WEBVTT 00:00:26.023 --> 00:00:30.119 The picture you are about to see deals with the problem of self-destruction. 00:00:31.329 --> 00:00:37.427 Its purpose was to enable people to better understand the nature of this strange, tragic act. 00:00:38.035 --> 00:00:42.206 We shall not be able to diminish this great human affliction 00:00:42.206 --> 00:00:47.337 until more people do understand it and appreciate its seriousness. 00:00:50.481 --> 00:00:52.312 Voices in the Dark 00:00:53.651 --> 00:00:57.246 A lot of things about the world these days are very scary. 00:01:07.832 --> 00:01:13.237 My generation may be one of the first generations where a lot of us die... ...not of old age. 00:01:13.237 --> 00:01:15.501 Because a lot of us may not make it there. 00:01:20.411 --> 00:01:26.350 Global warming... it's gonna do this and our climate's gonna go weird and... 00:01:27.351 --> 00:01:30.047 ...like another ice age or something. 00:01:38.196 --> 00:01:41.256 I think the scariest things aren't for me. 00:01:41.666 --> 00:01:48.504 The scariest things are thinking that I might leave a world to my children 00:01:49.307 --> 00:01:56.975 that would be really difficult and painful for them. 00:01:57.915 --> 00:02:00.418 I think we're all fucked. All of us. 00:02:00.418 --> 00:02:04.355 I think most of us in this room are gonna die before we reach... 00:02:04.355 --> 00:02:07.191 I don't believe that we would wipe ourselves out entirely. 00:02:07.191 --> 00:02:10.728 I believe that... I believe that we can probably fall down to... 00:02:10.728 --> 00:02:13.898 There's gotta be a way. There's gotta be a way to live through it... 00:02:13.898 --> 00:02:21.205 Once we're able to look at the world without blinders and see the really horrific mess we're making of it... 00:02:21.205 --> 00:02:25.977 We have got to change our whole idea of the way that the world works... 00:02:25.977 --> 00:02:29.547 I generally just feel like everything is out of balance. 00:02:29.547 --> 00:02:32.516 Nothing that I can do will make any impact on the planet. 00:02:32.516 --> 00:02:37.922 We're living a way that doesn't work. We have to live a way that does work. So it's gonna change. 00:02:37.922 --> 00:02:42.552 You can't change what's happening in Washington. You can't change what's happening over in Iraq. 00:02:57.375 --> 00:02:59.605 "We've met the enemy and he is us. " 00:03:05.549 --> 00:03:11.283 I guess I just tell myself that it's all gonna be OK. You kinda have to to keep going. 00:03:16.394 --> 00:03:19.158 It's not a happy thing to think about. 00:03:36.347 --> 00:03:40.249 There was a time in my life when I was having this recurring daydream. 00:03:43.821 --> 00:03:50.727 I'd be sitting in my car, radio blaring, slowly making my way forward through a fast food drive thru. 00:03:54.932 --> 00:03:59.164 I'd get to the window and they'd hand me my drink and my burger and fries. 00:04:00.271 --> 00:04:05.038 And as i waited for me change. . . off in the distance. . . 00:04:06.477 --> 00:04:10.607 a bright flash... and a rising cloud. 00:04:12.316 --> 00:04:16.116 And as the full force of the nuclear blast washed over me... 00:04:17.053 --> 00:04:21.184 ...as the icy cold of my overturned Coke seeped into my jeans... 00:04:25.730 --> 00:04:27.357 I'd think to myself... 00:04:28.666 --> 00:04:30.497 ... what a way to go. 00:04:37.141 --> 00:04:42.813 Yeah I think that we might wipe ourselves off the Earth. 00:04:42.813 --> 00:04:46.943 Definitely. I feel like that's where we're headed. 00:04:47.551 --> 00:04:50.554 There's an emptiness that other needs... 00:04:50.554 --> 00:04:51.922 the real needs... 00:04:51.922 --> 00:04:54.759 the real desires aren't being met. 00:04:54.759 --> 00:04:57.928 And we're just scrambling with what our culture offers us. 00:04:57.928 --> 00:05:02.433 And our culture tells us... you know our culture tells us we will find love 00:05:02.433 --> 00:05:06.937 if we buy this lipstick and that make-up and these clothes and this car. 00:05:06.937 --> 00:05:09.974 I think it would be OK if we gave the Earth back 00:05:09.974 --> 00:05:14.078 to everybody else why is not as destructive. 00:05:14.078 --> 00:05:16.512 All the rest of the life on Earth. 00:05:25.589 --> 00:05:31.323 I was born in the American Midwest, central Michigan, the "water winter wonderland". 00:05:31.996 --> 00:05:37.195 I was raised in the arms of an extended rural family.: mostly farming folk... 00:05:37.435 --> 00:05:41.462 ...solid, hard working, quiet, giving. 00:05:41.972 --> 00:05:48.275 I was bom into warmth and plenty to eat, a sense of place, and a surety of security. 00:05:49.079 --> 00:05:51.138 And I was born into stories. 00:05:51.449 --> 00:05:54.850 Stories about the value of work and the right way to live. 00:05:54.952 --> 00:06:01.050 Stories about God and country, about community, loyalty, steadfastness, and resolve. 00:06:01.358 --> 00:06:04.987 Stories about the role and place of humans on this planet. 00:06:05.863 --> 00:06:09.890 Stories about our relationship to something we called "nature". 00:06:11.368 --> 00:06:13.427 I was born into stories. 00:06:16.106 --> 00:06:18.131 Nobody told me these stories. 00:06:18.375 --> 00:06:19.706 They didn't have to. 00:06:19.977 --> 00:06:25.847 The stories were the air I breathed, the water in which I swam, the ground upon which I walked. 00:06:26.116 --> 00:06:27.777 They were all around me. 00:06:28.185 --> 00:06:30.210 We didn't even know they were stories. 00:06:30.988 --> 00:06:33.354 We just thought they were the way things are. 00:06:34.325 --> 00:06:36.225 My world was a playground. 00:06:36.327 --> 00:06:41.065 There were fish to catch, boats to row, parades to watch, trails to hike, 00:06:41.065 --> 00:06:49.473 lakes to swim, snowmobiles to rlde, games to play, presents to open, and family to share it all with. 00:06:50.674 --> 00:06:53.444 The days would end with sunsets and fireworks 00:06:53.444 --> 00:06:56.880 and sometimes I would dance until I collapsed with joy. 00:06:58.649 --> 00:07:02.486 It was a magical land... cherry Popsicles and warm milk, 00:07:02.486 --> 00:07:06.855 birthday cakes and store-bought costumes and brand-new chairs under the tree. 00:07:07.191 --> 00:07:10.361 A land of giant geese, well-dressed poodles, 00:07:10.361 --> 00:07:13.819 talented birds and even more talented people. 00:07:15.065 --> 00:07:19.703 The Earth was our merry-go-round, our monkey bars, our swing set. 00:07:19.703 --> 00:07:23.833 As long as we didn't look down, everything would be just fine. 00:07:27.945 --> 00:07:31.039 I was born halfway up the population explosion. 00:07:31.482 --> 00:07:34.474 I was born on the slope of rising CO2 levels. 00:07:34.852 --> 00:07:37.878 I was born in the foothills of a mass extinction. 00:07:38.322 --> 00:07:41.416 I was born on the rocky rise of oil production. 00:07:42.059 --> 00:07:48.032 I was bom facing forward, looking ever upward, my first step a step upslope, 00:07:48.032 --> 00:07:52.937 a step into progress, a step into a vast and glorious human future. 00:07:52.937 --> 00:07:56.574 We were moving on up. There was no looking back. 00:07:56.574 --> 00:08:00.277 There was a mountain to conquer, and conquer it we would. 00:08:00.277 --> 00:08:03.110 All we had to do was climb a bit further. 00:08:03.180 --> 00:08:06.750 But the mountain we were climbing was not what we thought it was. 00:08:06.750 --> 00:08:13.679 Rather than rising from natural forces, the slopes up which we were headed were the results of imbalance and shortsightedness. 00:08:13.958 --> 00:08:18.729 In our efforts to progress, to succeed, to improve, to strive, to overcome, 00:08:18.729 --> 00:08:21.799 to manage, to shape, to solve, and to grow, 00:08:21.799 --> 00:08:24.927 we wielded huge new forces across the globe. 00:08:25.402 --> 00:08:30.362 We walked as giants upon the Earth,: unaware of the footprints we left behind. 00:08:32.842 --> 00:08:38.682 I have walked that path, unaware of my own big feet, enacting the stories of our culture, 00:08:38.682 --> 00:08:43.176 not stopping long enough to feel the instability of the slope underfoot. 00:08:45.089 --> 00:08:51.153 But in the late 80s, news of the ozone hole and global warming first hit me, and the ground began to shake. 00:08:52.930 --> 00:08:56.233 I stopped and looked around me for the first time. 00:08:56.233 --> 00:08:59.031 I got scared. I got involved. 00:08:59.703 --> 00:09:04.163 And then the shaking subsided. Or rather, I just got used to it. 00:09:05.209 --> 00:09:11.248 Life got more complex with the births of my three children. And there was climbing still to do. 00:09:11.248 --> 00:09:13.113 So I continued to climb. 00:09:14.351 --> 00:09:16.587 But the tremors were still there, underfoot. 00:09:16.587 --> 00:09:21.091 At night I slept, but fitfully, clenched with worries, 00:09:21.091 --> 00:09:24.686 my dreams assaulted by vague rumblings from the future. 00:09:25.462 --> 00:09:31.402 In my dreams, I would stand at the pinnacle of the present, and look out over the surrounding terrain. 00:09:31.402 --> 00:09:34.860 And it didn't look like I had thought it would. . . 00:09:48.285 --> 00:09:51.345 A faint howling in the distance pierces the night 00:09:51.922 --> 00:09:56.586 The monsters we have created Lumbering to rampant life 00:09:57.094 --> 00:10:00.495 Are heading even now toward our village 00:10:02.700 --> 00:10:05.168 Nuclear weapons biding their time 00:10:05.569 --> 00:10:08.265 Itching with purposes unfulfilled 00:10:09.740 --> 00:10:12.732 As hopeful fingers tremble near buttons 00:10:15.045 --> 00:10:17.240 Bunker Busters and Tactical nukes 00:10:19.450 --> 00:10:21.850 Suitcase bombs and terrorist acts 00:10:23.654 --> 00:10:26.248 Power plant accidents and leaking wastes 00:10:28.358 --> 00:10:32.294 Plutonium launched into space In rockets known to explode 00:10:35.365 --> 00:10:40.325 And depleted uranium poisoning the battlefield Depopulating the land 00:10:47.077 --> 00:10:50.342 Chemical warheads And biological black magicks 00:10:51.181 --> 00:10:54.275 Sarin and Soman and VX and phosgene 00:10:55.586 --> 00:10:58.054 Anthrax and smallpox and plague 00:10:58.555 --> 00:11:03.515 Enough to take out entire cities Enough to cover the planet 00:11:04.495 --> 00:11:08.864 And they don't care who lets them out As long as they get to play 00:11:09.800 --> 00:11:12.564 Others nasties lurch toward us on their own 00:11:13.003 --> 00:11:16.495 Old friends, new creations and recent escapees 00:11:17.608 --> 00:11:20.577 Ebola, Marburg, Lassa and SARS 00:11:20.577 --> 00:11:23.876 Swine Flu, Bird Flu, HIV and AIDS 00:11:25.215 --> 00:11:29.515 The rebound of tuberculosis, Cholera, malaria, and typhus 00:11:30.687 --> 00:11:35.249 Prions and mad cows Scrapie sheep and chronic wasting disease 00:11:35.793 --> 00:11:41.595 Cancers that eat away our lungs our brains Our breasts our testlcles and our ovaries 00:11:44.601 --> 00:11:47.126 And new monsters peer over the horizon 00:11:48.705 --> 00:11:52.971 Good intentions spliced to Blind arrogance and numbing greed 00:11:55.445 --> 00:11:58.175 Frankenfoods and Terminator seeds 00:11:58.849 --> 00:12:02.012 Herbicide tolerant and pesticide laced crops 00:12:03.520 --> 00:12:08.184 Patented Life Barely tested, quietly ticking. . . 00:12:08.692 --> 00:12:10.592 Let loose upon the land 00:12:11.261 --> 00:12:14.355 As if their creators, having looked at the world, 00:12:14.798 --> 00:12:17.733 Managed to learn nothing at all 00:12:20.137 --> 00:12:22.372 The monsters howls grow frenzied 00:12:22.372 --> 00:12:28.208 Chemicals in our land our sky our rain Our rivers our food our bodies our babies 00:12:28.946 --> 00:12:33.576 Rising male infertility rates and Superfund sites and ozone depletion 00:12:35.619 --> 00:12:38.383 Rivers dammed and salmon doomed 00:12:38.889 --> 00:12:41.517 Topsoil loss and fertilizer run-off 00:12:42.359 --> 00:12:45.817 Huge oceanic dead zones And depleted fisheries 00:12:46.396 --> 00:12:51.026 And the ghosts of silent whales Scraping over the corpses of coral reefs 00:12:55.239 --> 00:12:59.039 The monsters advance And forests collapse under their feet 00:13:00.777 --> 00:13:06.044 Leaving indigenous cultures battered, Homeless, soul-sick, or dead 00:13:06.717 --> 00:13:11.221 Disrupting water and oxygen cycles And turning soil into deserts 00:13:11.221 --> 00:13:16.853 As tigers and salmon and tree frogs and falcons Stumble down the path toward extinction 00:13:17.527 --> 00:13:20.664 Their heartrending voices Lost in the chatter of chainsaws 00:13:20.664 --> 00:13:23.394 And the coughing insults of bulldozers 00:13:26.670 --> 00:13:29.298 And all the while the climate is changing. . . 00:13:30.741 --> 00:13:35.412 Angry summers, insistent floods, Belligerent blizzards 00:13:35.412 --> 00:13:38.973 Grudging droughts and pissed-off hurricanes 00:13:39.349 --> 00:13:44.988 with poles warming and ice shelves calving Permafrost slumping and glaciers receding 00:13:44.988 --> 00:13:47.821 Sea levels rising and big cities sinking 00:13:48.325 --> 00:13:53.897 As ocean currents halt and superstorms gust, Deserts expand and rabbits run 00:13:53.897 --> 00:13:59.267 And locusts horde and army ants march And mosquitoes hunt and rodents overrun 00:14:00.971 --> 00:14:03.769 The balance undone 00:14:05.142 --> 00:14:10.580 Leaving crops destroyed and diseases vectored And famine and rioting and looting and war 00:14:10.580 --> 00:14:15.108 The ocean turns acld and corals And shellfish and planktons dissolve 00:14:15.419 --> 00:14:19.456 The disruption of food chains, The collapsing of ecosystems 00:14:19.456 --> 00:14:21.947 Tonight on the Weather Channel 00:14:24.828 --> 00:14:28.389 (commentator blathering) 00:14:28.832 --> 00:14:30.467 Watch it now, while you can 00:14:30.467 --> 00:14:33.903 Because oil is peaking, with no clear replacements 00:14:35.005 --> 00:14:37.741 Production will falter As demand keeps increasing 00:14:37.741 --> 00:14:42.838 And the price, which is rising now, will just keep on rising 00:14:45.515 --> 00:14:50.487 Imagine the impact to the global economy To the truckers and farmers 00:14:50.487 --> 00:14:52.387 To your neighbors 00:14:52.990 --> 00:14:54.423 Yourself 00:14:55.192 --> 00:14:59.196 Watch the bidding war rage From trade floors to battlefields 00:14:59.196 --> 00:15:02.859 Watch the Pentagon plan and the patriots act 00:15:03.834 --> 00:15:07.099 Go look out the window Do you feel a draft? 00:15:08.071 --> 00:15:14.169 World population is fueled by the input of oil We could reach 7 billion by 2013 00:15:14.711 --> 00:15:18.704 That's billions of bodies more Than the planet can sustain without oll 00:15:21.051 --> 00:15:26.490 We're consuming the planet and Poisoning the soil and the air and The water that we all need to live 00:15:26.490 --> 00:15:29.357 We're driving a high-speed train To the end of life 00:15:29.659 --> 00:15:31.795 And we're taking the rest of the planet 00:15:31.795 --> 00:15:34.531 Trillions upon trillions of living souls 00:15:34.531 --> 00:15:36.624 Along with us 00:15:39.636 --> 00:15:41.194 And all of this 00:15:42.272 --> 00:15:43.739 All of this 00:15:44.908 --> 00:15:46.375 All of this 00:15:47.878 --> 00:15:49.470 All of this 00:15:50.647 --> 00:15:55.452 is wrapped tightly inside a culture of denials and lies and absurdities so complex 00:15:55.452 --> 00:15:56.520 And so powerful 00:15:56.520 --> 00:15:58.886 That we can barely see through the smog 00:15:59.389 --> 00:16:02.325 The monsters are screeching At the village's edge 00:16:02.325 --> 00:16:06.056 So huge and so horrible That we cannot bear to look at them 00:16:06.396 --> 00:16:07.226 And we, 00:16:07.964 --> 00:16:11.301 Bound in a cultural straightjacket Of our own making, 00:16:11.301 --> 00:16:13.804 Slumber on as they draw near 00:16:13.804 --> 00:16:18.208 Working jobs we hate Consuming products that do not fulfill 00:16:18.208 --> 00:16:24.169 Distracting ourselves as best we can with Television drugs food sex and entertainments 00:16:24.748 --> 00:16:27.808 Hoping our leaders will find some answers 00:16:28.452 --> 00:16:32.556 Awakening, finally, In the still hours of early morning 00:16:32.556 --> 00:16:36.959 To the shapeless realization That they will not 00:16:40.897 --> 00:16:47.962 (alarm clock begins to beep and grows louder...) 00:16:48.472 --> 00:16:49.905 (click off) 00:16:51.608 --> 00:16:55.635 Ah. . . what a nightmare. . . 00:16:57.981 --> 00:17:02.786 Well, Johnny, you are in a pretty serious situation. 00:17:02.786 --> 00:17:10.318 But we believe - your mother and Mr. Benton and I - that you can make good without being sent away. 00:17:15.866 --> 00:17:22.294 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. 00:17:23.205 --> 00:17:28.178 It seemed built into the situation, a certainty of population dynamics, 00:17:28.178 --> 00:17:31.773 the inevitable end to Mr. Malthus' musings. 00:17:32.983 --> 00:17:35.051 At some point we would near the sun, 00:17:35.051 --> 00:17:38.851 our wings would fail, and we would plummet back to the earth. 