END:CIV

- People often say that

there's a war against nature

and that this is

the third world war.

- It's getting more stark;

it's getting worse and

the rate of change is accelerating,

whether we're talking about the

extinction of species or

the thoroughness of the techno-culture.

- The world right now is,

frankly, very frightening.

For what we consider

to be industrial civilization,

I would say is extraordinarily uncivilized,

actually quite savage.

- It's not an exaggeration

to say that we're

living in an ecological apocalypse.

- Between years 1980 and 2045

we will lose more species

of plants and animals than

we have lost in the

last 65 million years.

We have two big-picture

time pressures that really mean

we should be acting a lot

more urgently than most of us have.

And one of them is peak oil,

or energy collapse,

and one of them is climate change,

or runaway global warming.

- I think that most people,

even most scientists,

continue to underestimate how far

down the path to climate catastrophe

we've already travelled.

- For the most part,

we're oblivious to it, we don't

want to know about it,

we don't want to hear about it.

- The one thing I'm most afraid of

is that we're going to

mount a tremendous campaign

to sustain the unsustainable.

- At this point, scientists

are saying that the Earth's

temperature may increase

by as much as 10 degrees.

At that point, there may not

even be bacteria left.

- When the oil starts

to really run dry,

and when those in power

have to assert their power

in a time of dwindling resources,

I think they're going

to turn to much more

blunt and cruel methods

of enforcing their power.

- The whole climate is

changing:
the winds,

the ocean currents,

the storm patterns,

snow pack, snow melt,

flooding, droughts.

GAME OVER:

Somewhere in northern California

- It's stunning how fast

the destruction is proceeding.

Every day that passes,

the world is in worse shape.

'The sad-looking man you see

on the screen is Derrick Jensen.

Jensen is the best-selling author

of several non-fiction books

including "A Language Older than Words"

and "The Culture of Make Believe".

His books deal with topics such as

surveillance, child abuse,

the environment,

and something he calls "civilization".

But it's statements like these

that make him so controversial:

They're thinking of raising

the Shasta Dam in California,

and the reason that

Senator Feinstein gave was...

"It is Californians' God-given

right to water their lawns."

You know, there is no way

to argue with that...

...except with explosives.

'That was Mr. Jensen in 2006,

the same year he published

a two-volume set called 'Endgame.'

In 'Endgame' , he argues that there is an

urgent need to bring down civilization.'

- If people would have brought down

civilization a hundred years ago

people in the Pacific Northwest

could still eat salmon.

There's going to be people sitting

along the Columbia fifty years from now --

they'll be glowing for one thing --

but they'll be starving to death,

and they'll be saying,

"I'm starving to death, because

you didn't take out the dams...

...that killed salmon, and

those dams were used for barging,

and for electricity, for alumninum

smelters for beer cans, so

God damn you."

He lays out his case against

civilization by enumerating 20 premises.

Due to time limitations and

the fact that most people

would not tolerate a twenty-hour

movie, we will explore

four of these premises,

and accompany them

with real-life examples.

Premise I

Industrial civilization, civilization itself,

but especially industrial civilization

is not, and can

never be, sustainable.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure

out that any way of life that's based

on the use of nonrenewable

resources won't last.

But what is civilization?

Civilization is a way of life

characterized by the growth of cities.

- So you've got groups of people living

in a dense enough population that

the local landbase cannot support them.

What that means is you have to get

your basic resources from somewhere else

because you've used them up where you live.

So you're going to go out into

the countryside and gather up

whatever it is you want,

bring it back in.

If you require the importation of resources,

it means you've denuded the landscape

of that particular resource.

Manhattan Island circa 1609

Manhattan Island today

Manhattan today Manhattan 1609

- There's no way that in the

long term you can continue

to destroy the land that you need for your survival,

or the waters that you need to drink,

and expect to continue to live.

- Industrial civilization requires

ever-increasing amounts

of energy and ever-increasing

amounts of land,

ever-increasing amounts

of resources of all kinds

in order to perpetuate itself,

in order to continue to grow,

in order to just maintain itself.

And we live on a finite planet,

and those aren't available.

Of course, unfortunately for us

and most living creatures,

that culture won't stop until

it's consumed as much as it can,

or, of course,

until we stop it ourselves.

- If you have a finite amount of anything,

if you start using it,

eventually you use it up.

And so it would seem that if

your entire culture is based on,

I don't know,

let's take a random resource...

...oil...

...that you would think about

what's going to happen

when the oil runs out...

- We've found energy resources

that have allowed us to escape

some of the kinds of

limits that previous cultures

have had to face much more quickly.

They used to collapse because

they ran out of resources,

easily accessible resources.

The limit being the distance that people

could travel with things like horses,

or other pack animals.

That ended with the beginning

of the fossil fuel age; now

they can go all over the planet

and take what they want.

So globalization has only

accelerated this tremendously

destructive process.

- We've poured our wealth into

building an infrastructure

for daily life

that has no future. I do think that

oil problem is going to accelerate

within the next three to

five years, maybe even sooner.

The numbers indicate that we've

probably peaked in global production.

- Where do you find

the break from that?

I mean, all of it is a giant machine or

ensemble that just moves forward.

Technology, for example,

never takes a step back.

This whole thing just

keeps going like a cancer.

- I don't know of any civilization

that's been sustainable,

I don't believe

there ever has been one.

Technology, at its essence,

is really our culture's...

...determination,

that comes from certain

philosophical and historical sources,

that we will be nothing else

but more relentlessly technological.

- There is no clean green path to

living in a lifestyle that

we're all used to in

industrialized nations.

This way of life is over.

- Civilizations are often

cutting their own throats,

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