"The world of human feelings has been much less explored than the whole of the universe put together." "But now it's late." "What have we been doing all these thousands of years." "We've been congratulating ourselves on our progress, in going faster and faster and faster." "Then in reality, we've only been getting further away from ourselves." "Lucy, take my place, will you." "This movie is based on an interview with John Zerzan anarcho-primitivist philosopher, author and editor of the magazine Green Anarchy." "Do you think that this culture is killing the planet?" "Oh, I certainly do." "I think that Derrick Jensen puts that very well, very forcefully, I think its becoming more and more unmistakable." "And that's exactly what's going on." "the deepest institutions are driving this forward." "It's a very basic direction and mechanism, and I think it's very hard to deny it." "Ok, why do you think that is, why do you think this culture is so destructive?" "Well, I think it has to do with the fruition of certain very basic social institutions, like division of labor or specialization, the more they advance, the more ruinous are the consequences." "They just keep marching forward, and the results become more and more clear as a function of the very nature of the institutions." "The other one I would say, the way I look at it, is domestication." "And as Paul Shepherd said, that all of these...the arrival of genetic engineering and cloning and so forth, that's nothing but the fruits of domestication from the very beginning, it's implicit in the very beginning, as the way he put it." "It's the first step, the first step that brings all the rest." "It's just the logic of it." "As Adorno would say, the inner logic of it." "They want us to turn us into machines." "They want to make us feel dead." "They want us to loose our hopes and dreams." "Our desires and fears." "Like robots with human flesh." "Today is a winter day... that we've never seen before." "We re sitting in here... like animals longing to get out." "We are conscious souls... dreaming of a place far away." "But deep down inside we know... that life is too short." "We run around in circles... but we never get in time." "Life is spinning forward... to an even unsafer embrace." "It gets so very complicated... and can cause so much harm." "In here we are safe." "In our own atmosphere." "These small cages, which are typical for monkeys used in medical research all around the world." "these tiny wired barren cages, with usually nothing in them at all." "They are so horrendous." "I've spent my life in the wild." "I know what it's like for a social living creature, with the intelligence of a monkey." "They have this rich social life, they are surrounded by their family." "They are challenged every day, their minds are working, and their lives are just fantastic out in the forest." "And to see a monkey alone in a cage like that, with nothing to do, so that they go completely crazed with boredom and sadness, probably." "It's deeply, deeply disturbing." "One day I was just sobbing and I called a friend of mine, Janet Armstrong, who is an Okanag Indian, and I said to her," "God this work is just killing me, it's breaking my heart." "She said, yeah it would do that," "I said, the dominant culture hates everything, doesn't it?" "Yeah, it does, even itself." "I has a death urge, doesn't it." "She said yeah it does." "I said unless it's stopped, it does kill everything on the planet, isn't it." "She said yeah, unless it's stopped." "I said, we are not gonna make a great new glorious tomorrow, are we?" "And she said the best thing se could possibly say, which is, I've been waiting for you to say that." "And the reason why that was the best thing she could possibly say is because it normalized my despair and it let me know, that that despair is an appropriate response to a desperate situation." "... "Now I wanna kill" ..." "And let me know that sorrow is just sorrow, and pain is just pain, and fear is just fear." " But what is there to do but survive?" "Yes, we sing, we dance, sometimes we make jokes, we make love." "If not we deny life." "We work for them so we may survive, and we survive for a reason." "Revenge." "A quick death from a snipers bullet or a rocket attack from an F-16." "A crushing, suffocating death, beneath the rubble of a bulldozed building." "A slow, bleeding death, in an ambulance held for hours at a checkpoint." "A dark death, under torture tables of an Israeli prison." "A random, arbitrary death as their tanks spray a crowd with machine gun fire." "A cold, calculated death from malnutrition, and curable diseases." "A thousand small deaths, as you watch your family die around you." "And if you face all of this death and indifference and keep your humanity and your love and your dignity and refuse to surrender to their terror and despair, then you know something of the courage that is Palestine." "A machine can not feel." "It never gets hungry." "Never thirsty and never needs