00:17:38.989 --> 00:17:39.683 "Fuck!" 00:17:40.190 --> 00:17:42.959 New voices spoke of possible futures. 00:17:42.959 --> 00:17:44.794 "Hey can i have some of those purple berries?" 00:17:44.794 --> 00:17:47.597 Crosby, Stills and Nash sailed the Wooden Ships. 00:17:47.597 --> 00:17:49.166 "Shit, not again!" 00:17:49.166 --> 00:17:51.930 Riddley Walker wrote his connexions. 00:17:52.802 --> 00:17:58.175 And Charlton Heston ate Soylent Green with The Omega Man on the Planet of the Apes. 00:17:58.175 --> 00:18:00.405 "You maniacs!" 00:18:01.711 --> 00:18:08.947 The world looked insane to me but nobody else seemed to notice so I buried my thoughts and muddled on. 00:18:09.819 --> 00:18:12.722 Deep inside, this was tearing me to pieces. 00:18:12.722 --> 00:18:19.252 I remember looking in at night on my sleeping children, and feeling a deep and gnawing terror for their futures. 00:18:20.397 --> 00:18:26.302 But I locked my fears tightly in my heart, hit the snooze button, and slept a while longer. 00:18:26.836 --> 00:18:31.841 And then I came across Daniel Quinn and Derrick Jensen, two writers who helped me, 00:18:31.841 --> 00:18:35.312 with books such as Ishmael and The Culture of Make Believe, 00:18:35.312 --> 00:18:42.185 to recognize the stories of our culture, the beliefs and assumptions and fables that have shaped our lives, 00:18:42.185 --> 00:18:48.124 the fairy-tales we have told ourselves, the madness we have made manifest in the world. 00:18:49.092 --> 00:18:54.764 Quinn speaks of the Nazi regime, of Adolph Hitler and the story he told the German people.: 00:18:54.764 --> 00:19:00.670 a story about the lost destiny of the Aryan race, a story of oppression and defilement, 00:19:00.670 --> 00:19:04.407 a story of victory and vengeance and greatness regained. 00:19:04.407 --> 00:19:08.678 And Quinn explained how the entire nation, oppressors and oppressed alike, 00:19:08.678 --> 00:19:14.514 Jews and Good Germans and Gypsies and Gays, were all held captive by that story. 00:19:15.485 --> 00:19:21.224 We who live today inside the dominant global culture are similarly captives of stories.: 00:19:21.224 --> 00:19:24.227 stories that surround us like the air we breathe,: 00:19:24.227 --> 00:19:27.097 stories that we enact at our own peril,: 00:19:27.097 --> 00:19:30.362 stories that threaten the community of life itself. 00:19:31.534 --> 00:19:38.497 Have you heard the one about humans being separate from "nature", different, special, the pinnacle of creation? 00:19:39.709 --> 00:19:44.373 Or about humans being innately flawed - violent, selfish and greedy? 00:19:45.482 --> 00:19:52.122 How about the one that says that the world was made for human beings, to manage, control, and exploit as a resource, 00:19:52.122 --> 00:19:56.252 and that the world has no value beyond its utility? 00:19:57.193 --> 00:20:03.496 Or the story about there being only one right way to live, and one right way to understand and view the world? 00:20:04.367 --> 00:20:09.896 Or about how unlimited growth, competition, and production are all unquestionably good? 00:20:10.373 --> 00:20:13.043 Or the story that tells us that we can have and do 00:20:13.043 --> 00:20:16.877 anything we think we want, because there are no limits? 00:20:18.615 --> 00:20:22.385 There were people in the world looking squarely at our cultural stories, 00:20:22.385 --> 00:20:23.887 and at the global predicament, 00:20:23.887 --> 00:20:25.722 and seeing what I saw.: 00:20:25.722 --> 00:20:30.682 our culture, in its present configuration, could not last. 00:20:31.328 --> 00:20:33.228 I was not alone. 00:20:33.530 --> 00:20:38.297 But the transformation, or the collapse, still seemed far away. 00:20:38.568 --> 00:20:41.799 It would come one day. But not now. 00:20:42.238 --> 00:20:45.537 There was time. There was hope. 00:20:46.276 --> 00:20:49.712 Somewhere, there were people taking care of it all. 00:20:50.447 --> 00:20:53.983 And that's how it was for me, year after year. 00:20:53.983 --> 00:20:56.586 I lived the middle class American life. 00:20:56.586 --> 00:21:04.686 I lived the stories I had learned as a child and tried as best I could to ignore the rumblings of fear that haunted my depths. 00:21:06.196 --> 00:21:09.632 And then I started to work on this documentary. . . 00:21:10.433 --> 00:21:18.274 Three years later, having chewed our way through a mountain of books, articles, websites, magazines, newspapers, and documentaries, 00:21:18.274 --> 00:21:21.911 having attended lectures and meetings and salons and rallies, 00:21:21.911 --> 00:21:29.340 and having interviews with friends and neighbors, scientists and researchers and writers and activity and thinkers and feelers and more, 00:21:29.753 --> 00:21:36.559 and having talked and written and laughed and cried and worried and despaired and regained our power to plunge ahead again, 00:21:36.559 --> 00:21:38.117 one thing seems clear.: 00:21:38.728 --> 00:21:43.733 the global environmental, political and economic predicament we live in today is critical, 00:21:43.733 --> 00:21:47.404 the possible scenarios range into the highly disturbing, 00:21:47.404 --> 00:21:52.068 and the timeframe seems. . . well. . . imminent. 00:21:52.242 --> 00:21:55.879 It's as though we've awakened to find ourselves on a runaway train, 00:21:55.879 --> 00:22:00.884 hurtling wildly down the tracks, held in place by powerful cultural stories 00:22:00.884 --> 00:22:07.255 and fueled by our desperate consumption of the very heart, blood, bones and flesh of this planet. 00:22:07.824 --> 00:22:10.894 If we don't find some way to stop this train soon, 00:22:10.894 --> 00:22:13.260 we're going to reach the end of the line. 00:22:30.814 --> 00:22:35.485 So what do you see when you wake up on the train? I can tell you what I saw. 00:22:35.485 --> 00:22:43.358 I saw the ground beneath the pavement, the man behind the curtain, the monster under the bed, the real below the rails. 00:22:44.694 --> 00:22:51.701 The culture of Empire works every moment of every day to distract my attention, like a magician using sleight-of-hand. 00:22:51.701 --> 00:22:55.637 What happens when I look where the conjurer does not want me to look? 00:22:56.172 --> 00:22:57.662 I see the trick. 00:22:58.708 --> 00:23:01.575 I see the reality behind the illusion. 00:23:03.346 --> 00:23:08.306 I see, if I look long enough, that the Empire has no clothes. 00:23:11.120 --> 00:23:12.622 Ride with me a while. 00:23:12.622 --> 00:23:17.627 Look more closely at the train, and the tracks, and the terrain through which we're speeding. 00:23:17.627 --> 00:23:23.691 If we are to respond effectively, we'll need a clear understanding of the whole of the situation. 00:23:24.634 --> 00:23:27.937 For me, four aspects of our predicament stand out.: 00:23:27.937 --> 00:23:33.109 Peak oil, climate change, mass extinction and population overshoot. 00:23:33.109 --> 00:23:37.714 In the fall of 2005, Sally Erickson and I circled the country by train, 00:23:37.714 --> 00:23:41.673 meeting with people to talk about these issues, and many others. 00:23:42.886 --> 00:23:47.757 At some point you reach the place 00:23:47.757 --> 00:23:50.783 where you can't get it out any faster. 00:23:52.195 --> 00:23:56.733 So, when you get to that point you've reached the peak. Then we start downhill. 00:23:56.733 --> 00:24:02.228 And once we start downhill that's when economic collapse will occur. 00:24:03.072 --> 00:24:07.877 That's my friend Tom, talking about oll. Peak Oil. And Economic Collapse. 00:24:07.877 --> 00:24:15.409 At first I didn't get it. So I started reading. And on our trip I met with some people who knew more about the situation. 00:24:15.919 --> 00:24:20.924 Over the last 150 years we've created a society that runs on oil. 00:24:20.924 --> 00:24:23.626 And it's inevitable that we would have done so, 00:24:23.626 --> 00:24:26.896 because it's just such incredible inexpensive, 00:24:26.896 --> 00:24:29.228 convenient, energy-dense stuff. 00:24:29.532 --> 00:24:37.098 I spoke with Richard Heinberg, a core faculty member of New College of Callfornla and author of three books on Peak Oil. 00:24:37.574 --> 00:24:46.583 The problem, of course, is that oil is a non-renewable resource. So even when we first started using the stuff we knew that eventually we'd run out. 00:24:46.583 --> 00:24:51.543 I met with the journalist Paul Roberts, who wrote a book about oil depletion in 2004. 00:24:52.522 --> 00:24:54.891 At some point, since oil is a finite resource, 00:24:54.891 --> 00:24:57.594 you can't keep raising production. 00:24:57.594 --> 00:24:59.162 Usually this is about the halfway point. 00:24:59.162 --> 00:25:01.297 When you've depleted half of the resource 00:25:01.297 --> 00:25:03.967 it becomes harder and harder to raise production. Doesn't mean you run out. 00:25:03.967 --> 00:25:06.369 And a great deal of oil is still coming out of the ground. 00:25:06.369 --> 00:25:11.374 If we were to peak tomorrow we'd still have eighty-two and a half million barrels coming out of the ground every day. 00:25:11.374 --> 00:25:14.537 But it would be really hard to get eighty-three and a half million barrels. 00:25:14.978 --> 00:25:25.288 Gerald Cecil, a professor of Astrophysics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been so taken by the oil situation that he's now writing a book about it. 00:25:25.288 --> 00:25:29.258 The rate with which oil has been coming out of the ground has stagnated. 00:25:29.258 --> 00:25:33.062 It's stagnated at eighty four million barrels of oil a day, 00:25:33.062 --> 00:25:39.535 which sounds like an incredible number. But that's what we use to power ourselves at today's rate of use. 00:25:39.535 --> 00:25:46.843 And as the world population continues to grow, and as prosperity presumably continues to grow and people power up in their energy use, 00:25:46.843 --> 00:25:51.514 we get to a situation where there isn't any excess capacity to keep that powering going. 00:25:51.514 --> 00:25:58.187 And at some point you end up with a flat supply and a growing demand and you have serious problems. 00:25:58.187 --> 00:26:00.314 And that's the nature of peak oil. 00:26:01.858 --> 00:26:06.818 Are we at or near the peak of oil extraction? There are many signs that we are. 00:26:07.997 --> 00:26:13.002 Discoveries of new oil peaked right around 1963, '64. 00:26:13.002 --> 00:26:15.004 That was a long time ago. 00:26:15.004 --> 00:26:19.275 So we're not talking about a couple years of bad luck in exploration. 00:26:19.275 --> 00:26:21.077 This is a long-established trend. 00:26:21.077 --> 00:26:30.850 We've been discovering less oil with every passing year, to the point now where we're extracting and using about four or five barrels of oil for everyone that we discover. 00:26:31.154 --> 00:26:39.357 Now the oil industry responded in a number of ways. But one of the things it did was begin developing some amazing new technologies to help it find more oil faster. 00:26:39.729 --> 00:26:46.157 And despite this huge investment in technology, and these great leaps forward, the rates of discovery are still declining. 00:26:46.569 --> 00:26:51.441 Country after country is reaching its own national all-time oil production peak 00:26:51.441 --> 00:26:52.942 and going into decline. 00:26:52.942 --> 00:27:01.250 The US was one of the first to do it back in 1970. And now something like 30 or 33 countries are past their peak. 00:27:01.250 --> 00:27:07.623 And so it's inevitable that within the very next few years we'll see the global peak in oil production. 00:27:07.623 --> 00:27:09.181 Nobody's ready for that. 00:27:10.059 --> 00:27:14.723 Not ready for what, exactly? What will the end of cheap oil mean for the world? 00:27:14.997 --> 00:27:17.625 I went to speak with the writer and activist Jerry Mander. 00:27:17.967 --> 00:27:24.463 I'd let myself believe that the real problems were decades away. Turns out they're probably right around the corner. 00:27:25.308 --> 00:27:27.503 All the structures that now exist - 00:27:28.211 --> 00:27:30.702 our urban formations, 00:27:31.547 --> 00:27:34.539 our transportation systems, 00:27:35.451 --> 00:27:37.282 our means of getting food, 00:27:37.954 --> 00:27:40.787 globalization as an economic model, 00:27:42.125 --> 00:27:44.116 capitalism as an economic model, 00:27:44.360 --> 00:27:48.820 which depends on constant expansion and growth and ever-more resources - 00:27:49.332 --> 00:27:53.302 cannot possibly continue to exist. 00:27:53.302 --> 00:28:02.335 Because they're all based on - the root base of all of it - is the existence of cheap energy. 00:28:02.779 --> 00:28:08.718 In order to avoid a deflationary depression we have to have continual growth in the money supply, 00:28:08.718 --> 00:28:13.723 which has to be based on continual growth in economic activity, 00:28:13.723 --> 00:28:19.662 which must be based on the continual growth in available energy and raw materials. 00:28:19.662 --> 00:28:27.034 We've built an economy based on the idea that It has to grow every year or else collapse. 00:28:27.570 --> 00:28:30.273 So, soon, the economy won't be able to grow. 00:28:30.273 --> 00:28:37.304 And all signs are that we may be facing a kind of global economic collapse because of peak oil. 00:28:38.548 --> 00:28:44.316 It seems that, if our economy is poised for meltdown, our agricultural system is doubly so. 00:28:44.787 --> 00:28:52.717 I spoke with local sustainable designer Harvey Harman and with writer Richard Manning about what he calls "the oil we eat". 00:28:52.962 --> 00:28:58.491 The average piece of food in your supermarket has traveled 3,000 miles or more to get there. 00:28:59.202 --> 00:29:04.140 So not only is it based on petroleum to grow it, 00:29:04.140 --> 00:29:07.076 but then it's transported, and refrigerated. 00:29:07.076 --> 00:29:08.744 And, you know, it's a system 00:29:08.744 --> 00:29:15.484 that's very dependent on cheap energy, and it's very energy-intensive. 00:29:15.484 --> 00:29:21.858 If we take a look at about 1940, and an American farmer, that farmer was using roughly 00:29:21.858 --> 00:29:27.125 a calorie of fossil fuel to make a calorie of food. 00:29:27.663 --> 00:29:29.899 Today that same farmer 00:29:29.899 --> 00:29:35.201 uses something like 10 calories of fossil fuel to make a calorie of food. 00:29:36.239 --> 00:29:42.645 That means that petrochemicals, fossil fuel, have become embedded in our food supply. 00:29:42.645 --> 00:29:48.811 if we run out of fossil fuel that strategy will collapse in a heartbeat. 00:29:49.518 --> 00:29:54.323 Sadly, with so much at stake, oil grows increasingly worth fighting for. 00:29:54.323 --> 00:29:56.587 My friend Ray said it best. 00:29:57.026 --> 00:29:59.262 Prices will naturally begin to rise 00:29:59.262 --> 00:30:01.364 and people will probably fight over it more. 00:30:01.364 --> 00:30:07.603 And the US will, almost certainly, with whatever means are necessary, make sure that we get everything we need. 00:30:07.603 --> 00:30:11.664 And so that will probably make for an unhappy rest of the planet. 00:30:13.109 --> 00:30:15.711 It's a permanent state of affairs. You know? 00:30:15.711 --> 00:30:19.977 The fuel crisis will be over in a couple of hundred million years. 00:30:20.316 --> 00:30:30.459 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. 00:30:30.459 --> 00:30:32.528 (laughs) 00:30:32.528 --> 00:30:34.257 It takes a long time. 00:30:36.265 --> 00:30:40.436 Peak oil got my attention. The ramifications are enormous. 00:30:40.436 --> 00:30:45.805 And if the oil situation is bleak, some say that the natural gas situation is even worse. 00:30:46.142 --> 00:30:48.633 As writer and professor Otis Graham said.: 00:30:48.944 --> 00:30:50.645 We've had three or four hundred years of 00:30:50.645 --> 00:30:53.082 fossil fuel - it's coming to an end. 00:30:53.082 --> 00:30:54.850 is that an historic turning point? 00:30:54.850 --> 00:30:56.317 it's breathtaking! 00:30:57.920 --> 00:31:01.657 Even more breathtaking is what happens when we burn the stuff. 00:31:01.657 --> 00:31:07.595 Scientists used to talk about climate change in terms of centuries. Now they're talking about decades. 00:31:07.595 --> 00:31:12.969 Now they're talking about next year. Now they're talking about now. 00:31:12.969 --> 00:31:16.005 My friends and neighbors are talking about it too. 00:31:16.005 --> 00:31:19.308 We've increased the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. 00:31:19.308 --> 00:31:24.880 Which traps heat in the earth's atmosphere. Which raises the temperature. 00:31:24.880 --> 00:31:27.750 The glaciers are melting. The sea ice is melting. 00:31:27.750 --> 00:31:30.453 The polar ice caps are basically melting. 00:31:30.453 --> 00:31:36.692 And I hate it. I hate feeling like we've done this to nature. 00:31:36.692 --> 00:31:41.697 Not to mention all of the animals, all of the wildlife, that are going to die. 00:31:41.697 --> 00:31:44.166 it'll begin to happen. it's already beginning to happen. 00:31:44.166 --> 00:31:47.236 it's happening everywhere. You know. it's happening! 