‘What a way to go’ is one man’s attempt to face up to the end of the industrial era. It is spliced together from archive footage of programmes from the 1940s and 50s, with interviews from friends and theorists such as Richard Heinberg, Ran Prieur, or Jerry Mander, and Derrick Jensen.
Where most films of this type present facts and science, this one concentrates on psychology. How have we been able to create such an unsustainable way of life, and how do we continue to live it even when we know it is destroying us? The film skips from one theory to another, from the denial that made Nazi Germany possible, to the transition from a hunter-gatherer society to settled agriculture, the population crisis, the distraction of mass media, disconnection from the earth, lack of community… It touches on a hundred different things for a minute each. It can’t possibly deal with them all, but what it does it create a great vista of futility, a building wave of disaster.
It’s unflinchingly honest, and goes a big step further than ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ to look at the root of the problem. Climate change, peak oil, pollution, all these things are symptoms of consumerism, of the growth model of capitalism. We can’t fix climate change without acknowledging that our whole way of life needs to be re-examined.
If this is all sounds depressing, it is. This film is not for everyone. It’s a shamelessly amateur and personal production, which you’re either going to love or hate. The archive footage restlessly flickers and jumps, and is layered with visual effects, and over it all is a relentlessly downbeat voice-over. Those who hang on to the end for the hopeful bit will be disappointed. “I have no happy chapter to offer you” says writer and narrator Timothy Bennett.
Gloomy it may be, but there’s an integrity to this despair. Bennett looks our culture full in the face, and concludes that we live empty, shallow and destructive lives. Paradoxically, this ends up being life affirming, because of course life doesn’t lie in the consumer dream. Seeing the full horror of what we’ve created might just give us the courage to turn our back on it, not because we’ve been scared out of it, but because our lifestyle is seen for the hollow promise that it is.
In summary, this is a very powerful film, but one that’s going to polarize audiences. It’s at least half an hour too long and a fair percentage will give up halfway through. If you’re showing films to raise awareness, don’t start here. If you’ve got a bunch of people who are interested, educated, but still believe they can carry on living as they do, this might just lift the fog on the unreality of our consumer culture.
Find out more about the film here.
The Earthbound Report 
We have to wake up and realize that we should be better hosts of our planet.