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VisionQuest Pictures presents a Storkboy Declaration

What A Way To Go
Life At The End Of Empire

A middle class white guy comes to grips with Peak Oil, Climate
Change, Mass Extinction, Population Overshoot and the demise of the
American Lifestyle.

Featuring interviews with Daniel Quinn, Derrick Jensen, Jerry Mander, Chellis Glendinning, Richard Heinberg, Thomas Berry, William Catton, Ran Prieur and Richard Manning. Produced by Sally Erickson. Written, Directed, and Edited by Tim Bennett. More about the film…

“What we have been doing has not been working.  We will have to do something else.”

Latest News

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What’s New with Sally?
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What’s New with Tim?
2/7/10  Just in time for Valentine’s Day: Eve Ensler’s latest on TED:
Girl Power. My kind of girl: no holds barred support for feeling, everything, just the way we feel it. Amazing. Thank you Eve.
 
12/17/09 No Time for Tears in Copenhagen by Bill McKibben
Bill McKibben wept for an hour in Copenhagen and writes about that in a beautiful piece describing the outpouring of desire around the world to preserve life on the planet. As I read his piece I was moved to tears as well and would encourage others to read it because, paradoxically, it may move you to tears as well, and that, I believe, will be a good thing.  Do not however misunderstand me as far as how McKibben ends his piece… If you read the blog I just wrote you’ll understand why the call to action feels off to me.
12/15/09  Meditation on : A Hopi Elder Speaks
This blog, well, it kind of came through me, and I’m not sure where from, but it seems to address the raging river of change in the world and my own current best response to that.  
 
12/14/09 Article from Truthout about the incredible increase in psychiatric drugs sold to treat children.  Um, maybe that’s not a good idea for the kids? Um, maybe the problem is not the kids but everything else…but the pharmaceutical industry profits because its so much easier to give kids drugs than to listen to them and then change everything.
 
11/27/09  Been reading over past blog entries.  Strikes me much differently than when I’ve read past personal journals. Rereading a couple of older blogs has me thinking about a winter vision quest, perhaps in a cabin with a woodstove for a few days, silence, fasting, writing and bundling up to walk or ski.
 
11/18/09  Sobering map of the growth of unemployment Jan 07- Sept 09. Thoughts about how to offer comfort and support.  Our Conscious Conversation group had it’s third meeting.  Growing connections, great insights, increasing trust.
 
11/15/09  Okay, so The Culture of Pretend: How Psychotherapy Keeps Our Communities Sick… Is here. And some great comments follow.  I’m also in the process of writing about death and the “Call to Non-Action.”  Probably continue to irritate some people.  That’s the risk of real dialogue. Too bad real dialogue can’t really happen on the internet.  Sort of requires bodies in a room to make the deeper shift to what Bohm referred to as collective learning which supports collective intelligence.
 
Also there’s a very intriguing article about Detroit with an interesting vision of transforming that city into an urban farm capable of feeding it’s people.  Is that possible?  Possible or not it is a compelling vision to consider and perhaps apply to other settings, like small struggling towns that will be popping up as people flee jobless areas especially in challenging climates.  Speaking of which, a friend just reported to me that some northern cities have been paying one-way bus fare to Florida for their homeless…I wonder how Florida is feeling about that?
 
11/5/09 Communication/Communion: When two or more people understand deeply the truth of their individual experiences.  We’re all bozos on this bus! The Culture of Pretend reinforces shame!  Stay tuned for my next blog, in the edit stage.  Not short and sweet. Long and hopefully compelling.
 
10/19/09  ‘member the Woody Allen quote from WAWTG  about one path leads to despair and utter hopelessness and the other, to total extinction… pray we make the correct choice? 
Well…it’s not funny anymore. I just read Apocalypse or Extinction and then went to check out the author’s academic creds…I’ve been thinking about the implications of 2-4 degrees C all day….
 
10/18/09  Planning trip to NC to shoot more Shut Up and Drum footage. I’m sobered by how little help there is for people w/OUT substance abuse problems.  Hopefully we can facilitate some coordinated support for Rocco on our trip.
 
10/18/09  We’ve started a Conscious Conversation group in our small town to learn group communication skills and to provide for a place to establish deep relatedness, embrace differences, tap collective wisdom. It’s an experiment in doing dialogue in a weekly rather than weekend format. Scroll to the bottom the Dialogue Workshop Gatherings page to read more about Conscious Conversation!
 