00:31:47.236 --> 00:31:48.497 it's terrifying. 00:31:49.071 --> 00:31:50.868 it's a drag. 00:31:51.640 --> 00:31:53.475 That's putting it mildly. 00:31:53.475 --> 00:32:00.814 The only good thing I can think to say about climate change is that when I understood the climate situation, I spent less time worrying about oil. 00:32:01.617 --> 00:32:03.986 some people have said, and I think they're right about this, 00:32:03.986 --> 00:32:08.189 we're gonna run out of air to burn before we run out of fossil fuels to burn. 00:32:08.189 --> 00:32:13.595 in other words, the fossil fuels are creating the global warming problem, 00:32:13.595 --> 00:32:16.298 the CO2, and the pollution problems. 00:32:16.298 --> 00:32:20.301 And, if we keep using those, it's not really a matter of when we run out of fossil fuels. 00:32:20.301 --> 00:32:28.004 It's when we befoul the atmosphere so much, and create so much global warming, it's irrelevant how much gas we've got left. 00:32:28.744 --> 00:32:32.373 There. See what I mean? You feel better already, don't you? 00:32:33.382 --> 00:32:38.342 So, whom else could I speak with about the climate? Turns out I didn't have to go very far. 00:32:38.654 --> 00:32:45.628 William Schlesinger, Dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences at Duke University had this to say. 00:32:45.628 --> 00:32:49.632 We have raised, globally in our atmosphere, 00:32:49.632 --> 00:32:51.967 the concentration of carbon dioxide 00:32:51.967 --> 00:33:00.242 from about 280 parts-per-million in the late 1800's to close to 380 parts-per-million today. 00:33:00.242 --> 00:33:08.317 That's roughly a 30% increase. And the projection is that it will be 550, 560, in the year 2050. 00:33:08.317 --> 00:33:14.323 Schlesinger's colleague at Duke, Professor of Conservation Ecology Stuart Pimm, added this.: 00:33:14.323 --> 00:33:17.293 There is now a strong scientific consensus that 00:33:17.293 --> 00:33:19.728 that has caused warming over the last 00:33:19.728 --> 00:33:26.224 several decades, maybe centuries, and there's a strong expectation that it will continue to do so. 00:33:26.569 --> 00:33:33.642 So. . .greenhouse gases on the rise. Temperature on the rise. More floods. More droughts. Rising sea level. 00:33:33.642 --> 00:33:38.647 It's been in the news for some time now. How does this impact the community of life? 00:33:38.647 --> 00:33:48.557 Birds are arriving earlier in the springtime. Plants are flowering earlier. Species' ranges are moving northward. 00:33:48.557 --> 00:33:55.831 We are seeing an extraordinary, strong signal, biological signal, 00:33:55.831 --> 00:33:58.267 of what global warming is doing for us. 00:33:58.267 --> 00:34:02.238 Crops and trees will grow in places they don't grow today. 00:34:02.238 --> 00:34:06.075 We have a lot of suspicion that they may not grow as well. 00:34:06.075 --> 00:34:14.915 And we're beginning to see extinctions of species that have literally no place else to go as the climate gets warmer. 00:34:15.284 --> 00:34:18.420 There's one impact I found particularly sobering. 00:34:18.420 --> 00:34:22.690 The carbon in the atmosphere. The carbon in the atmosphere goes into the ocean, 00:34:22.690 --> 00:34:25.460 it gets absorbed in the ocean as, I want to say, carbonic acid. . . 00:34:25.460 --> 00:34:27.263 Changes in the atmosphere, for example, 00:34:27.263 --> 00:34:30.299 of carbon dioxide can be buffered by absorption 00:34:30.299 --> 00:34:32.434 of the carbon dioxide into the oceans. 00:34:32.434 --> 00:34:40.476 That as you do that, you do change the acidity of the oceans. And we are finding that there's a measurable change in the acidity of the oceans. 00:34:40.476 --> 00:34:48.645 And that is making it harder for the plankton to form their shells. And if there's a plankton die- off. . . that's the bottom of the food chain. 00:34:49.784 --> 00:34:56.525 Plankton, as well as corals, are threatened not only by rising acidity, but by rising temperatures. 00:34:56.525 --> 00:35:00.963 Phytoplankton levels have declined by as much as a third in some northern oceans. 00:35:00.963 --> 00:35:06.569 And this has resulted in significant impacts to fish and krill and bird populations. 00:35:06.569 --> 00:35:11.574 But the reported dangers go far beyond a breaking of food chains, which is bad enough. 00:35:11.574 --> 00:35:16.011 Phytoplanktons produce half of the oxygen we breathe. Half. 00:35:16.979 --> 00:35:19.072 And they are a major carbon sink. 00:35:19.481 --> 00:35:25.181 When plankton dies, more carbon remains in the air. Which means more warming. 00:35:26.522 --> 00:35:31.160 On top of this, new evidence shows that climate can shift very rapidly. 00:35:31.160 --> 00:35:37.827 Slow changes can build. . . to a tipping point. . .and the system can then shift abruptly to a new state. 00:35:38.634 --> 00:35:47.576 this is happening in the oceans, where a global current known as the grand conveyor belt is now being impacted, with possibly disastrous results. 00:35:47.576 --> 00:35:56.118 As Douglas Crawford-Brown, Director of the Carolina Environmental Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill told me.: 00:35:56.118 --> 00:36:01.690 The amount of carbon dioxide that we're putting out into the atmosphere is rising to a point now 00:36:01.690 --> 00:36:06.462 where most scientists would agree that we may be at a sort of tipping point. 00:36:06.462 --> 00:36:13.302 We may be at a point where we're going to start to get so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that feedback mechanisms 00:36:13.302 --> 00:36:18.307 that control the temperature of the earth will start to be stretched a little bit too far. 00:36:18.307 --> 00:36:25.447 The classic one is you get too much melting of ice, it flows into the ocean, and you shut off the conveyor belt. 00:36:25.447 --> 00:36:30.219 And if that happens, this will cause dramatic changes in the climate in England. 00:36:30.219 --> 00:36:37.426 I mean, England would literally become Norway or Sweden, if you look at them on the globe, if the conveyor belt were to be slowed down. 00:36:37.426 --> 00:36:40.327 And we're starting to see changes of those magnitudes. 00:36:41.163 --> 00:36:45.200 this is why I tend to use the term climate change, rather than global warming. 00:36:45.200 --> 00:36:54.131 A warming planet can have heating and drought in some areas, and freezing in others, such as Europe and North America would experience if the Gulf Steam shut down. 00:36:54.777 --> 00:36:56.938 The impact of that would be huge. 00:36:57.379 --> 00:37:05.788 those portions, much of which supply the agricultural bounty for Europe and the US, 00:37:05.788 --> 00:37:10.748 would have dramatic changes in climate, particularly affecting agriculture. 00:37:11.894 --> 00:37:18.561 There are a number of self-reinforcing feedback loops now in operation. Here are two such processes. 00:37:19.168 --> 00:37:27.303 You know the polar ice melting, which is opening huge areas of sea in the polar regions. 00:37:28.644 --> 00:37:32.444 Without that ice, which normally reflects sunlight, 00:37:33.515 --> 00:37:40.148 that polar sea is now going to be absorbing a lot more sunlight and, therefore, heat. 00:37:40.789 --> 00:37:47.196 We have a lot of carbon stored in the permafrost. And those permafrosts are starting to defrost. 00:37:47.196 --> 00:37:50.899 And when they defrost that carbon dioxide - that carbon - is going to be oxidized 00:37:50.899 --> 00:37:54.069 to carbon dioxide, or brought out as methane and so on. 00:37:54.069 --> 00:37:57.673 And that will be a dramatic increase in greenhouse gases. 00:37:57.673 --> 00:38:05.045 This may get out of hand and we'll suddenly be looking at a very rapid warming of the planet. 00:38:05.514 --> 00:38:07.414 This may get out of hand. 00:38:07.716 --> 00:38:13.422 given that there seems to be a consensus that we need to reduce carbon emissions by 70 percent or more, 00:38:13.422 --> 00:38:17.426 and given that we live in a world where economies must grow or die, 00:38:17.426 --> 00:38:21.296 and given that our carbon emissions grow along with our economies, 00:38:21.296 --> 00:38:26.301 and given that many countries are working feverishly to emulate the American way of life, 00:38:26.301 --> 00:38:30.005 it's difficult to see a way to STOP it from getting out of hand. 00:38:30.005 --> 00:38:35.841 I've yet to see a proposed solution that even comes close to realistically addressing the situation. 00:38:37.045 --> 00:38:39.741 Talk about a snowball's chance in hell. 00:38:40.315 --> 00:38:44.520 I used to take this martial arts class. And a lot of these guys, it was kind of a kung-fu thing, 00:38:44.520 --> 00:38:46.989 a lot of the guys in class would be saying, 'well, what if i meet a guy that's really good 00:38:46.989 --> 00:38:49.892 in tae-kwon-do?', or "what if i meet a really good boxer?" 00:38:49.892 --> 00:38:52.494 And the teacher would say, "well, you're going to get your butt kicked". You know? 00:38:52.494 --> 00:38:58.033 You say, "what if we run into a tipping point where we have this kind of accelerated scenario of climate change?" 00:38:58.033 --> 00:38:59.301 We're going to get our butts kicked. 00:38:59.301 --> 00:39:05.941 It's very possible that global climate change is out of our control at this point no matter what we do. 00:39:05.941 --> 00:39:11.380 Whether we implement Kyoto, or Kyoto on steroids, or whatever it is. 00:39:11.380 --> 00:39:18.320 I don't know how it will be manageable. If they can't manage the fallout from the New Orleans catastrophe 00:39:18.320 --> 00:39:23.622 what's going to happen when they try to manage a society-wide catastrophic situation? 00:39:24.927 --> 00:39:31.266 We can take a lot of punches. Nature takes punches pretty readily. 00:39:31.266 --> 00:39:34.292 Global warming is a really severe punch. 00:39:35.270 --> 00:39:41.510 And all that we depend on for natural systems and agricultural systems 00:39:41.510 --> 00:39:43.774 is about to be wiped out pretty drastically. 00:39:45.314 --> 00:39:51.487 About to be? What is he saying? Do we dare speak of such disasters as inevitable? 00:39:51.487 --> 00:39:55.123 If we speak of inevitability, will that overwhelm people? 00:39:55.123 --> 00:39:58.460 Will they slide into apathy and diversion? 00:39:58.460 --> 00:40:01.396 Isn't that where people already are? 00:40:01.396 --> 00:40:04.900 I don't feel like I can afford to look at anything less than the truth. 00:40:04.900 --> 00:40:08.570 And then I must ask.: what are we made of? 00:40:08.570 --> 00:40:11.471 Who will we be in the face of such truths? 00:40:11.874 --> 00:40:15.537 If we don't look at these things, one thing seems certain. 00:40:15.944 --> 00:40:23.719 Generations to come are not going to be very happy with us for refusing to get serious 00:40:23.719 --> 00:40:26.745 about these hugely important issues. 00:40:28.423 --> 00:40:35.664 What really gets me is it's not just our human descendents. Millions of species and more are now threatened by our behavior. 00:40:35.664 --> 00:40:40.569 And for many of them, there will be no "generations to come". 00:40:40.569 --> 00:40:45.741 We're killing off all the life forms that give us life. 00:40:45.741 --> 00:40:49.978 We have black holes in the ocean. There are no fish in places in the ocean. 00:40:49.978 --> 00:40:54.677 What's happened to the fish? What's happened? 00:40:55.250 --> 00:41:01.246 That's my friend Barbara, who spent her life as a teacher and activist, working for the life of this planet. 00:41:01.723 --> 00:41:07.992 The thing is, we know what's happened. My son Jack knows. He's known since he was a kid. 00:41:08.363 --> 00:41:12.568 I mean, everyone knows the problems - the deforestation, the pollution of rivers, the garbage, overpopulation. 00:41:12.568 --> 00:41:19.308 All of these things the planet isn't built for us to do that. 00:41:19.308 --> 00:41:22.044 It's not built in such a way that it can take that. 00:41:22.044 --> 00:41:27.607 I mean, we have to live on the planet, so if we're going to destroy where we're living then that's going to be a problem. 00:41:30.352 --> 00:41:36.985 Hmm. Destroy where you're living. A problem? What are the analysts and scientists saying? 00:41:39.061 --> 00:41:42.297 Geologists mark geological time by catastrophe. 00:41:42.297 --> 00:41:46.768 When did the comet hit and wipe out all those species? When did the fossil record change? 00:41:46.768 --> 00:41:53.909 so what was there yesterday was not there the next day? And we're in one of those periods right now. But it's human-caused. 00:41:53.909 --> 00:41:59.779 And we're seeing an order of extinctions now that ranks with the great catastrophes on the planet. 00:41:59.915 --> 00:42:09.187 Currently we are driving species to extinction probably a thousand times faster than they should be. 00:42:09.458 --> 00:42:14.794 We will lose somewhere between a quarter, maybe as many as a half, 00:42:15.263 --> 00:42:19.468 of all the species on earth within the next century. 00:42:19.468 --> 00:42:22.801 I think what he's saying is.: that would be bad. 00:42:23.305 --> 00:42:26.241 When I spoke with Daniel Quinn, he seemed to agree. 00:42:26.241 --> 00:42:34.916 if this goes on, and on and on and on, there's going to come a point 00:42:34.916 --> 00:42:37.111 when the system is going to collapse. 00:42:38.220 --> 00:42:45.888 What is it that's going on and on? Nothing less than the people of Empire devouring the world. As my friend Kevin put it.: 00:42:48.263 --> 00:42:50.766 Humans are taking over the whole planet. 00:42:50.766 --> 00:42:53.168 And everything else is being crowded out. 00:42:53.168 --> 00:43:02.844 Crowded out. Felled and milled. Caught, cleaned and canned. The numbers show that the culture of civilization is eating itself out of house and home. 00:43:02.844 --> 00:43:08.717 On land, we consume forty percent of what's known as the primary productivity of the planet. 00:43:08.717 --> 00:43:15.290 If you look at how much green "stuff" the planet produces every year, 00:43:15.290 --> 00:43:17.693 we use about two-fifths of that. 00:43:17.693 --> 00:43:24.933 We consume it, our domestic animals consume it, and we use wood, and fibers like cotton. 00:43:24.933 --> 00:43:30.839 I drive through the country and see it. Forests are now fields and parking lots and box stores. 00:43:30.839 --> 00:43:37.938 We grow crops and livestock and billboards and cell phone towers, bulldozing and bush- hogging our way around the globe. 00:43:38.714 --> 00:43:46.985 And it's the destruction of the places where species live that's the principal cause of species becoming extinct. 00:43:48.824 --> 00:43:51.359 It's the same story in the oceans. 00:43:51.359 --> 00:44:02.904 Many people think that the oceans are vast and untouched. And in actual fact we take about a third of the production from the oceans, too. 00:44:02.904 --> 00:44:07.008 Our fish stocks, all over the coast of the United States and certainly around the world, 00:44:07.008 --> 00:44:10.412 are getting perilously close to collapsing. 00:44:10.412 --> 00:44:19.254 Most of the desirable, large, predatory fish - snapper, swordfish, and the like - have been reduced 00:44:19.254 --> 00:44:23.020 down to ten percent of their previous population. 00:44:23.592 --> 00:44:28.962 Down to ten percent? Maybe that's why we're now eating tilapia instead of cod. 00:44:29.598 --> 00:44:31.964 The cod is almost gone. 00:44:33.068 --> 00:44:37.300 And with your tilapia may I suggest a big tall glass of drinkable water? 00:44:37.572 --> 00:44:44.679 When it comes to fresh water we probably take about half of the available fresh water. 00:44:44.679 --> 00:44:50.519 Part of the way we've fed the planet over the last thirty years, as we've doubled population, is to use a whole lot of water. 00:44:50.519 --> 00:44:54.489 Our agriculture's now the leading user of water in the world. 00:44:54.489 --> 00:44:56.091 And in this nation as well. 00:44:56.091 --> 00:45:04.633 Our watersheds in the United States have been so highly developed that even small changes in the amount of water that falls 00:45:04.633 --> 00:45:10.071 are beginning to cause large implications for society's availability of water. 00:45:11.106 --> 00:45:16.011 Multiplying the impact of consumption and habitat destruction is the fact that, 00:45:16.011 --> 00:45:20.248 with fuels, with pesticides and herbicides and industrial chemicals, 00:45:20.248 --> 00:45:22.851 with noise and with electromagnetic waves 00:45:22.851 --> 00:45:26.855 and with human activity and with structures of control and domination, 00:45:26.855 --> 00:45:32.694 Empire is literally and metaphorically poisoning every square inch of the planet. 00:45:32.694 --> 00:45:36.998 Yes, life will recover from what we are doing to the planet. 00:45:36.998 --> 00:45:38.400 But don't hold your breath. 00:45:38.400 --> 00:45:40.335 It's going to take millions of years. 00:45:40.335 --> 00:45:45.540 It's going to take an incredible number of human generations. 