to sleep." "it's never afraid, happy or sad." "By definition it's dead and a society that is built on machines is dead too." "As a creature, living in the trashing endgame of civilization, I am intimately aquatinted with the landscape of loss and I grown accustomed to carry the daily weight of despair." "I walked clear cuts that wrapped around mountains and droped in to valleys, and climbed ridges that fragment watershed after watershed and I sat silent near empty streams that two generations ago were lashed in to whiteness by uncountable salmon coming home to spawn and die." "A few years ago I began to feel pretty apocalyptic, but I hesitated to use that word." "In part because of those cartoons I've seen of crazy penitence carrying "The end is near" - signs" "In part because of the power of the word itself." "Apocalypse." "I didn't want to use it lightly." "And then a friend and fellow activist said to me, "What's it gonna take for you to finally use that word?"" ""Will it take the death of runs of Salmons so large, that people were afraid to put their boats in the water, that they would capsize." "So large that you would hear them, long before you would see them." "or maybe it will take the death of flocks of passenger pigeons so large they darken the sky for days at a time." "So large they were as loud as thunder, moving 60 miles an hour." "Maybe it will take the death of flocks of Eskimo curlews just as large." "Maybe it will take the turning of the sea of San Diego in to a dead zone." "Maybe it will take putting dioxin in every mothers breast milk." "Maybe it will take 90% of the large fish in the oceans being gone." "Do you think that it will undergo a voluntary transformation then to a sane and sustainable way of living?" "I mean a lot of people, at least, seems to have some kind of agenda to make it more sustainable." "Well, there are people that would like to be comforted with what I think it's the illusion, that certain partial steps will be OK or will be sufficient." "But it's a much more thorough going thing, that gonna have to happen to change it." "The whole question of voluntary change, I mean that depends on what you think is applications, what would be effective and that's a whole question in itself." "The question that Derrick Jensen brings up from time to time or regularly I would say, is that he just ridicule's the idea that there will be a voluntary shift away from it." "But I'm very much more hopeful, frankly." "I think that when we see what's going on." "That, it's not to me so unlikely that people will say, "well this is causing such negative results in every single sphere", why wouldn't people think about doing something different." "I mean, it's more irrational that people are not going to be able to confront this and draw the obvious conclusion." "Then it is to say, "Oh no, nobody will ever steer from this suicidal course of civilization and technology." "I mean who knows, it's impossible to say, of course, but I feel that there are grounds for not just thinking that there would never be any shift in people's consciousness." "Police, we are not afraid of you." "We rose up to sees the state, but found that the state did not exist." "That in reality we faced the system stretching far beyond our borders." "But we were born in the struggle and we have defeated other empires before this one, we did not overthrow apartheid through elections or decisive military engagement, we defeated apartheid and we will stop this war by making it unworkable on the ground" "through thousands of collective acts of rebellion and disobedience." "Air pollution is a chemical, physical or biological agent that modifies the natural characteristics of the atmosphere." "The atmosphere is a complex, dynamic natural gaseous system that is essential to support life on planet Earth." "In other words ..." "We're fucked!" "Riddarhyttan, Bergslagen, Sweden, Scandinavia, Northern Europe" "January the fifth, 2007" "The mildest winter in recorded history." "Anyone who claims that this has nothing to do with global warming or that global warming has natural causes." "Is insane." "When the state itself causes and profits from the various injustices we struggle against, how is it logical to believe, the system will change without being forced?" "So much what I feel right needs to happen right now, is just, they need to stop." "For some reason, I was sort of reminded of this line a friend told me, where I've been staying in the last few months, he said, "Natures default mode is healing." And really, what we need to do to, you know." "And a lot of, the difficult destructive tendencies that are perpetuated against the natural environment by industrialized nations." "Is just too simply stop and let the natural world recover." "And its not industrialization, that's going to create independence." "It's basically sowing the seeds for all of our eventual destruction." "And in that way development is really just hypocrisy." "It's violence with