10/14/09 - We just watched a Ted Talk by James Balog from the Extreme Ice Survey.  Astounding video of glaciers melting.
 
2/8/10 - Hey all… remember Keven Mayer from WAWTG?  (”If we don’t figure out what our place in the universe is, we’re not going to have a place in the universe.”)  Well, he and a bunch of his fellow activists in the Ithaca area are organizing resistance against natural gas drilling in NY state. One thing they’ve done is to produce a marvelous short film called Frac Attack:  Dawn of the Watershed.  Kevin’s in it.  You can see it here, and check out what they’re up to.  Great job, folks!
 

12/24/09 - Check out Bill Catton’s new book Bottleneck:  Humanity’s Impending Impasse.  I haven’t read it yet, but am very glad to see Bill still writing, adding his voice to the conversation.

 
12/11/09 - Season’s End by Marillion.  This song always moves me.  Suitable for Copenhagen.  Got a new blog.  Check it out.
 
12/3/09 - Well, Mr. Obama’s war game leaves me sad on the one hand and glad on the other.  Sad that he’s proving himself to be exactly what I had guessed.  Glad that more and more are now seeing that.  The notion of a petition to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee (asking them to take it back) came to mind and a quick Google search finds one here.  Sigh.
 
Also just read Matt Taibbi’s latest on Obama’s economic team in Rolling Stone.  Rolling Stone editors say, in the new issue, that as much as they hate to, they feel like it’s time to go after the Big O.  Hopes dashed all around, neh?  I found myself wondering, as I read it, whether maybe Mr. O isn’t really totally collapse-savvy, and that his actions reveal a secret plan to give the economic leadership enough rope to hang themselves.  Perhaps he really knows that what’s called for is the complete dismantling of the worldwide economic and industrial machine, and is doing everything he can to make that happen as quickly as is possible.  Unlikely?  You betcha.  But hey, we’re supposed to hope audaciously, aren’t we?
 
11/27/09 - We’re hanging low with our friend, Jess, avoiding the “holiday” as much as is possible.  Sally and I are on a news fast, trying to see how it feels to  avoid the insanity for a few days.  Presumably it will continue without us.  We both continue to write, me with my fiction and her with her non.  It’s going very well, I think.  We’re engaged and challenged and focused.  That’s always nice.  The Portuguese subtitles are in and I’ll start testing them soon, to get them ready for a new master.  Now I start with the French.  Take care, all.  TTG
 
11/21/09 - With 4 degrees Celsius global mean temperature rise bubbling up a few months back, it was probably only a matter of time before we started talking about six degrees.  Here and here are a couple of articles.  And here is our take on six degrees, our “deleted scene” from WAWTG.
 
11/19/09 - Nothing to Lose but Our Illusions:  An Interview with David Edwards by Derrick Jensen.  I just read through this again.  In my opinion, one of the single most important conversations around.  I could stand to read it every day.
 
11/18/09 - Dope-en-hagen.
 
11/15/09 - I’m thinking a great deal today about redemption.  How do we redeem this millennia-old experiment in isolation, control and destruction?  One way is to work to stop the destruction, such that some part of the community of life is able to make it through the bottleneck.  Another way is for the humans of the dominant culture to learn what is to be learned here, to grow up, to change, to evolve, to step into the next paradigm.  That’s the work I feel most called to, though I will not disavow the work of protection.  Human survival alone does not feel like redemption.  Growing up, learning, transforming - those things feel like redeeming acts.
 
11/10/09 - I just finished this wonderful address - Thomas Merton and Technology: Paradise Regained Re-lost - by Fr. Ezekiel Lotz, OSB.  It’s an examination of Merton’s views on modern technological society, ecology and “the world we have lost,” written last year for the Gethsemini III conference. It was a marvelous and moving read for me.  I found it while Googlefishing for mentions of WAWTG…
 
11/5/09 - Copenhagen approacheth, and denial is in the air.  Taking on Superfreakonomics.   Monbiot digs for understanding.  David Roberts examines the polling data.  Americans for Prosperity full of hot air.  Little boys play games.  The media goes more insane.  Denial becomes a spectator sport.  The home team searches for new strategies.  And more new strategies.  How will it all play out?  Stay tuned.  There’s enough insanity in the air to make certain that we’ll be surprised.