00:45:45.540 --> 00:45:50.879 Trillions of people will live in a biologically impoverished world 00:45:50.879 --> 00:45:56.078 if we don't stop our human impacts now. 00:45:57.552 --> 00:46:00.822 I spoke with Daniel Quinn about this mass extinction. 00:46:00.822 --> 00:46:03.518 He gave me a metaphor that has haunted me since. 00:46:04.759 --> 00:46:10.823 We are like people who live in a very tall building. . . brick building. We live on the top floor. 00:46:11.399 --> 00:46:21.775 And every day we go out, go down to the lower floors and at random we knock bricks out, take them upstairs to the top, and build higher. 00:46:23.578 --> 00:46:28.709 Every day. Downstairs, 200 bricks. Take them upstairs. 00:46:30.018 --> 00:46:36.992 And the building is perfectly stable. But it's not going to be stable forever. 00:46:36.992 --> 00:46:42.464 Because we are attacking the structural integrity of the building. 00:46:42.464 --> 00:46:46.601 Two hundred species a day, day after day after day, year after year. . . 00:46:46.601 --> 00:46:49.069 And as our population increases 00:46:50.305 --> 00:46:55.043 it's going to turn into 400 species a day, a thousand species a day. 00:46:55.043 --> 00:46:59.343 And there's going to come a day when the system is going to collapse. 00:46:59.814 --> 00:47:02.374 Two hundred species a day!? 00:47:04.152 --> 00:47:06.950 This is calamitous. 00:47:07.689 --> 00:47:14.496 We may already be well above 200 bricks each day. And it looks to me like the building is not far from collapse. 00:47:14.496 --> 00:47:19.593 Everything in me wants to run out of the building before it comes crashing down around my ears. 00:47:19.968 --> 00:47:23.571 But where would I run? Empire now covers the planet. 00:47:23.571 --> 00:47:28.304 The building is everywhere. And almost all of us are inside of it. 00:47:28.810 --> 00:47:29.902 All of us. 00:47:30.478 --> 00:47:33.106 All six and a half billion of us. 00:47:34.082 --> 00:47:38.086 One of the hardest things to talk about is the human population explosion. 00:47:38.086 --> 00:47:45.583 The friends and neighbors I spoke with all seemed to agree that the enormous increase in human population would soon have to be reckoned with. 00:47:45.860 --> 00:47:48.196 We're approaching full tilt, I think, 00:47:48.196 --> 00:47:54.226 in terms of what the planet can sustain. 00:47:54.869 --> 00:48:00.308 Any species that has outgrown its environment 00:48:00.308 --> 00:48:02.544 is pressed for resources. 00:48:02.544 --> 00:48:04.346 is it just all going to end, 00:48:04.346 --> 00:48:06.414 and is that going to be the solution? 00:48:06.414 --> 00:48:10.285 You know, are we gonna become extinct 00:48:10.285 --> 00:48:11.653 like the dinosaurs? 00:48:11.653 --> 00:48:18.217 Equilibrium will be re-achieved. 00:48:18.960 --> 00:48:22.597 Unfortunately, nature is a harsh taskmaster. 00:48:22.597 --> 00:48:24.299 Because we're so intelligent, 00:48:24.299 --> 00:48:27.369 because we're such a different class of animal, 00:48:27.369 --> 00:48:35.477 with such a big brain, we have the ability to understand and foresee and prepare and stuff for these things, 00:48:35.477 --> 00:48:37.206 doesn't mean we will. 00:48:37.846 --> 00:48:40.982 How will we face into the issue of human population? 00:48:40.982 --> 00:48:47.522 I went to speak with William Catton, a professor of Sociology & Human Ecology at Washington State University, 00:48:47.522 --> 00:48:53.290 now retired, and author of an amazing book on ecology and human population called Overshoot. 00:48:53.728 --> 00:48:57.459 According to Catton's assessment of the carrying capacity of the planet.: 00:48:57.832 --> 00:49:00.402 I think the way we're living now, 00:49:00.402 --> 00:49:03.705 the world was overpopulated already 00:49:03.705 --> 00:49:05.536 by the time of our civil war. 00:49:06.474 --> 00:49:10.712 The population at the time of the US Civil War was just over one billion. 00:49:10.712 --> 00:49:15.672 So we've now overshot that number by more than 5 billion. As Catton told me.: 00:49:16.484 --> 00:49:20.388 It is possible to exceed carrying capacity. But only temporarily. 00:49:20.388 --> 00:49:26.020 if you exceed carrying capacity you then damage the environment upon which you're depending. 00:49:26.461 --> 00:49:33.367 Looking closely, I've come to see that population numbers for humans, in and of themselves, are only part of the story. 00:49:33.902 --> 00:49:37.839 As Catton points out, it's the damage those numbers do that counts. 00:49:37.839 --> 00:49:41.331 And that damage is intimately connected to our way of life. 00:49:41.843 --> 00:49:45.914 The Earth supports as great a collective mass of ants as it does people. 00:49:45.914 --> 00:49:52.787 It can do so because ants aren't building 6000-square-foot homes, driving two hours to their jobs, 00:49:52.787 --> 00:49:57.747 buying plasma TV sets, and killing each other with depleted uranium munitions. 00:49:58.393 --> 00:50:03.731 We in the developed world have 32 times the footprint on the planet, 00:50:03.731 --> 00:50:07.792 on resources... depletion... 32 times a person in india. 00:50:10.705 --> 00:50:13.606 I think we all know that though the figure is stunning. 00:50:13.942 --> 00:50:19.903 And it ought to make us really think, and start to talk with each other about this. 00:50:20.548 --> 00:50:25.508 You talk about how many "energy slaves", per capita, do we have? 00:50:27.088 --> 00:50:29.991 In this country we've got something like 70 times 00:50:29.991 --> 00:50:34.996 as many energy slaves per capita as people in Bangladesh. 00:50:34.996 --> 00:50:39.067 instead of thinking of Bangladesh as the overpopulated country, 00:50:39.067 --> 00:50:41.503 if you multiply each of us by seventy 00:50:41.503 --> 00:50:47.242 - take that 290 million, or whatever number of us there are now, multiple it be seventy - wow. 00:50:47.242 --> 00:50:49.938 We are an overpopulated country. 00:50:50.245 --> 00:50:58.050 In those terms, the US is a nation of 21 billion people. And my own three children add 210 to that number. 00:50:58.386 --> 00:51:03.691 To speak of population, then, as the root cause of our problem makes little sense to me. 00:51:03.691 --> 00:51:13.657 It conjures images of crowded third-world cities and teeming masses of human flesh, while the global impacts of rich first-world lifestyles go unexamined. 00:51:15.970 --> 00:51:21.306 Big feet. More and more feet. And more and more feet getting bigger and bigger. 00:51:21.709 --> 00:51:26.908 And if these feet just keep on walking, one of these days they're gonna walk right into oblivion. 00:51:28.416 --> 00:51:31.351 It cannot be sustained for much longer. 00:51:33.755 --> 00:51:37.158 There are any number of catastrophic forces that could lower our numbers, 00:51:37.158 --> 00:51:41.424 as oil depletion, climate change and environmental collapses play out. 00:51:41.863 --> 00:51:45.799 One thing large populations are especially prone to is disease. 00:51:46.668 --> 00:51:51.628 Microbes are gonna have a lot more to do with it than humans have to do with it in the end. 00:51:52.407 --> 00:51:57.071 Nature - we're still governed by natural rules, we like to think we're not, but we are - 00:51:57.512 --> 00:52:02.074 when you put together the kind of biomass that humans represent on this planet, 00:52:02.951 --> 00:52:05.818 we're an asset to somebody. We're a resource. 00:52:07.288 --> 00:52:11.725 But it may be possible to meet the situation with consciousness and intention. 00:52:11.960 --> 00:52:16.590 Once we get to the peak human population, wherever that is - 00:52:16.864 --> 00:52:22.564 I hope it is 8 1/2 billion rather than 12 billion but it's gonna be high - 00:52:22.904 --> 00:52:26.774 whenever we get there, what - do we have a vision of what we should do? 00:52:26.774 --> 00:52:31.246 I mean, we got to the peak, and there's trouble all around us! 00:52:31.246 --> 00:52:33.077 What should we do? 00:52:33.648 --> 00:52:43.683 Somehow we've got to devise a way for obtaining a soft landing as we reduce the population from six-plus billion down toward one billion. 00:52:43.992 --> 00:52:48.763 If we decide we want to reduce it we can see to it that the reduction occurs 00:52:48.763 --> 00:52:54.998 in a more humane way than it will occur if we just try to keep on business as usual. 00:52:55.470 --> 00:53:03.036 Humanity has never been in this. This is new. This is new. And this is big. And this is not being talked about. 00:53:03.578 --> 00:53:09.574 And because it is not being talked about, we have no clear idea how we might device that softer landing. 00:53:10.018 --> 00:53:14.478 Talking about it, then, clearly and honestly, is the first step. 00:53:14.989 --> 00:53:19.050 Without that, catastrophe is inevitable. But either way, 00:53:19.460 --> 00:53:22.554 Our global population is going to be reduced. 00:53:24.365 --> 00:53:29.928 this is what I had to face.: the population of my species is going to be reduced. 00:53:30.004 --> 00:53:35.610 I had to face it just like the grizzly bears have had to face it, and the wild salmon have had to face it, 00:53:35.610 --> 00:53:40.348 just like the right whales and the piping plovers and the mountain gorillas have had to face it, 00:53:40.348 --> 00:53:46.912 just like the great auks and the golden toads and the blackfin cisco had to face it before they went extinct. 00:53:47.422 --> 00:53:51.722 And I had to face something else.: I have a choice about how I meet it. 00:53:52.160 --> 00:53:54.529 My friend Lyle gave it some perspective. 00:53:54.529 --> 00:54:01.569 The fact is that there have been die-offs of civilizations. There have been collapses of great, mighty civilizations. 00:54:01.569 --> 00:54:06.802 Sophisticated, powerful, unbelievable civilizations have collapsed. 00:54:07.008 --> 00:54:10.239 And it's a choice. 00:54:10.978 --> 00:54:18.453 it's a choice that we can decide to succeed or fail. And i'm going to go ahead and decide to succeed, thank you 00:54:18.453 --> 00:54:21.217 And i'd really like it if you'd come with me. 00:54:23.424 --> 00:54:28.384 What choices do we now have? What would that success Lyle speaks of look like? 00:54:28.963 --> 00:54:34.924 What is inevitable at this point? And what remains to be created, if only we awaken to our power? 00:54:36.270 --> 00:54:41.230 Most importantly, why have we not already awakened? 00:54:42.610 --> 00:54:48.883 And you know something? The more you talk about your problems the easier they are to solve. 00:54:48.883 --> 00:54:52.720 This bottling things up inside is bad! 00:54:52.720 --> 00:54:56.087 We can't survive apart from the earth. 00:54:56.691 --> 00:54:58.818 And so. . . we're killing it! 00:54:59.427 --> 00:55:08.236 i think part of looking at things exactly the way they are is feeling how isolated 00:55:08.236 --> 00:55:13.341 and alienated we have become from ourselves, 00:55:13.341 --> 00:55:16.878 from the people around us, and from the natural world. 00:55:16.878 --> 00:55:25.479 And when you look at that, and experience that, the natural response is deep grief. 00:55:26.254 --> 00:55:29.052 Deep grief at the loss of connection. 00:55:39.467 --> 00:55:42.231 There are other issues we could have looked at. 00:55:45.072 --> 00:55:47.700 How do we face into all of this information? 00:55:48.543 --> 00:55:52.673 It looks as though our very survival as a species is now in question. 00:55:54.315 --> 00:55:59.878 As I gaze unflinchingly at the world situation, the information goes right into my body. 00:56:00.221 --> 00:56:01.916 I feel shaken to the core. 00:56:02.457 --> 00:56:04.118 I feel like running away. 00:56:04.559 --> 00:56:08.120 I feel, at times, like I've been hit head on. 00:56:09.063 --> 00:56:10.963 I know I'm not alone. 00:56:11.399 --> 00:56:15.733 I wish I had some magic potion. I wish I had some easy fix. 00:56:16.103 --> 00:56:19.334 I wish I could just tell you that everything is going to be OK. 00:56:20.274 --> 00:56:22.743 But of course I can't tell you that. 00:56:22.743 --> 00:56:26.770 And probably, deep down, you already know that. 00:56:28.382 --> 00:56:30.680 What chance do I really have, doctor? 00:56:32.086 --> 00:56:37.758 Mr. Marshall, I have no desire to mislead you. 00:56:37.758 --> 00:56:41.489 I'm sure you realize that recovery is not a sure thing. 00:56:43.798 --> 00:56:48.803 Thirty-six years after the first Earth Day, forty-four years after Silent Spring, 00:56:48.803 --> 00:56:53.604 the planet is closer now to ecological meltdown than it has ever been. 00:56:54.942 --> 00:57:01.782 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. 00:57:01.782 --> 00:57:04.182 We will have to do something else. 00:57:05.853 --> 00:57:08.879 When we stay focused on the question, "what do we do?" 00:57:10.091 --> 00:57:15.586 we don't ask the more basic questions about "how did we get here?" 00:57:17.765 --> 00:57:28.075 And if we don't ask those questions i don't think we've got much chance of effecting 00:57:28.075 --> 00:57:33.035 the kind of radical change that we're going to have to effect if we're going to make it. 00:57:33.347 --> 00:57:38.046 Well, i appreciate your being so frank with me, Dr Swenson. 00:57:39.353 --> 00:57:42.447 I guess I don't have to tell you how i feel. 00:57:43.591 --> 00:57:48.462 From my experience, talking about how we feel is exactly what we need to be doing. 00:57:48.462 --> 00:57:51.363 And we'll also need to question some assumptions. 00:57:52.066 --> 00:57:58.472 One assumption I question is the one that tells us that, since scientists can help us understand the situation, 00:57:58.472 --> 00:58:02.135 they are automatically equipped to tell us how to "solve" it. 00:58:02.677 --> 00:58:07.637 But there are forces at work in the world that cannot be understood through a microscope. 00:58:09.450 --> 00:58:15.150 What are the forces that brought us to this point? And what are the forces that keep us stuck here? 00:58:16.090 --> 00:58:19.582 I went to speak with the people who are trying to answer these questions. 00:58:21.162 --> 00:58:27.226 I realized that I would have to step outside of the culture, so that I could see it from a new perspective. 00:58:28.302 --> 00:58:35.042 Deep inside the tangle of problems that threatens the entire world there rages a boundless blaze of cultural fire, 00:58:35.042 --> 00:58:38.910 the locomotive power for the cultural train we're all now riding.: 00:58:39.580 --> 00:58:44.950 an engine not of steam or diesel, but of story, and myth, habit and belief. 00:58:45.319 --> 00:58:47.412 An engine racing out of control. 00:58:47.922 --> 00:58:51.085 It's time to look more closely at the culture of Empire. 00:58:51.492 --> 00:58:53.585 So, how did we get into this mess? 00:58:54.061 --> 00:58:57.997 wow. That's a cosmic question. 00:58:58.499 --> 00:59:07.897 Many analysts think it started about ten thousand years ago when humans began to engage in a new and fundamentally unsustainable style of food production. 00:59:08.342 --> 00:59:12.278 What we invented was something that I call totalitarian agriculture, 00:59:12.546 --> 00:59:19.787 which is predicated on the notion that it all belongs to us. 00:59:19.787 --> 00:59:24.792 We can kill off anything we don't want on the land, put a fence around the land. 00:59:24.792 --> 00:59:29.497 We can grow the food we want on the land and Nobody else can touch it. 00:59:29.497 --> 00:59:35.834 That slippery slope that we're on right now. . . we started walking on that ten thousand years ago. 00:59:37.471 --> 00:59:44.111 And it is because of an inherent problem in "agriculture". "Agriculture" really depends on disturbance. 00:59:44.111 --> 00:59:49.116 There's no way you can do "agriculture" without doing that catastrophic damage. 00:59:49.116 --> 00:59:53.246 So it makes "agriculture" fundamentally unsustainable. 00:59:54.288 --> 00:59:58.392 The surplus from this new way of getting food had immediate effects. 00:59:58.392 --> 01:00:04.098 It has fueled this tremendous population growth of ours. 01:00:04.098 --> 01:00:07.966 Our growing population is always catching up with our food production. 01:00:08.803 --> 01:00:11.567 We have a food race on our hands. 01:00:11.806 --> 01:00:17.144 We grow more food and the population increases. So we grow more food. 01:00:17.144 --> 01:00:19.547 It's a race that can't be won. 01:00:19.547 --> 01:00:27.154 On top of that, totalitarian agriculture also consigned its practitioners to a life of hard work and poor health. 01:00:27.154 --> 01:00:33.527 As a species, we had food before us for all of our history, which is two hundred. . . three hundred thousand years. 01:00:33.527 --> 01:00:38.487 When you look at ten thousand years it's relatively minor in that space. 01:00:38.999 --> 01:00:40.668 But we were hunter-gatherers. 01:00:40.668 --> 01:00:46.300 So nature grew our food in its way. As opposed to our way, which is "agriculture". 