In answer to the question “Now what?” I would like to offer some lines from a Native American Ghost Dance song:

“The whole world is coming,
a nation is coming, a nation is coming,
the Father says so, the Father says so.
Over the whole earth they are coming.
The buffalo are coming, the buffalo are coming,
the eagle has brought the message to the tribe.”

Greetings, Ben

Tom, the words “religion” and “spirituality” do not refer to the same thing, as far as I’m concerned. They need to be teased apart, I think, to be useful terms. I have found the process of doing that to be highly rewarding.

Best,
Tim

A spiritual awakening sounds brain dead. What’s the evidence for this? Did the Shroud of Turin amount ot a hill of beans? Yet millions persist in believing this 2000+ yr old crap about the supposed existence of god and the son of god and so on. We don’t need more of this crap-ola in the world, we need less spiritualism if anything!

Pandora’s box is open. We have lots of knowledge about how our body’s function, how various other organisms function and how the planet functions. This is all evidence based knowledge. I’m kind of partial to evidence based living. Without it, we gradually return to the Middle Ages.

Excellent, thought provoking piece, Tim!

Thanks for your many and varied comments. I haven’t seen Vanishing Point, Dan, but might check it out. I think I’m making different distinctions of self than you, which leads to the confusion regarding decision-making. I’ll chew on that some more. I don’t think much of this is conscious, let alone rational.

Suzanne, thanks for your love and compassion. I’m right there with you.

Gordon, I have. Is there something you want to say about that?

Steve K, thanks for your commitment.

Joseph, I think you may be right about that mass spiritual awakening. I’m not really expecting “mass” anything at this point, though human extinction would certainly be a mass consciousness change, wouldn’t it? We’ll see how it goes. I’m going to keep walking the path the Earth calls me to in any event. Sorry to hear of your two lost friends. I know how that goes.

Steve C, thanks for the kind words and the tip to your father’s new book. I heard about it just recently and was so glad. He’s a gem. And he deserves to have his voice out there. He was so far ahead of so many of us! I’ll put something on my main page soon. You’re right, the metaphor do fall apart, don’t it?

Jennifer, your comment does not resonate. I have neither advocated suicide nor argued against resistance. I did something very different from that. You do not seem to have read what I wrote.

Thanks to all of you others who’ve weighed in with your thoughts, hopes and ideas. I’m going to dive back into my novel now. See you next time. Take care out there,

Tim

I don’t want to die, but if I must because the insane people running the show are not going to stop their rapaciousness (And they are not – this is so obvious it is absurd to have to mention it) – climate destruction is here to stay as long as we have the current system in place – then why don’t we talk about gathering, resisting, finding a way to stop them? Why would you immediately go to a Thelma and Louise? Why is everyone so ready to give up, go on to the next level, the “sweet hereafter”?

This is what is real, right here, right now. Why would you talk about suicide when an actual resistance hasn’t even been brought to the table? What about revolution? Is that a bad word or something? Talk about unspeakable, try: self-defense!

Let’s make a list of the biggest perpetrators of the violence against us and our homeland. I will give you a small one: The Bilderberg Group, Monsanto, Cargill. There. Three main perpetrators to start with. If people gathered and took self-defensive action all holy hell would break loose for sure, but you know what? All holy hell is coming anyway, so why not try to stop them?

Why not act in self – defense?

You have a forum over there/here. You have started people thinking about all this, talking about it. With the summit happening in Copenhagen people are thinking about it more and more. Now is the time to encourage people to rise up, gather for action, not lay down and accept the inevitable!!! This is pacifist nonsense. We are many, they are few. Target their ability to run their war machine (they have already stated how vulnerable their computer systems are to hackers and how they are working hard to fix this) and you have made them weak where they were previously strong. If only people would get straight about gathering and acting together, to resist this. There is no other way.

I can’t support this romanticizing the end with a Thelma and Louise analogy.

You have brilliantly faced the first part of this problem, Tim. You and Sally made a dynamite movie. You have a website that has so much great information. You have people talking. It is just a short step to resistance……… Do you love your life? Then fight! There is not much time………

Best,
Jennifer

But, sadly it’s far too clean and beautiful of an exit to stand as a metaphor for what humanity is collectively on the verge of bringing about in this century. We’re obviously not talking just two souls making an independent choice of their own free will, nor a crash site that will be a tiny smudge at the bottom of a Grand Canyon otherwise preserved in National Park status.

And in an era of religious zealots conflating their own notions of righteousness with some supposed divine imperative to extinguish many other innocent lives along with their own in suicide bombings aimed at a radical end to the collective status quo, I think it behooves us all to be very clear what we are (and are not) suggesting when we urge our fellows to contemplate a response to “our collective misery, and our wish for the death of the culture that underlies that misery, hover(ing) still in that great freeze-frame of our present predicament.”

But I do endorse your very graphic invocation of the cliff-edge metaphor as an invitation to look inward, as well as all around us, at the abundant evidence that we are at the end of the line.

“Now what?” was a good way to end your piece and I have a suggestion for one little avenue of inquiry that some of your readers might find grist for the mill. That being the sequel to the book Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, which you site in the Book List on your website, by William R. Catton, Jr. (my father) who was one of the speakers in your excellent film What A Way To Go.

It is Bottleneck: Humanity’s Impending Impasse, available at: http://www2.xlibris.com/BOOKSTORE/bookdisplay.aspx?bookid=60202

Thanks again for your great film, and all of the honest and heartfelt sharing you’ve continued in other ways since you made it.

Sincerely,
Steve Catton