed to confront us with reality, not placate us with facile solutions.

However, unfortunately there was a general sense amongst those I was watching it with that he ends up with a happy chapter after all- a lengthy final chapter in which he lists the kind of actions we could take, from permaculture gardens to getting active on our local council, and all the community-building tasks discussed in Willits or the transition towns movement. It was felt by my companions-in-doom that this took the bite out of what is otherwise an incisive movie, that it would have been better off without the last 20minutes and that overall the film was perhaps too long.

Perhaps this is unfair; we were after all hardened peak oil activists and educators, or at least frequenters of the peak oil blogosphere, and more interested in seeing how the film was constructed than likely to take any new message from it.

I am left wondering, however, who I would show it to? It is a powerful message, fast moving at the beginning, but somehow not quite able to keep up that pace throughout, and left me with a slightly uneasy feeling of, well, what next? Ive been there, that darkness, too much already for it to have much impact, and I would feel, if I were showing it to a group, I would need some tools for group facilitation to actually unpack people’s responses and help process their feelings. I do think, though, that this may be the most important work we have to do.

Despite its failings- which I alluded to as being in my opinion a rather “retro-romantic” view of how humanity left the paradise of the hunter-gatherer society- I welcome this film as one of the best of the “gloom and doom” genre, particularly because I also believe the most important thing we can do right now is stay with the darkness a little while longer, let it sweep over us and then ask ourselves: what does it mean to be alive right now?

I’ll leave you with a final quote from the film by Richard Heinberg:

“As civilisation has done more and more for us, it has made us more and more infantile, so we have become less and less able to think for ourselves, to provide for ourselves, and this gives us more of a herd mentality, taking our cues from authority figures around us…. As all of this starts to shift and change and disintegrate and collapse there is an opportunity to come back to ourselves and to grow up, both individually and as a culture.”