01:00:47.508 --> 01:00:49.840 We didn't grow food. Food grew. 01:00:51.345 --> 01:00:55.281 it's hard for people to accept the fact that 01:00:57.918 --> 01:01:05.326 the more you base your society on agriculture, the harder you work. 01:01:05.326 --> 01:01:09.230 if we look at archaeological sites around the world - and people have done this - 01:01:09.230 --> 01:01:11.665 in all the locations - this is not a cultural issue - 01:01:11.665 --> 01:01:17.404 in all the locations where agriculture began, in Asia, the Mid-East, South America, and Central America, 01:01:17.404 --> 01:01:20.207 we will find people who are stunted, short, 01:01:20.207 --> 01:01:24.345 their teeth are invariable gone because of the carbohydrates they're eating turn into sugars 01:01:24.345 --> 01:01:25.946 and rot their teeth out, 01:01:25.946 --> 01:01:32.351 they're misshapen, they're asymmetrical, they show every evidence of suffering all sorts of disease. 01:01:33.320 --> 01:01:40.895 this new type of agriculture both required and allowed more settlement, and with that came the beginnings of wealth and inequality. 01:01:40.895 --> 01:01:47.868 if you go to pre-agricultural towns you'll see a series of houses, all about the same size. 01:01:47.868 --> 01:01:56.076 And almost instantly, when agriculture occurred, you can go to any town, in any agricultural site in the world, not just in Western culture, 01:01:56.076 --> 01:02:01.749 and see a few very large houses with granaries connected to them, and a whole series of smaller houses. 01:02:01.749 --> 01:02:06.709 That kind of social inequity began almost immediately with agriculture. 01:02:07.888 --> 01:02:15.090 As Quinn and Manning point out, early agricultural peoples were not better off than their hunter-gatherer predecessors. 01:02:15.329 --> 01:02:16.990 this was news to me. 01:02:17.264 --> 01:02:23.760 The psychologist and cultural analyst Chellis Glendinning points to other consequences of settlement and agriculture. 01:02:24.205 --> 01:02:28.869 Before, when women were moving around, and very athletic, and carrying their babies, 01:02:29.977 --> 01:02:34.114 and having a diet that wasn't so high in carbohydrates, 01:02:34.114 --> 01:02:37.084 and nursing their babies for long periods of time, 01:02:37.084 --> 01:02:39.687 then women didn't ovulate very often. 01:02:39.687 --> 01:02:44.692 But when women became sedentary, women began to have regular cycles. 01:02:44.692 --> 01:02:47.561 And so, more babies were born. And so guess what? 01:02:47.561 --> 01:02:52.794 Then you have to make more farms. And then you have to expand the area that's fenced off. 01:02:53.434 --> 01:02:57.972 And then, ooh, maybe you're going to meet up with someone else who's coming that way, another group. 01:02:57.972 --> 01:02:59.963 And so then you have to have a war. 01:03:00.875 --> 01:03:05.938 We're taught to regard agriculture and settlement as the normal and natural way for humans to live. 01:03:06.447 --> 01:03:15.480 So it was a bit of a shock, to learn how these basic cultural changes were the fundamental cause of so many of the problems that have dogged us through the centuries. 01:03:16.156 --> 01:03:19.990 Derrick Jensen speaks to the end result of all of this cultural change. 01:03:20.527 --> 01:03:26.300 I think one of the best lines i ever wrote was that "forests precede us and deserts dog our heels." 01:03:26.300 --> 01:03:32.106 When I think of - or when you think of - the plains and hillsides of Iraq, 01:03:32.106 --> 01:03:37.169 is the first thing that you normally think of cedar forests so thick the sunlight never touches the ground? 01:03:37.978 --> 01:03:39.613 I think for most of us that's not the case. 01:03:39.613 --> 01:03:47.247 But the first written myth of this culture is Gilgamesh cutting down those forests to make cities. 01:03:48.789 --> 01:03:53.749 Cities. Settlements begat villages which begat towns which begat cities. 01:03:54.295 --> 01:03:59.300 Totalitarian and catastrophic agriculture, the accumulation of wealth and power, 01:03:59.300 --> 01:04:05.139 and increases in population all came together to give rise to a new form of human culture.: 01:04:05.139 --> 01:04:08.575 the culture of cities, the culture of civilization, 01:04:08.575 --> 01:04:10.270 the culture of Empire. 01:04:10.778 --> 01:04:21.722 I realized, as I was writing the newest book, Endgame, that i'd been bashing civilization for probably, eh, ten years now. 01:04:21.722 --> 01:04:24.825 And i'd never defined it. I didn't know what i was talking about. 01:04:24.825 --> 01:04:33.324 And so I define it in that book as a way of life characterized by the growth of cities. 01:04:34.368 --> 01:04:41.241 I've defined a city as a collection of people living in numbers large enough to require the importation of resources. 01:04:41.241 --> 01:04:45.846 A city could be defined, almost, as a human ecosystem that grossly exceeds 01:04:45.846 --> 01:04:48.747 the carrying capacity of its local environment. 01:04:49.817 --> 01:04:59.426 As Jensen and Catton point out, because cities exceed the carrying capacity of their local environment, and because they require the importation of resources, 01:04:59.426 --> 01:05:06.133 then those who live in cities are locked into the inevitability of getting those resources from somewhere else, 01:05:06.133 --> 01:05:11.093 from somebody else, by whatever means is necessary. 01:05:12.206 --> 01:05:14.575 Often that means is trade. 01:05:14.575 --> 01:05:22.349 But trade requires transport, and transport requires energy, and energy has to come from somewhere, and it eventually runs out. 01:05:22.349 --> 01:05:27.286 And trade requires willing partners. But people do not always want to trade. 01:05:27.654 --> 01:05:32.682 When trade breaks down, and you need those resources, what remains is war. 01:05:34.028 --> 01:05:36.826 We now need oil to keep our cities going. 01:05:37.097 --> 01:05:40.968 Watch the bidding war rage from trade floors to battlefields. 01:05:40.968 --> 01:05:44.529 Watch the Pentagon plan and the patriots act. 01:05:45.906 --> 01:05:50.911 Let's stop for a second and regroup. I told you I've had to challenge some assumptions. 01:05:50.911 --> 01:05:57.684 We've been doing agriculture and expanding and growing and building cities and accumulating material wealth for so long now 01:05:57.684 --> 01:06:01.288 that it just feels like this is how things are supposed to be. 01:06:01.288 --> 01:06:08.387 But how can a way of life that is destroying its own support systems be considered "how things are supposed to be"? 01:06:09.596 --> 01:06:19.471 "...they did eat every herb of the land, and all the fruit of the trees, and there remained not any green thing... " Exodus 10.:1 5 01:06:23.343 --> 01:06:24.469 Let's move on. 01:06:25.579 --> 01:06:33.687 Once our native human intelligence and creativity was combined with the defining impulses of empire, things began to snowball. 01:06:33.687 --> 01:06:40.127 We kept using more and more sophisticated technology so we could put off the inevitable. 01:06:40.127 --> 01:06:42.721 Which is.: we've got physical limits. 01:06:43.063 --> 01:06:47.768 Using the power of technology, we could break through the limits and laws and rules 01:06:47.768 --> 01:06:52.728 that kept the community of life in balance for millions of years . . . temporarily. . . 01:06:53.140 --> 01:06:58.378 Rules! All the time rules! i'm sick of 'em. 01:06:58.378 --> 01:07:01.081 Offscreen Narrator.: Excuse me for interrupting, boys and girls, 01:07:01.081 --> 01:07:05.185 but maybe you would like to find out just what it would be like if there were no rules. 01:07:05.185 --> 01:07:07.087 But how could we do that? 01:07:07.087 --> 01:07:09.715 By going someplace where there are no rules. 01:07:09.957 --> 01:07:12.126 There's no such place. 01:07:12.126 --> 01:07:16.230 But maybe there is a way we could go to a place without rules. 01:07:16.230 --> 01:07:17.397 how? 01:07:17.397 --> 01:07:23.461 By using our imagination. Now let's all pretend real hard. . . 01:07:25.506 --> 01:07:28.041 And pretend we did. 01:07:28.041 --> 01:07:32.279 thinking we had no limits, our power to control went right to our heads. 01:07:32.279 --> 01:07:35.442 As historian and "geologian" Thomas Berry put it.: 01:07:57.504 --> 01:08:02.464 What i say goes, see? i'm the law around here! 01:08:02.809 --> 01:08:05.369 (laughs) 01:08:06.580 --> 01:08:12.815 But the belief in the power to control has proceeded on some faulty assumptions about the limits of science. 01:08:40.981 --> 01:08:43.450 I've been confused about technology. 01:08:43.450 --> 01:08:49.122 I've heard all my life that technologies themselves are neutral, that it all depends on how we use them, 01:08:49.122 --> 01:08:54.354 that they can be used for good or ill, depending on the wisdom and intelligence of the user. 01:08:54.828 --> 01:08:57.296 But, as Jerry Mander explains.: 01:08:57.296 --> 01:09:02.301 That's completely wrong. You can do an analysis of every technology 01:09:02.301 --> 01:09:09.376 and find its beneficial aspects and its negative aspects. 01:09:09.376 --> 01:09:17.647 The idea that it's just about the way we use it is absurd. Because these are built-in factors. 01:09:18.185 --> 01:09:23.145 As an example, the difference between nuclear and solar is more than in how we use them. 01:09:23.657 --> 01:09:28.528 Each technology has built-in characteristics that determine how they end up being used, 01:09:28.528 --> 01:09:29.962 and who uses them, 01:09:29.962 --> 01:09:31.231 and for what. 01:09:31.231 --> 01:09:35.402 Military scientists are not now working on a solar powered warhead. 01:09:35.402 --> 01:09:39.236 And neither am I looking to put a nuclear water heater on my roof. 01:09:40.907 --> 01:09:45.867 Because of this misunderstanding, it's easy to get trapped in the myth of the technofix. . . 01:09:46.446 --> 01:09:52.886 Ever since that division of humans and human space away from the rest of the world, 01:09:52.886 --> 01:09:57.846 there's been one problem arising from that situation after another, you know. 01:09:58.458 --> 01:10:02.292 "Oh dear, we have to pipe in more water for the more farms", you know. 01:10:03.130 --> 01:10:05.499 "Oh dear, now we have to travel great distances". 01:10:05.499 --> 01:10:08.559 "Oh dear, now we need more resources, we need more land". 01:10:09.102 --> 01:10:13.507 Whatever. It's been one technological fix after another. 01:10:13.507 --> 01:10:19.146 And then as soon as you try to answer something with some kind of a technological fix that doesn't really go to the root of the problem 01:10:19.146 --> 01:10:20.480 then there's going to be new problems. 01:10:20.480 --> 01:10:22.749 And then it just rolls along. 01:10:22.749 --> 01:10:28.922 And so now, I mean, you look at the state of the world now and half the people in the world are living in urban areas. 01:10:28.922 --> 01:10:31.458 so how do you answer that? 01:10:31.458 --> 01:10:35.128 And the population explosion has gone to such an extreme. 01:10:35.128 --> 01:10:39.326 How do you answer that, but with another technological fix? 01:10:39.700 --> 01:10:42.169 Half the people in the world live in cities. 01:10:42.169 --> 01:10:47.174 And cities, by definition, exceed the carrying capacity of their local environments. 01:10:47.174 --> 01:10:49.267 I don't think most people know this. 01:10:49.609 --> 01:10:53.705 But you'll agree that to make up your mind fairly you have to know all the facts. 01:10:54.214 --> 01:10:56.444 See, I don't think you know all the facts. 01:10:57.617 --> 01:11:02.577 If we knew all the facts we'd have discarded the myth of the technofix a long time ago. 01:11:02.889 --> 01:11:10.864 To my eye our crisis, at its deepest levels, is a crisis not of technology but of meaning and purpose. 01:11:10.864 --> 01:11:17.738 We keep acting like all we need do is throw more technology at it while we fall to understand, or even see, 01:11:17.738 --> 01:11:25.702 the clearly cultural issues that doom to fantastic failure these ever more desperate attempts to keep the present system going. 01:11:26.346 --> 01:11:30.784 We've been pretending for so long we've forgotten what we once knew.: 01:11:30.784 --> 01:11:34.982 you can't survive in the long run if you don't follow the laws of life. 01:11:36.156 --> 01:11:42.396 As we settled into agriculture and civilization, agriculture and civilization settled into us. 01:11:42.396 --> 01:11:45.098 We fenced ourselves off from the world. . . 01:11:45.098 --> 01:11:48.969 And everything inside the fence became what we needed to survive. 01:11:48.969 --> 01:11:55.135 And everything outside the fence became threatening, wild, you know, uncontrollable, keep it out! 01:11:55.842 --> 01:11:59.379 And our technologies cut us off from our own experience. . . 01:11:59.379 --> 01:12:06.420 We can build a culture that sits between us and the world. 01:12:06.420 --> 01:12:11.491 And it mediates our behavior toward the world. 01:12:11.491 --> 01:12:14.227 And it mediates what we do and what we perceive. 01:12:14.227 --> 01:12:19.499 If you have a spear, it becomes a lot easier. You don't have to kill somebody right in front of you. 01:12:19.499 --> 01:12:24.204 You can kill somebody thirty feet away. And that distance makes it easier to kill. 01:12:24.204 --> 01:12:31.445 And 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, 01:12:31.445 --> 01:12:38.214 you can kill Iraqis with no more thought or feeling than you might have wasting the Covenant on your X-Box at home. 01:12:40.787 --> 01:12:44.858 this disconnection from the world, from other people and other creatures, 01:12:44.858 --> 01:12:48.624 altered our relationships, and left us confused and wounded. 01:13:16.456 --> 01:13:22.229 At what point do we stop and listen? And if we stop and listen, what will we be able to hear? 01:13:22.229 --> 01:13:30.500 Disconnection has stopped our ears. The planet's voice barely registers. Our minds are clogged with stories. 01:13:30.871 --> 01:13:36.309 Central to my understanding of the world is this.: all cultures are based on stories. 01:13:36.309 --> 01:13:42.215 The culture of civilization and empire comes with its own unique set of beliefs and impulses. 01:13:42.215 --> 01:13:46.515 Listen to some of the stories that have brought us to our present predicament. 01:13:46.586 --> 01:13:49.256 "There's never quite enough" 01:13:49.256 --> 01:13:50.624 "We're innately flawed" 01:13:50.624 --> 01:13:53.493 "it's heresy today to say, 'let's stop growing"' 01:13:53.493 --> 01:13:55.161 "Hard work is morally virtuous" 01:13:55.161 --> 01:13:56.463 "More is better" 01:13:56.463 --> 01:13:59.766 "The physical world as i see it is everything" 01:13:59.766 --> 01:14:02.235 "We can solve any problem" 01:14:02.235 --> 01:14:06.740 "I mean... they actually say that the way to be happy is to own more stuff" 01:14:06.740 --> 01:14:11.478 "We are to subdue the earth and have dominion over it" 01:14:11.478 --> 01:14:16.783 "We own. . . we own the planet. We own everything here. We own these resources" 01:14:16.783 --> 01:14:21.354 "Humans have rights. Nothing else has rights" 01:14:21.354 --> 01:14:27.224 "There are many times in which people just don't want to be told that such-and-such a place is off-limits to them" 01:14:27.894 --> 01:14:32.194 Living with stories like this, is it any wonder we're devouring the planet? 01:14:33.033 --> 01:14:37.026 In some ways we're kind of - we're in a culture of two-year-olds. 01:14:37.704 --> 01:14:41.708 Where we just won't look at the limits. 01:14:41.708 --> 01:14:49.740 Dominion over the Earth, in Genesis, didn't mean to leave this pillaged and smoking. 01:14:50.684 --> 01:14:54.211 Daniel Quinn has named some of the basic stories of Empire. 01:14:54.588 --> 01:14:58.391 The ambient voice of our culture tells us that 01:14:58.391 --> 01:15:03.997 this is the best that humans could ever hope for. 01:15:03.997 --> 01:15:06.666 What we've got right now, where we're going. 01:15:06.666 --> 01:15:08.827 It's just unsurpassable. 01:15:09.402 --> 01:15:13.640 Ergo, any alternative has got to be worse. 01:15:13.640 --> 01:15:17.310 There were other civilizations besides ours; 01:15:17.310 --> 01:15:20.580 they did not think that they had the one right way to live, 01:15:20.580 --> 01:15:24.017 and that everyone in the world should be made to live that way. 01:15:24.017 --> 01:15:27.020 We're taught to think that we are Humanity. 01:15:27.020 --> 01:15:33.526 if there are other people out there that are different from us, well they're degenerates, 01:15:33.526 --> 01:15:36.296 or they're just not as far advanced as we are. 01:15:36.296 --> 01:15:40.700 We came along, and began doing things, 01:15:40.700 --> 01:15:42.463 and building civilization, 01:15:42.802 --> 01:15:46.397 and this is the way humans were meant to live from the beginning. 01:15:47.240 --> 01:15:50.141 Which is one reason why we can't give it up. 01:15:51.911 --> 01:15:55.904 Here, perhaps, is the most dangerous story of them all. . . 01:15:57.384 --> 01:16:06.526 We are superior to all other creatures and our lives are independent of theirs. 