language, that term." ""Stop domestic flights"" "Do you think that can be something that wakes people up?" "You know when they see how crazy the weather is becoming." "Oh, sure." "I think that the most visible sign is, when you see the big motion pictures now, that are certainly assuming the course of it, which is a disastrous course, really?" "It's already out there, it's no secret to anyone ...that it won't get worse and worse." "There is no basis for that." "So I think that's part of it." "That's a fundamental thing obviously, the extreme weather, the consequence of all of the global warming phenomenon, that's kind of hard to miss." "Don't you think it's a problem that..." "a lot of people seem to think that, the only thing we have to do is use green technology, I can't remember the word in English." "but you know, sort your... you know when you throw away your stuff, that you... yea' recycling, things like that" "Well that's of course the dominant mode of thinking - is that technology, which in such a very large measure has created this problem, we need more of it." "I mean, that's starts to break down." "I think as a solution it's just..." "Because the results don't measure the claims." "It's true in health, it's true in a lot of things." "More and more technology there is, the worse its getting." "You could say, yeah, there is the widespread belief, there is a hope, they'll find some magic technological solution, but if you don't have results in that direction, then you don't have much basis for that faith." "That faith erodes as it is right now." "It's not working out that way." "It's the reality that teaches people not ideas." "What they see, what's actually happening." "And that's going to be the learning curve, that's what the decisive thing is, after all." "Why I hate wind turbines:" "1." "Birds are killed by the thousands each year in the turbine blades." "2." "Wind power is so inefficient that it scarcely replaces conventional sources of energy at all." "3." "There's nothing sustainable in the production of these machines." "4." "Like all other so called "green and sustainable" forms of technology it's a fucking hoax to justify the insanity of production and consumption in our industrial-based society a dead society." "Keep talking All." "What do you want to hear, fairytales?" "Explain to me what's going on." "That something you'll have to find out for yourself." "You're still afraid?" "Yes." "Of what?" "I don't know." "You're still there?" "Say something." "A shilling sense of emptiness." "You understand me All?" "Sure I understand." "So you think that the best thing to do is to explain to people that green technology is not sustainable?" "Exactly." "Exposed how lubricous this is." "They just want more production." "They have to begin to question the whole mass production, the whole massificaton and the whole techno culture foundations." "That's the basis for the crisis and that's rather easy to point that out." "Not that you instantly convince everybody, but it makes sense." "It explains the crisis, and it explains the development and it also explains what you have to do to change it." "And I think you can make a very lucid case, and it becomes persuasive the more the reality matches up with your version of it, this version of it, let's say." "then the one that the system puts out." "Thinking Ahead" "What do you think about people who say that we actually are too powerless to make a difference?" "And that the best thing we can do is to outlive this civilization?" "You know just wait for the collapse and go from there." "Yeah, that's the kind of lifeboat idea." "We can't do anything, we just hope to weather the storm." "I don't like the passive stance in the first place, and its certainly very questionable, if you just wait for the brighter day." "It's not gonna get brighter, it's gonna get worse." "I think that's the wrong kind of approach these people that give up facing what's really going on and what would really be required it's somewhat understandable, but its not going to work." "There is no place to hide." "It's coming everywhere." "And is there a basis of thinking that you can ride it out, or just think about something else until it gets better?" "I think that's really escapist, it's not responsible." "It's related to the question of powerlessness though." "If you can't to see a way of being part of an active solution, then you are more tending to think" " well we just have so see if we can survive it." "Naturally that's what follows." "But I think we have to show that we can think about this and confront it and start changing the public dialog, exposing all of the, you know, piercing through the denial." "And showing that we have to get rid off all off these nonsensical approaches, including the left." "And that can be done, you can go ahead and do that" "And clear the decks for a real turn." "For a real change." "Freeganism:" "Some people have made a choice not to participate in the insanity of the consumer