01:16:06.526 --> 01:16:15.491 Narrator.: Through his intellect man has developed a superiority over every other form of animal life. 01:16:17.537 --> 01:16:22.909 with the stories of Empire in place, civilization was ready to spread around the planet. 01:16:22.909 --> 01:16:27.013 Ran Prieur explains the core idea of "The Parable of the Tribes", 01:16:27.013 --> 01:16:33.316 which reveals how the culture of Empire prevailed in a process of cultural evolution that selects for power. 01:16:33.687 --> 01:16:36.456 imagine there's a bunch of tribes that are living together peacefully. 01:16:36.456 --> 01:16:42.929 And one of the tribes, for some reason, instead of living in balance and in peace, 01:16:42.929 --> 01:16:48.697 they decide that they're going to make a bunch of weapons and conquer the next tribe and turn them into slaves. 01:16:49.736 --> 01:16:51.966 The next tribe has three choices. 01:16:53.239 --> 01:16:59.701 if they run away the paradigm of the violent tribe expands into their territory. 01:17:00.080 --> 01:17:05.985 if they submit into slavery the paradigm of the violent tribe expands into their territory. 01:17:05.985 --> 01:17:11.825 if they build weapons to fight back the paradigm of the violent tribe expands into their territory. 01:17:11.825 --> 01:17:20.028 And that just goes on until the whole world is made up of people who make weapons and fight and enslave other people. 01:17:21.468 --> 01:17:25.438 After ten thousand years of this, we've forgotten who we are. . . 01:17:25.438 --> 01:17:30.398 How could three million years of human life be meaningless? 01:17:30.710 --> 01:17:36.282 The way people were living at that time, during that vast period,: 01:17:36.282 --> 01:17:43.882 they were living in a way in which humans could live for millions of years. 01:17:44.557 --> 01:17:49.517 Tens of millions of years. And that's something! 01:17:50.096 --> 01:17:56.035 Man, now we're saying "how many decades can we have?" 01:17:56.035 --> 01:18:00.267 And if we go on living this way, it's not many. 01:18:04.144 --> 01:18:07.881 It strikes me as critical that we remember who we really are. 01:18:07.881 --> 01:18:12.719 We have these huge brains and a great capacity for innovation and adaptation. 01:18:12.719 --> 01:18:17.679 But we can get trapped inside of stories and fantasies that block us from our own greatness. 01:18:18.324 --> 01:18:26.065 Well, human beings can act either as members of climax ecosystems, 01:18:26.065 --> 01:18:30.136 where we integrate ourselves into everything else that's going on, 01:18:30.136 --> 01:18:33.206 or we can act as invasive species, like the cane toad. 01:18:33.206 --> 01:18:41.170 The classic example of human beings acting as an invasive species, of course, is Europeans over the last five hundred years or so. 01:18:42.215 --> 01:18:47.220 It doesn't have to be this way. Not all human cultures have followed this path. 01:18:47.220 --> 01:18:54.854 When I look closely, what I see is that human capacities and characteristics have always been medlated by the larger society. 01:18:55.929 --> 01:18:57.294 Always. 01:18:58.832 --> 01:19:05.795 One person I spoke with who discussed our present predicament in terms of inherent human characteristics was Richard Manning. 01:19:06.272 --> 01:19:11.110 to survive in our hunter-gatherer days. . . a very narrow field of vision. 01:19:11.110 --> 01:19:16.082 You had to be concerned with what was happening around you in the immediate hundred yards. 01:19:16.082 --> 01:19:21.454 You had to be worried about what was going to happen in the next ten seconds or five minutes. 01:19:21.454 --> 01:19:25.258 Where was that tiger going to come from that was going to bite your neck and kill you? 01:19:25.258 --> 01:19:28.795 So our strongest instincts are geared to the immediate. 01:19:28.795 --> 01:19:32.832 Our adrenaline doesn't start to flow when we read about global warming. 01:19:32.832 --> 01:19:35.665 It starts to flow when somebody put a fist in our face. 01:19:36.636 --> 01:19:42.008 And yet the Haudenosaunee evolved a culture that balanced those strong instincts. 01:19:42.008 --> 01:19:46.179 They make decisions based on their impact on the seventh generation. 01:19:46.179 --> 01:19:49.315 Contrast that with the culture of Empire. 01:19:49.315 --> 01:19:54.020 What we've never been able to do is recognize a limit coming from thirty or forty years out 01:19:54.020 --> 01:19:55.455 and behave accordingly. 01:19:55.455 --> 01:20:01.121 And so we haven't seen climate change coming. And most people don't see oil depletion coming. 01:20:01.961 --> 01:20:06.165 And there are other forces in the universe that play out over the long term. 01:20:06.165 --> 01:20:12.005 Exponential growth and population dynamics can both unfold over generations making them, 01:20:12.005 --> 01:20:16.509 for humans blinded by their own culture, difficult to see. 01:20:16.509 --> 01:20:19.879 William Catton explains another long-term process. 01:20:19.879 --> 01:20:27.253 C. Wright Mills of Columbia University - kind of a maverick - gave a nice physiological definition of fate. 01:20:27.253 --> 01:20:38.965 Fate is what happens when innumerable people make innumerable small decisions about other matters that have a collective, cumulative effect that Nobody intended. 01:20:38.965 --> 01:20:42.302 Ok. That's what's happened when we overpopulated the world. 01:20:42.302 --> 01:20:50.437 Nobody intended to overpopulate the world. Nobody intended to pollute the oceans. Nobody intended to start the greenhouse effect. 01:20:52.111 --> 01:20:55.648 So this is part of what I've come to about how we got here.: 01:20:55.648 --> 01:20:59.419 a snarl of assumptions and behaviors and beliefs and stories 01:20:59.419 --> 01:21:02.288 that form the backbone of the culture of Empire, 01:21:02.288 --> 01:21:06.122 a fusion of forces that severed us from the laws of life. 01:21:06.559 --> 01:21:09.796 this culture tells us that we can live apart from those laws. 01:21:09.796 --> 01:21:12.332 Without limits. Without rules. 01:21:12.332 --> 01:21:16.936 But doing so has left us, and the planet, battered and beaten. 01:21:16.936 --> 01:21:20.770 It isn't working out the way we've been taught to think it will. 01:21:22.108 --> 01:21:25.545 Offscreen Narrator.: Well boys and girls, how do you like living without rules? 01:21:25.545 --> 01:21:27.246 I hate it! 01:21:27.246 --> 01:21:30.016 This is no fun. 01:21:30.016 --> 01:21:32.450 It stinks. 01:21:34.220 --> 01:21:43.390 Over and over I've had to ask.: why do we keep destroying the planet, even now, when the evidence that we are doing so is overwhelming? 01:21:43.930 --> 01:21:48.735 The first thing to note is that all of these historical forces are still in play. 01:21:48.735 --> 01:21:52.238 And some new forces have arisen in our time. 01:21:52.238 --> 01:21:57.198 It's sobering to consider that we're trapped in an economy that must grow or die. 01:21:57.543 --> 01:22:01.914 The economy will, can and must continue to grow. 01:22:01.914 --> 01:22:06.078 Now of course this is an absurdity. Because we live on a finite spherical planet. 01:22:07.153 --> 01:22:10.748 so there's only so much stuff to chew up and spit out. 01:22:11.824 --> 01:22:16.022 We're assaulted by corporately controlled media that keep us delusional. 01:22:16.496 --> 01:22:23.459 People tend to think that they have a choice about what information they take from television. 01:22:24.404 --> 01:22:32.011 And we are sitting and receiving a form of information, which is very very powerful. It comes in the form of images. 01:22:32.011 --> 01:22:34.002 And once the images go in, they don't come out. 01:22:34.414 --> 01:22:37.717 it's almost science fiction in its implications. 01:22:37.717 --> 01:22:42.155 It's Big Brother. And yet we think it's perfectly normal. 01:22:42.155 --> 01:22:47.160 As people's real lives become more and more degraded and unsatisfying 01:22:47.160 --> 01:22:54.328 and petty and vulgar and irritating and sterile, 01:22:55.501 --> 01:23:01.841 then the appeals of those glorified images became all the more powerful. 01:23:01.841 --> 01:23:05.211 There's a great line be Zygmunt Bauman that - 01:23:05.211 --> 01:23:10.583 he says that rational people will go quietly and meekly into a gas chamber 01:23:10.583 --> 01:23:13.074 if only you allow them to believe it's a bathroom. 01:23:15.755 --> 01:23:21.091 And I've lost all hope that my government is capable of looking clearly at the situation. 01:23:25.565 --> 01:23:32.872 Sadly, it looks as though much of our educational system leaves us totally unprepared to question the dominant culture. 01:23:32.872 --> 01:23:37.877 It numbs our critical thinking skills, instead of developing them. 01:23:37.877 --> 01:23:48.185 And it goes along with technical, industrialized society because you need to turn people into interchangeable machine parts 01:23:48.554 --> 01:23:52.820 where you can pull one person out, stick another person in the same spot. 01:23:53.359 --> 01:23:58.194 Narrator.: These children are being taught to accept uncritically whatever they're told. 01:23:58.731 --> 01:24:01.199 Questions are not encouraged. 01:24:02.201 --> 01:24:07.006 I've certainly never been encouraged to question how our culture creates disconnection. 01:24:07.006 --> 01:24:12.745 Every one of us is living in this little comfortable bubble that's completely disconnected 01:24:12.745 --> 01:24:18.584 from the real world of animals and plants and soil and water and natural forces 01:24:18.584 --> 01:24:23.289 that produces everything that's of any meaning whatsoever on this planet. 01:24:23.289 --> 01:24:28.728 If your experience is that your food comes from the grocery store, 01:24:28.728 --> 01:24:30.930 and that your water comes from a tap, 01:24:30.930 --> 01:24:34.467 you will defend to the death the system that brings those to you. 01:24:34.467 --> 01:24:36.102 Because your life depends on it. 01:24:36.102 --> 01:24:38.871 If your experience is that your water comes from a stream 01:24:38.871 --> 01:24:41.507 and that your food comes from a land base, 01:24:41.507 --> 01:24:45.967 you will defend to the death that stream and that land base because your life depends on it. 01:24:47.480 --> 01:24:55.855 Systems of manipulation and exploitation. Structures of disconnection and delusion. Institutions of domination and deceit. 01:24:55.855 --> 01:24:59.689 I had to ask.: who would create such things? 01:25:00.393 --> 01:25:04.730 Only people who have become almost wholly disconnected from their world. 01:25:04.730 --> 01:25:07.733 People who have forgotten who they once were. 01:25:07.733 --> 01:25:10.395 People who have been deeply wounded. 01:25:11.971 --> 01:25:14.540 We've gotten lost in a hall of mirrors. 01:25:14.540 --> 01:25:24.083 Everything that we receive - everything we see, hear, smell, taste, feel - originates in, or is mediated by, humans and machines. 01:25:24.083 --> 01:25:28.621 That affects our consciousness. It gives us an inflated sense 01:25:28.621 --> 01:25:32.358 of our own importance and of what reality is. 01:25:32.358 --> 01:25:37.096 As if, because we've made it, It makes it most real. 01:25:37.096 --> 01:25:44.937 As any narcissist knows, it's endless. We can never get enough of that: enough of that reflection of ourselves. 01:25:44.937 --> 01:25:47.667 What we're really aching for is real relationship. 01:25:49.575 --> 01:25:57.216 Our animal bodies, I think, formed by the Earth itself, want and require a real relationship to the world. 01:25:57.216 --> 01:25:59.252 To the water, wind and soil. 01:25:59.252 --> 01:26:04.212 To the animals, plants and fellow humans that comprise the community into which we were born. 01:26:05.124 --> 01:26:10.084 But we're stuck in the hall of mirrors. And we've begun to lose our sanity. 01:26:10.730 --> 01:26:16.335 So that you see the beginning of something like dissociation, like post-traumatic stress disorder, 01:26:16.335 --> 01:26:19.905 like schizophrenia, like multiple personalities, you know. 01:26:19.905 --> 01:26:28.938 You see that the fragmentation in the world today is being mirrored in all of these kind of very severe psychological disorders. 01:26:29.615 --> 01:26:35.187 if you're in that sort of solitary confinement you're going to start hallucinating. 01:26:35.187 --> 01:26:40.192 And you may end up believing strange things. 01:26:40.192 --> 01:26:42.820 Like the idea that humans are superior. 01:26:44.096 --> 01:26:51.604 Acting out of that belief of superiority, of entitlement, of invincibility, Empire has conquered the world. 01:26:51.604 --> 01:26:56.375 But that conquering has bounced back on the conquerors, leaving everyone wounded. 01:26:56.375 --> 01:27:03.716 if the world, the system that we're living in, is harming other people, 01:27:03.716 --> 01:27:06.619 then that's something that, you know, you can't live with that. 01:27:06.619 --> 01:27:12.825 So if you look at the people who have been assimilated into Empire, 01:27:12.825 --> 01:27:15.461 and if you look at the Imperialists themselves, 01:27:15.461 --> 01:27:21.764 you find an incredible dissociation from reality. 01:27:22.735 --> 01:27:27.239 Dissociated from the reality of the planet, we don't act on its behalf. 01:27:27.239 --> 01:27:35.581 Feeling for nature is diminishing to the degree that people are less desiring 01:27:35.581 --> 01:27:39.352 and less able to influence policy about nature, 01:27:39.352 --> 01:27:42.515 to do anything to protect nature, to have any feeling for nature. 01:27:42.988 --> 01:27:46.719 it's hard to have feeling for it if you never have any contact with it. 01:27:47.360 --> 01:27:50.429 And it's hard to have any contact with the rest of the world 01:27:50.429 --> 01:27:53.432 because we're living like an animal in a cage. 01:27:53.432 --> 01:27:55.798 Just think about an animal in a zoo. 01:27:56.902 --> 01:28:04.775 An animal's deprived of the very things that keep that animal going.: the smells, the sights, the sounds, the instincts, the hunting. 01:28:05.544 --> 01:28:09.480 And they become psychotic. Literally psychotic. 01:28:10.216 --> 01:28:14.587 I think that we've done something to ourselves that is exactly analogous to that. 01:28:14.587 --> 01:28:19.125 We've put ourselves in a cage - this cage of civilization, of cities. 01:28:19.125 --> 01:28:21.560 And it's made us, in a way, psychotic. 01:28:21.560 --> 01:28:26.932 That - if you would have a group of hunter- gatherers - and this has happened a lot - 01:28:26.932 --> 01:28:34.673 hunter-gatherers watch behavior of people in our society, they would think we were crazy for the way we behave. 01:28:34.673 --> 01:28:36.004 Because we are. 01:28:37.510 --> 01:28:43.749 I stop. I listen. I watch the world. The disconnection is everywhere. 01:28:43.749 --> 01:28:54.455 You learn it as a child. You learn to not feel the kind of pain that is inflicted upon you by the lack of connection. 01:28:55.194 --> 01:28:58.595 By being in a crib by yourself in a dark room. 01:28:59.031 --> 01:29:05.438 By not having the breastfeeding. By not having the constant contact with other people's bodies. 01:29:05.438 --> 01:29:11.877 Television viewing for children, and I think to some degree for adults, 01:29:11.877 --> 01:29:23.022 is a training for more hyperactive lifestyles and hyperactive informational systems. 01:29:23.022 --> 01:29:33.466 And that is putting people into a kind of emotional psychological state, which makes it impossible to relate to nature. 01:29:33.466 --> 01:29:36.335 So, I mean, it's concrete alienation again. 01:29:36.335 --> 01:29:46.579 most of us don't have a human community where we can rest and feel safe and feel like "i'm going to be taken care of". 01:29:46.579 --> 01:29:54.887 in our culture there's so many things that are set up to stop us from connecting directly. 01:29:54.887 --> 01:29:58.691 If you go to a bar- we take this for granted - if you go to a bar it's dark. 01:29:58.691 --> 01:30:00.522 There's really loud music playing. 01:30:01.861 --> 01:30:08.289 Because if it were quiet and there were good light people would get freaked out to have to deal with each other so directly. 01:30:11.604 --> 01:30:14.340 Our economy thrives on this. 01:30:14.340 --> 01:30:20.040 It's pretty easy to sell stuff to people who are so disconnected from the things that they most need. 01:30:20.713 --> 01:30:24.513 The stores are filled with bandages for the wounds of Empire. 01:30:26.018 --> 01:30:28.621 There are other ways to look at this wounding. 01:30:28.621 --> 01:30:36.795 Derrick Jensen sees the dominant culture as an abusive system, leaving its members suffering from Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. 01:30:36.795 --> 01:30:42.968 What happens if you're not traumatized once or twice, but if you're actually in captivity for a long time? if you're held as prisoner? 01:30:42.968 --> 01:30:47.973 One of the things that happens is you become afraid of all relationships and you have to control everything around you. 01:30:47.973 --> 01:30:53.946 You forget that mutual relationships are possible and you begin to believe that all relationships are based upon hierarchy. 01:30:53.946 --> 01:30:56.482 Because that was your experience. 01:30:56.482 --> 01:31:03.455 And you come to believe that all relationships are based on power. And, of course, when we look around that's what we see. 01:31:03.455 --> 01:31:12.765 So we are too frightened to enter into a relationship with these trees, with all of our neighbors. 01:31:12.765 --> 01:31:16.098 And so we call them resources: those to be exploited. 01:31:17.303 --> 01:31:22.575 Everything within an abusive family structure is set up to protect the abuser. Everything. 01:31:22.575 --> 01:31:30.141 And by the same token, everything within this culture is setup to protect the rich. That's what this culture is about. 01:31:31.784 --> 01:31:38.424 Why do so many victims of abuse stay with their abusers? 01:31:38.424 --> 01:31:45.965 Because they're identified with the system. And they've been taught since they were very - since early on - that everything is about protecting that system. 01:31:45.965 --> 01:31:52.071 with civilization, we've been taught to identify with this larger whole that isn't us. 01:31:52.071 --> 01:32:00.171 We identify more strongly as "civilized" than we do as living beings. 01:32:02.047 --> 01:32:06.352 Over the years I've begun to break my own identification with the dominant culture, 01:32:06.352 --> 01:32:10.356 to reconnect with myself as a living creature walking the Earth. 01:32:10.356 --> 01:32:14.493 I'm still not finished with the task. A daunting challenge. 01:32:14.493 --> 01:32:18.452 And yet one of the most rewarding things I've ever done. 01:32:20.065 --> 01:32:23.694 I've also learned to view this culture through the lens of addiction. 01:32:24.536 --> 01:32:34.468 Addiction is based on continually seeking more of what it is we don't really want. 01:32:35.214 --> 01:32:38.775 And therefore, never being fully satisfied. 01:32:39.151 --> 01:32:44.156 There's a deep need. There's a deep hole, a deep longing, 01:32:44.156 --> 01:32:50.129 a deep fear, a deep grief, a deep rage. 01:32:50.129 --> 01:32:55.134 And so there's food, there's cigarettes, there's alcohol, there's drugs, there's computers, 01:32:55.134 --> 01:33:00.606 there's TV, there's movies, there's shopping, there's music. . .it's endless. 01:33:00.606 --> 01:33:10.249 Chellis Glendinning.: All of that, that we've now determined people can be addicted to, it's like a technological fix. 01:33:10.249 --> 01:33:18.123 So as long as that's working, why would I stop? I won't stop. An alcoholic doesn't stop. 01:33:18.123 --> 01:33:22.753 A drug addict doesn't stop as long as it's working. But you reach a point where it doesn't work any more. 01:33:23.829 --> 01:33:30.636 After centuries of abuse, disconnection, delusion and addiction, it looks as though we're desperate to hit bottom. 01:33:30.636 --> 01:33:39.144 it's almost as if we're wanting to hit bottom so hard that we either shift or die. 01:33:39.144 --> 01:33:41.772 Cause it's not worth continuing like this. 01:33:42.514 --> 01:33:47.886 so many people are so very, very unhappy. And they want this nightmare to end. 01:33:47.886 --> 01:33:58.194 And they don't recognize that the death that they want is a cultural death, and is a spiritual and metaphorical death. 01:33:59.531 --> 01:34:02.868 That would explain why we continue to foul our nest. 01:34:02.868 --> 01:34:07.237 If what we want is to hit bottom, we've found the perfect means to get us there. 01:34:07.639 --> 01:34:08.128 Denial. 01:34:08.240 --> 01:34:08.831 Denial. 01:34:08.941 --> 01:34:09.464 Denial. 01:34:09.575 --> 01:34:10.200 Denial. 01:34:10.309 --> 01:34:11.139 Denial. 01:34:11.243 --> 01:34:12.232 Denial. 01:34:12.344 --> 01:34:17.082 Denial in huge neon letters that blink on and off 01:34:17.082 --> 01:34:20.574 like the old Rocky and Bullwinkle credits at the end of the show! 01:34:22.287 --> 01:34:27.960 Again I stop. And listen. And watch as I move through the landscape of Empire. 01:34:27.960 --> 01:34:31.263 The denial is so thick that you could cut it with a paper knife. 01:34:31.263 --> 01:34:34.600 If only you weren't still using it to frost that cake. 01:34:34.600 --> 01:34:39.605 Denial takes tremendous energy. And if you have to work really, really hard 01:34:39.605 --> 01:34:47.137 to not acknowledge the fact that this culture's killing everything, 01:34:47.679 --> 01:34:49.840 you're not going to have much energy left over. 01:34:50.582 --> 01:34:56.155 It's the energy I freed up when I stepped out of my own denial that has made this documentary possible. 01:34:56.155 --> 01:35:01.115 The more I let down my defenses, the more I find the power to look more deeply at the world. 01:35:01.994 --> 01:35:09.301 And when I look I find the story of "somehow", a fantasy that keeps us passive in the face of the world situation. 01:35:09.301 --> 01:35:13.772 "We've muddled through things before. And somehow we'll muddle through this one." 01:35:13.772 --> 01:35:15.507 "somehow, everything's ok." 01:35:15.507 --> 01:35:18.076 somehow? How do we get there? You know? 01:35:18.076 --> 01:35:23.173 It's like - it doesn't do any good to fantasize if there's no way to get from here to there. 01:35:24.616 --> 01:35:30.680 Is there a way to get from here to there? And where is there, exactly? Where do go from here? 01:35:31.557 --> 01:35:37.928 As world events break through our walls of denial, voices of helplessness and resignation fill the air. 01:35:38.530 --> 01:35:42.296 Voice 1 : If we knew some way to get out of it we would. But we don't. 01:35:42.701 --> 01:35:44.498 Voice 2: Whatever's gonna happen is gonna happen. 01:35:44.870 --> 01:35:47.498 Voice 3: There's gonna have to be some sort of catastrophic event. 01:35:47.873 --> 01:35:51.844 Voice 4: A meltdown of all of these systems that we've been depending on. 01:35:51.844 --> 01:35:58.750 Voice 5: We figure there's no way to stop the train from heading off the end of the bridge, you know. We're just gonna go down screaming. 01:35:58.750 --> 01:36:04.656 Voice 6: And finally you just say, "Aww fuck it. this is. . . you know. . . let's just fuck it. Who cares?" 01:36:04.656 --> 01:36:11.289 Voice 7: You know, we might as well go out and party and have a good time. Because the world's not going anywhere good. 01:36:14.299 --> 01:36:18.292 this system feels like a trap, a madhouse, a prison. 01:36:18.971 --> 01:36:23.308 With resignation this profound, It seems as though there is little left to do 01:36:23.308 --> 01:36:24.309 but to make the prison 01:36:24.309 --> 01:36:26.709 as comfortable as is possible. 01:36:31.083 --> 01:36:36.355 Narrator.: Personalized. And with accessories engineered to our personalized taste. 01:36:36.355 --> 01:36:39.153 For convenience. For comfort. 01:36:40.626 --> 01:36:42.958 For convenience and safety. 01:36:43.795 --> 01:36:45.786 With protection from rain. 01:36:48.800 --> 01:36:53.430 Blocking out the wintry gale with comforting warmth. 01:36:56.308 --> 01:37:00.301 To hold out the searing heat with cooling comfort. 01:37:02.281 --> 01:37:08.987 Capitalist culture is telling us to buy. And we will feel better if we buy more... 01:37:08.987 --> 01:37:17.262 . . .that we are incomplete and that we need to fill this emptiness within us by consuming. 01:37:17.262 --> 01:37:19.753 Consume, consume, consume. 01:37:21.066 --> 01:37:24.369 We've looked now at the train that is hurtling us to destruction, 01:37:24.369 --> 01:37:26.171 at the tracks that constrain us, 01:37:26.171 --> 01:37:29.107 at the locomotive power that drives us to oblivion. 01:37:29.107 --> 01:37:32.838 And we see more clearly now exactly where we are headed. 01:37:33.312 --> 01:37:35.047 It all adds up to this.: 01:37:35.047 --> 01:37:40.417 this culture is not only killing the planet, It is destroying us as human beings. 01:37:43.155 --> 01:37:46.454 The train plunges forward at blinding speed. 01:37:47.559 --> 01:37:49.459 "Charlie stole the handle. " 01:37:50.729 --> 01:37:52.629 So who are we going to be? 01:37:57.035 --> 01:38:02.268 First Psychologist.: In the film I see a man standing on the ledge. Do you think he really wants to live? 01:38:02.941 --> 01:38:04.966 Second Psychologist.: The answer, of course, is yes. 01:38:08.280 --> 01:38:12.239 I don't think humans are going to go extinct. We can't kill ourselves off. 01:38:13.185 --> 01:38:17.622 I just don't see any plausible way it could happen. . . 01:38:19.057 --> 01:38:20.993 well. . . I guess. . . yeah. . . 01:38:20.993 --> 01:38:27.265 What we could - what might happen is the earth could get into a serious runaway greenhouse effect 01:38:27.265 --> 01:38:30.369 that could turn the whole planet like the planet Venus. 01:38:30.369 --> 01:38:33.202 Where it's like a thousand degrees and full of methane. 01:38:43.815 --> 01:38:49.054 A powerful creative tension arises when we hold two things at the same time.: 01:38:49.054 --> 01:38:54.014 a clear assessment of where we are, and a clear vision of where we want to go. 01:38:54.993 --> 01:38:58.087 I don't see that the culture of Empire has either. 01:38:58.630 --> 01:39:03.434 Trapped in a fantasy of domination and control, any clear assessment of the world 01:39:03.434 --> 01:39:07.871 gets trampled underfoot in the mad march toward the scam of progress. 01:39:08.540 --> 01:39:15.878 Traumatized by disconnection and abuse, the people of Empire now hold visions that are unhinged and insane. 01:39:17.215 --> 01:39:24.245 Born and raised in captivity, we're now so institutionalized that few of us can even see the prison bars. 01:39:25.057 --> 01:39:27.183 But we all know our cell numbers. 01:39:28.760 --> 01:39:32.531 Waking on the train, we find that we don't know where we are. 01:39:32.531 --> 01:39:34.829 And we don't know where we're going. 01:39:35.433 --> 01:39:39.894 We hear the whistle blowing. And we can see the world speeding by. 01:39:40.739 --> 01:39:43.138 Some of us want to stop the train. 01:39:43.941 --> 01:39:47.308 We want to get off before it reaches the end of the line. 01:39:48.180 --> 01:39:52.138 But we have no clear idea how to get from here to there. 01:39:57.556 --> 01:40:07.955 The secret plan is that we're going to go on this way, no matter what, for as long as we can. 01:40:08.532 --> 01:40:16.871 I likened it to the secret plan in Nazi Germany. It was an open secret. 01:40:17.909 --> 01:40:27.307 Everyone knew that those Jews weren't going off to resorts or to have picnics in the woods. 01:40:27.886 --> 01:40:31.456 But no one talked about it. And no one talks about this either. 01:40:31.456 --> 01:40:33.358 This is scary! We're in a democracy! 01:40:33.358 --> 01:40:36.995 We're in the biggest democracy on the planet and we're not getting informed. 01:40:36.995 --> 01:40:40.799 And we're not looking, either. We're not asking. 01:40:40.799 --> 01:40:49.832 As civilization has provided more and more for us, it's made us more and more infantile. 01:40:50.108 --> 01:40:58.450 So that we are less and less able to think for ourselves, less and less able to provide for ourselves. 01:40:58.450 --> 01:41:04.656 And this makes us more of a herd. . . where you develop more of a herd mentality. . . 01:41:04.656 --> 01:41:10.686 where we take our cues from the people around us, from the authority figures around us. 01:41:27.312 --> 01:41:29.246 The situation is desperate. 01:41:29.246 --> 01:41:38.022 It's the World-Wide Eco-Slam, where climate Crash goes head-to-head with The Peak oil kid and Overshoot tears into Mass Extinction. 01:41:38.022 --> 01:41:42.983 It's the Smackdown at the End of the Universe and tickets go on sale this Friday. 01:41:44.262 --> 01:41:47.299 The American lifestyle is unsustainable. 01:41:47.299 --> 01:41:50.701 That means that it can't be sustained. 01:41:50.701 --> 01:41:52.532 It's coming to an end. 01:41:53.438 --> 01:42:00.606 Remember how thirty years ago we looked to the future and said "thirty years from now, if we don't act, we're going to be in trouble"? 01:42:01.478 --> 01:42:05.279 Well it's now and we are because we didn't. 01:42:06.183 --> 01:42:09.087 The fundamental laws of life have been broken. 01:42:09.087 --> 01:42:12.147 The consequences of that are now apparent. 01:42:13.625 --> 01:42:19.757 Remember the Secret Plan.: the dominant culture is not going to stop until it destroys everything. 01:42:20.432 --> 01:42:21.421 It can't. 01:42:21.866 --> 01:42:27.498 It's built on a foundation of faulty assumptions. I see no way that it can be reformed. 01:42:28.106 --> 01:42:32.975 It can only be discarded, so that something new can grow in its place. 01:42:34.512 --> 01:42:36.639 We have to look at this. 01:43:05.710 --> 01:43:10.482 We've got to understand that we are part of a living community. 01:43:10.482 --> 01:43:14.786 We're not the masters of the living community. We're not the guardians of the living community. 01:43:14.786 --> 01:43:24.262 We are just another species. And we have the power to destroy that community. 01:43:24.262 --> 01:43:27.425 And when we do that we destroy ourselves. 01:43:27.899 --> 01:43:33.905 if we don't figure out what our place in the universe is 01:43:33.905 --> 01:43:36.931 we're not going to have a place in the universe. 01:43:46.751 --> 01:43:51.656 I have read many books about the world situation. And I have noticed a curious thing.: 01:43:51.656 --> 01:43:53.556 the Happy Chapter". 01:43:54.959 --> 01:44:00.765 After an entire book of dire prognostications and appalling facts comes the chapter at the end 01:44:00.765 --> 01:44:05.837 that says that if we only do this and this and that we'll find the solution, 01:44:05.837 --> 01:44:11.469 that while there is much to give us concern, there is also much about which we can be hopeful. 01:44:13.011 --> 01:44:15.280 I don't like happy chapters. 01:44:15.280 --> 01:44:17.248 They've lulled me back to sleep. 01:44:17.248 --> 01:44:21.116 They suggest that somebody somewhere somehow is handling it. 01:44:21.786 --> 01:44:23.617 I can just go on with my life. 01:44:24.122 --> 01:44:28.821 And hey, we've got thirty years or so, right? That's lots of time. 01:44:30.228 --> 01:44:33.026 I'm sorry, folks, but I think time's up. 01:44:34.032 --> 01:44:36.660 I have no happy chapter to offer you. 01:44:37.268 --> 01:44:39.668 No list of quick and painless fixes. 01:44:40.872 --> 01:44:44.672 No plan that will keep the train rolling forever on this track. 01:44:45.310 --> 01:44:47.801 I see no way for that to happen. 01:44:48.847 --> 01:44:54.342 If there is going to be a happy chapter, we shall have to write it together, 01:44:55.487 --> 01:45:01.949 with the rest of the community of life, on the pages of the living world. 01:45:02.894 --> 01:45:06.131 I sometimes have dreams about my grandchildren coming also. 01:45:06.131 --> 01:45:08.466 And these dreams sometimes turn unpleasant. 01:45:08.466 --> 01:45:12.771 Because the grandchildren come and they come from a North Carolina and from a California 01:45:12.771 --> 01:45:15.573 that is polluted, the air they can't breathe. 01:45:15.573 --> 01:45:18.843 And they say, "Granddad, did you let that happen?" 01:45:18.843 --> 01:45:20.712 And they're angry when they get there. 01:45:20.712 --> 01:45:24.204 I think they're going to look back and shake their heads and say, 01:45:26.151 --> 01:45:28.381 'what happened to those people? 01:45:28.887 --> 01:45:33.290 How did they lose sight of such basic things?" 01:45:44.769 --> 01:45:50.608 There is a new story arising in the world.: the story of the Great Turning, 01:45:50.608 --> 01:45:58.982 the turning away from a culture of domination and death, and the turning toward a culture that is life-sustaining and life-renewing. 01:45:59.651 --> 01:46:03.382 All over the planet, people are now telling this story. 01:46:03.988 --> 01:46:08.948 The Buddhist scholar and deep ecologist Joanna Macy tells this story in her workshops. 01:46:09.727 --> 01:46:14.130 The writer and activist David Korten tells it in his book by the same name. 01:46:14.599 --> 01:46:19.559 It's a story to be told by our descendents, looking back on this present time. 01:46:20.805 --> 01:46:24.609 Will we be the monsters of our great- grandchildren's nightmares? 01:46:24.609 --> 01:46:33.677 Or will we walk, as the story of the Great Turning says, as heroes and healers in the epic poetry of those still-unborn voices? 01:46:34.385 --> 01:46:38.323 Will we be reviled for our entitled, destructive ways? 01:46:38.323 --> 01:46:42.160 Or will we be lovingly remembered in the songs of our descendents 01:46:42.160 --> 01:46:48.066 as they recount the story of this lost and very wounded tribe that stepped back from the abyss 01:46:48.066 --> 01:46:51.365 and found its way home to the community of living souls? 01:46:53.204 --> 01:46:54.466 We get to choose. 01:46:56.174 --> 01:46:58.165 Who are we going to be? 01:47:00.011 --> 01:47:03.982 Part of me still wishes that someone would just take care of it, you know. 01:47:03.982 --> 01:47:08.753 That it's their job. That's what we pay them for. 01:47:08.753 --> 01:47:11.313 They're supposed to be the wise parents of us. 01:47:12.090 --> 01:47:18.654 it's going to come as a really rude awakening when people realize that a) they can't and b) they won't. 01:47:19.364 --> 01:47:29.103 I don't think life for most Americans, despite our affluence, is all that it's been cracked up to be. 01:47:29.507 --> 01:47:32.374 And people are afraid to talk about that. 01:47:33.845 --> 01:47:39.083 they're afraid they're the only ones that are experiencing deep dissatisfaction. 01:47:39.083 --> 01:47:41.419 it's really so sad, you know. 01:47:41.419 --> 01:47:46.291 You look at - and particularly American culture is emblematic of this - 01:47:46.291 --> 01:47:51.829 go to a typical shopping mall and look at the people around you and the environment around you. 01:47:51.829 --> 01:48:01.170 And the utter shallowness and hopelessness of it all is profoundly depressing. 01:48:07.779 --> 01:48:08.643 Look. 01:48:09.414 --> 01:48:10.779 Is this who are we? 01:48:11.316 --> 01:48:15.685 Consumers? Shoppers? Workers? Voters? 01:48:16.321 --> 01:48:21.782 Does our identity lie in Nielsen numbers and box office receipts and the Gross Domestic Product? 01:48:22.193 --> 01:48:26.664 Are we on this Earth to sell cheeseburgers to each other and yell at our children 01:48:26.664 --> 01:48:30.600 and drive around in clown cars and fall asleep in front of the tube? 01:48:31.035 --> 01:48:37.838 Are we destroying the planet, as Dmitry Orlov asks, just "to be somewhat more comfortable for a little while"? 01:48:38.943 --> 01:48:43.903 I keep having to remind myself.: this culture is not humanity. 01:48:44.616 --> 01:48:49.520 It is only one culture out of the tens of thousands that used to exist on this planet. 01:48:49.520 --> 01:48:53.012 Only one culture out of the many that are still hanging on. 01:48:53.558 --> 01:48:59.530 That it has overrun the world means nothing about its rightness, its greatness, or its destiny. 01:48:59.530 --> 01:49:04.535 It means only that we live in a system of social evolution that selects for short-term power 01:49:04.535 --> 01:49:10.303 rather than for compassion, or for sanity, or for long-term survival. 01:49:12.143 --> 01:49:15.510 I think we are much more than we've ever been allowed to believe. 01:49:16.948 --> 01:49:24.150 Denied the connection and meaning that nourishes us, we've grown small and stunted in the shallow soil of this culture. 01:49:24.989 --> 01:49:28.447 It's time to revitalize that ground of our being. 01:49:30.695 --> 01:49:38.002 What really is important, and what adds value and what adds... you know. . . 01:49:38.002 --> 01:49:40.869 what does a life well-lived look like? 01:49:41.572 --> 01:49:49.638 Humans have a history of living much more in touch with the natural world, with the planet. 01:49:50.148 --> 01:49:54.608 Much more sustainable. 01:49:55.353 --> 01:49:56.843 Much more spiritual. 01:49:57.555 --> 01:49:58.954 Much more communal. 01:49:59.624 --> 01:50:00.892 That's who we are. 01:50:00.892 --> 01:50:05.386 As all of this starts to shift and change and disintegrate and collapse, 01:50:06.164 --> 01:50:10.435 there's the opportunity, in fact, to come back to ourselves. 01:50:10.435 --> 01:50:16.032 To grow up, fundamentally, as people and as a culture. 01:50:18.509 --> 01:50:20.909 We're in a time of initiation, folks. 01:50:21.512 --> 01:50:27.747 A mass initiation at the level of culture itself. A vision quest for the collective mind. 01:50:28.653 --> 01:50:33.658 this culture's arrogance, its adolescent sense of invincibility and entitlement, 01:50:33.658 --> 01:50:42.691 must be sloughed off to make room for a more mature sense of interdependence with, and responsibility to, the community of life. 01:50:43.201 --> 01:50:45.226 this is the work of initiation. 01:50:46.604 --> 01:50:51.871 Stepping into this cultural maturity, we will take our rightful place in the community of life. 01:50:52.276 --> 01:50:55.040 And we will fall back in love with the world. 01:50:55.913 --> 01:50:59.007 We can do this. But only if we choose to. 01:51:00.084 --> 01:51:04.145 Only if we lay down our weapons in this insane war against the world. 01:51:04.789 --> 01:51:09.055 Only if we surrender control and move back into relationship. 01:51:21.672 --> 01:51:24.675 You want unlimited growth? You can have it. 01:51:24.675 --> 01:51:26.643 All you've ever wished for and more. 01:51:27.178 --> 01:51:33.378 Growth in relationship and experience. In self-awareness and spirit and love and community and connection. 01:51:33.851 --> 01:51:37.343 Growth in purpose and meaning. Growth in vision. 01:51:38.389 --> 01:51:44.562 When we step back into the community of life, we will find out immediately what has always been true.: 01:51:44.562 --> 01:51:46.792 all of life's on our side. 01:51:47.532 --> 01:51:50.935 We'll have polar bears on our team. And elm trees. 01:51:50.935 --> 01:51:54.427 And condors and salmon and dragonflies and plankton. 01:51:55.006 --> 01:52:00.239 We'll walk with the wind and the water, with mountains underfoot and stars overhead. 01:52:00.778 --> 01:52:06.341 The tiger's blood will course through our veins. The horse's breath will fill our lungs. 01:52:06.884 --> 01:52:13.187 We'll be more connected to real power than we've ever dreamt possible in our sick fantasy of domination. 01:52:13.958 --> 01:52:16.859 "Power with." Not "power over." 01:52:17.428 --> 01:52:22.832 The power of a species that has passed through initiation and into maturity. 01:52:26.671 --> 01:52:30.038 I think we need to look at what is it we want 01:52:30.908 --> 01:52:35.446 and see if civilization as we've created it is giving us that. 01:52:35.446 --> 01:52:38.549 And if it's not, what might give us that? 01:52:38.549 --> 01:52:40.484 What does it mean to dismantle civilization? 01:52:40.484 --> 01:52:45.615 What it means is depriving the rich of the ability to steal from the poor and to destroy the world. 01:52:46.224 --> 01:52:48.226 I can't give a better definition than that. 01:52:48.226 --> 01:52:57.101 There's no real reason why the entire country of the United States couldn't face reality. 01:52:57.101 --> 01:53:00.571 You just have to drop the idea of capitalism. 01:53:00.571 --> 01:53:06.110 You have to drop the idea of corporations running things. 01:53:06.110 --> 01:53:09.238 You have to drop the idea of economic growth. 01:53:10.348 --> 01:53:12.373 It could be done. it could be done. 01:53:15.553 --> 01:53:21.626 There was a great tradition among the Cheyenne dog soldiers called the picket pin and stake. 01:53:21.626 --> 01:53:26.864 they would get a tanned rope, called a dog rope, and a picket pin, 01:53:26.864 --> 01:53:34.972 that's used to stake horses to the ground, and they would attach the picket pin to the sash, 01:53:34.972 --> 01:53:37.975 the dog rope that was attached to them. 01:53:37.975 --> 01:53:41.913 And then in battle they would drive the picket stake into the ground. 01:53:41.913 --> 01:53:46.417 And that was done as a mark of resolve. Because once it's driven, you can't leave 01:53:46.417 --> 01:53:53.557 until either you're dead, or you're relieved by another dog soldier, or the battle's over and everyone is safe. 01:53:53.557 --> 01:53:57.194 so the question i ask people is, you know, at what point, 01:53:57.194 --> 01:53:59.219 you know, where will you drive your picket pin? 01:53:59.931 --> 01:54:03.264 Where will you stake yourself out and say "i'm not going to retreat any more"? 01:54:15.813 --> 01:54:18.077 Our descendents are watching us. 01:54:18.916 --> 01:54:20.440 How will we be? 01:54:22.019 --> 01:54:26.979 It's time to be thoughtful, coming together to learn about the world as it really is. 01:54:27.658 --> 01:54:31.062 Reading between the lies. Doing the math. 01:54:31.062 --> 01:54:33.053 Studying the world situation. 01:54:33.864 --> 01:54:35.593 There will be a quiz. 01:54:36.634 --> 01:54:41.901 A paradigm shift will require that we question our deepest and most fundamental assumptions. 01:54:42.573 --> 01:54:49.877 And that will require that we take our current worldview gently in our arms and hold it while it breathes its last. 01:54:51.882 --> 01:54:55.453 Step into a new story. Walk away from the pyramids. 01:54:55.453 --> 01:54:59.287 Get out of the crumbling building. Break out of prison. 01:55:00.024 --> 01:55:04.984 Choose your favorite metaphor. Choose your own adventure. But choose. 01:55:06.297 --> 01:55:08.632 It's time to be truthful. 01:55:08.632 --> 01:55:16.741 Millions of sensual pulsing animal bodies are now living trapped and used and starved in cities and cubicles 01:55:16.741 --> 01:55:22.805 and sweatshops and food courts and traffic jams and suburbs and public school classrooms. 01:55:23.614 --> 01:55:27.380 People who are not rich and white already know this. 01:55:28.119 --> 01:55:32.613 What would happen if we let ourselves feel our feelings about all of this? 01:55:33.457 --> 01:55:37.359 The entire community of life on this planet is now being threatened. 01:55:38.562 --> 01:55:43.329 Where do we stick our picket pins? Where do we take a stand? 01:55:44.035 --> 01:55:48.199 When do we find the courage to let ourselves feel what's going on? 01:55:49.373 --> 01:55:54.333 Our feelings are the swiftest path back to our forgotten selves. 01:55:55.880 --> 01:55:57.939 It's time to be open and humble. 01:55:58.682 --> 01:56:05.087 There are huge forces at work in the world, both seen and unseen. It's time to ask for help. 01:56:06.023 --> 01:56:11.689 Ask the ancestors. Ask the gods. Ask your God. 01:56:12.363 --> 01:56:18.165 Go outside and lie down on the Earth and ask the land, and the sky, and the life of this place. 01:56:19.537 --> 01:56:21.732 And then listen for a response. 01:56:22.773 --> 01:56:28.746 Listen to the voices of soil and stone, wind and water, the voices of cirrus clouds 01:56:28.746 --> 01:56:33.884 and chickadees, of red squirrels and wood beetles and Russian olives and hickories. 01:56:33.884 --> 01:56:40.483 The world will tell us what it knows, if only we will be still. And listen. 01:56:41.525 --> 01:56:42.685 And then speak. 01:56:43.494 --> 01:56:46.827 It's time to show up in our own lives and tell the truth. 01:56:47.431 --> 01:56:51.367 It's time to talk about the world situation with everyone we see. 01:56:52.002 --> 01:56:58.237 We're all in this together. What a relief it'll be, to discover that we are not alone. 01:56:59.977 --> 01:57:02.913 It's time to act with great intention. 01:57:02.913 --> 01:57:08.486 There is work aplenty to do in this weary world, and people engaged in that work. 01:57:08.486 --> 01:57:11.080 Find those people. Join in. 01:57:11.689 --> 01:57:16.786 Save rivers and stop bulldozers and stand up at city council meetings to tell your truth. 01:57:17.328 --> 01:57:20.431 Share skills. Evolve local communities. 01:57:20.431 --> 01:57:26.836 Move from agriculture to permaculture and grow your own food. Learn about medicinal herbs. 01:57:27.505 --> 01:57:34.673 As Derrick Jensen says, "we need it all." Find your work, and do it. It's time. 01:57:35.813 --> 01:57:37.940 But what about that speeding train? 01:57:38.949 --> 01:57:41.918 How will the Great Turning turn? 01:57:43.053 --> 01:57:49.226 We can wait for the train to crash on its own and hope that it doesn't kill us, and everything else. 01:57:49.226 --> 01:57:54.598 But with the children grown, perhaps we can come together and decide to dismantle, 01:57:54.598 --> 01:57:57.101 joyfully and with conscious intent, 01:57:57.101 --> 01:58:02.368 the rusty and dangerous old swing-set of a culture that no longer serves us. 01:58:03.207 --> 01:58:05.609 this may seem an impossible task. 01:58:05.609 --> 01:58:10.103 But if the alternative is extinction, then we have nothing to lose. 01:58:11.282 --> 01:58:16.153 We humans once knew how to live on this planet. A few still do. 01:58:16.153 --> 01:58:20.487 And that's the good news. It can be done. 01:58:21.258 --> 01:58:24.455 We can do way, way better than Empire. 01:58:35.706 --> 01:58:38.402 Let's jump off the train and build a boat. 01:58:38.876 --> 01:58:44.439 The train is constrained to rigid tracks and its momentum makes it almost impossible to steer. 01:58:44.915 --> 01:58:48.851 But the boat? Ah, the boat is a very different thing. 01:58:49.320 --> 01:58:54.121 Boats set sail into the unknown, subject only to wind and wave and weather. 01:58:54.892 --> 01:59:00.558 Boats can be lifeboats, preserving wisdom and understanding while the storm rages overhead. 01:59:01.098 --> 01:59:06.058 Boats can be arks, safeguarding the life of the world as the floodwaters rise. 01:59:06.837 --> 01:59:16.576 And boats can carry us into adventure, away from the shores of the current paradigm and to those unseen shores of a future not yet written. 01:59:17.181 --> 01:59:19.917 find your people and build a boat. 01:59:19.917 --> 01:59:24.980 Build a local community to serve the world and preserve the life of a piece of land. 01:59:25.522 --> 01:59:33.520 Or set sail in the wider world, interrupting the destruction, healing the wounds, crafting connections and changing minds. 01:59:34.064 --> 01:59:37.835 Build a boat. A lifeboat. An ark. 01:59:37.835 --> 01:59:42.670 A galleon of adventure and imagination destined for unknown lands. 01:59:43.607 --> 01:59:44.904 Build it now. 01:59:45.709 --> 01:59:47.176 The ice is melting. 01:59:48.145 --> 01:59:50.079 The waters are rising. 01:59:51.582 --> 01:59:54.449 We're going to have to let go of the shore. 01:59:55.653 --> 02:00:00.057 I do not know if I will survive the crash of industrial civilization 02:00:00.057 --> 02:00:04.255 or the impacts of the climate change that that civilization has unleashed. 02:00:05.062 --> 02:00:09.658 I do know this.: I have a choice about how I meet it. 02:00:10.167 --> 02:00:12.032 I have a choice. 02:00:12.636 --> 02:00:14.194 We have a choice. 02:00:15.205 --> 02:00:22.446 I can meet it with a burger in my hand, a French fry in my mouth, and a cold drink spilling onto my jeans. 02:00:22.446 --> 02:00:28.316 Or I can meet it with consciousness, integrity, and the sense of purpose that is my birthright. 02:00:29.320 --> 02:00:36.026 I can meet it on the far side of initiation, a mature and related member of the community of life, 02:00:36.026 --> 02:00:41.589 standing tall, doing my best to protect and serve this Earth that I love. 02:00:42.966 --> 02:00:44.866 this is the course I've chosen. 02:00:45.235 --> 02:00:47.032 this is my picket pin.: 02:00:47.638 --> 02:00:51.074 I will show up and I will tell my truth. 02:00:52.242 --> 02:00:56.576 But it's hard to sail alone, when the seas rage so fiercely. 02:00:57.448 --> 02:01:01.509 If you sail with me, we shall both be made stronger. 02:01:01.885 --> 02:01:06.288 And when others join us, then our crew will be made strong indeed. 02:01:07.958 --> 02:01:11.860 Together, we will set forth, to find that new land. 02:01:13.997 --> 02:01:16.363 What a way to go. . . 02:01:17.000 --> 02:01:18.627 // Let's build a boat // 02:01:20.404 --> 02:01:22.565 // In case the waters rise // 02:01:23.474 --> 02:01:24.941 // Let's build a boat // 02:01:27.344 --> 02:01:29.980 // Clouds they gather in the skies // 02:01:29.980 --> 02:01:31.447 // Let's build a boat // 02:01:33.350 --> 02:01:35.944 // For when the storm comes // 02:01:36.320 --> 02:01:37.787 // Let's build a boat // 02:01:39.390 --> 02:01:42.257 // For when the rain it beat like drums // 02:01:42.593 --> 02:01:45.729 // Oh the levee will get pounded // 02:01:45.729 --> 02:01:49.533 // Now the people are out having fun // 02:01:49.533 --> 02:01:52.469 // Someday our work will pay off // 02:01:52.469 --> 02:01:55.706 // We will float others will be overcome // 02:01:55.706 --> 02:01:57.901 // But you can't outrun the water // 02:01:58.709 --> 02:02:02.008 // Oh you can't outrun the water // 02:02:02.379 --> 02:02:07.510 // You can't outrun the water // 02:02:08.185 --> 02:02:09.652 // Let's build a boat // 02:02:46.523 --> 02:02:47.990 // Let's build a boat // 02:02:49.827 --> 02:02:52.762 // Take me to the other slde // 02:02:53.130 --> 02:02:54.597 // Let's build a boat // 02:02:55.466 --> 02:02:59.203 // Be forewarned this is no easy ride // 02:02:59.203 --> 02:03:01.000 // Let's build a boat // 02:03:02.706 --> 02:03:05.809 // Big enough for all of us // 02:03:05.809 --> 02:03:07.276 // Let's build a boat // 02:03:09.012 --> 02:03:10.614 // One that's good enough // 02:03:10.614 --> 02:03:12.349 // One that we can trust // 02:03:12.349 --> 02:03:15.419 // Oh the levee will get pounded // 02:03:15.419 --> 02:03:18.445 // Oh the people are out having fun // 02:03:19.089 --> 02:03:21.992 // Someday our work will pay off // 02:03:21.992 --> 02:03:25.128 // We will float others will be overcome // 02:03:25.128 --> 02:03:27.323 // But you can't outrun the water // 02:03:28.265 --> 02:03:31.564 // Oh you can't outrun the water // 02:03:31.902 --> 02:03:37.033 // You can't outrun the water // 02:03:37.908 --> 02:03:39.375 // Let's build a boat //