culture." "The world produces enough food to feed everyone." "Then why does over 800 million people suffer from chronic hunger?" "Our society has such an abundance of food that we can eat directly from the dumpsters." "Then why does almost 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes every day?" "What do you think is the problem with the left?" "I think the problem with the left is fundamental." "And it goes to not just in the eco-crisis." "But a lot of other things" "That it just seemingly refuses to deal with." "The basic reason is that it just partakes of the productionism of Marx in the first place." "This is what Bouldeard pointed out quite a long time ago in the book "Mirror of production"" "that the leftist idea of progress, of technology, of perfecting the means of production and always expanding them." "Which is basic Marxism." "It's not just Marxism itself it's a problem with the left across the board." "They can't seem to break that." "They just still wanna have mass production and the industrial world." "They don't see something else." "They can't entertain the idea of something radically different." "There are very big obstacles." "Things are always a matter of options or alternatives and you have to remove the false alternative, the one that are keeping us from solving the problem." "OK." "Do you think it's the same thing with the autonomous left too, the anarchist left?" "Well the anarchist left, if you call it that;" "there is a change going on," "I think what is descending, what we call green anarchy or primitivism or anti-civilization anarchy" "We have to talk about which place in particular we are referring to." "But this is what's happening now." "Because of the complete failure of the leftist mass production pro-factory kind of left." "That's absurd." "It's fading out." "They are very hostile to the critique of civilization and the rest of it for obvious reasons." "But it's really already dead." "People haven't completed the job I would say, of getting rid of it." ""Anarchism stands for direct action, the open defiance of, and resistance to, all laws and restrictions, economic, social and moral."" " Emma Goldman" ""The ALF and ELF operate in small autonomous cells."" ""We did not overthrow apartheid through elections or decisive military engagement."" ""The ALF and ELF operate in small autonomous cells."" ""We defeated apartheid and we will stop this war."" ""The ALF and ELF operate in small autonomous cells."" ""By making it unworkable on the ground, through thousands of collective acts of rebellion and disobedience."" ""The ALF and ELF operate in small autonomous cells."" ""We did not overthrow apartheid through elections or decisive military engagement."" "Graffiti: "We will win"" " ELF" "Let's say that civilization has collapsed." "Do you think it's possible to forget we have about technology and such?" "To forget it?" "Yeah." "I mean that's an argument you hear from a lot of people that criticizes critics of civilization." "Like we can't forget the knowledge that we have now." "You know we can't go back to living in the stone age and things like that." "Well, it's an interesting point." "It's a question of what is more valid." "What is more healthy." "Is it re-connecting with the earth or is it maintaining these technological approaches or values." "I mean in other words." "If you can see that a wrong turn was made and mistakes are made, that make the situation worse, you would think that those are the things we need to see and learn from, and not repeat." "We wouldn't wanna recycle the same disaster." "I wouldn't think anyway." "So why wouldn't you forget it?" "I mean not forget it in terms of amnesia." "But maybe its better to remember what do these things bring." "If you think that this is the promise of a better life and so forth." "Well is it?" "Yes or no." "And if you think it is, then you are gonna cling to it and if you don't, then you are not gonna cling to it." "But we have this manage point strikes me that we can see, where some of this has been leading, and what's the result is, so we can do something better." "We'll start with the idea, that language really can influence how we think." "One example of this was described this summer in the journal Science." "To look at this example we need to visit Brazil." "And the Piraha people." "Our guide is Peter Gordon from Colombia University." "He spent time with the Piraha and has observed their culture." "One of the many interesting features of the Piraha is the fact they only have counting words for one and two." "Any quantities larger than this are referred to as many." "But according to Dr. Gordon, even the counters they have aren't specific." "Even one and two, it turns out, are very vague." "And one really means sort of one and it could mean two or three, and two means more than one, but that's vague too." "And in fact the words for one and two are actually very similar." "So the word for one is "HOI"" "and the word for two is "HOI" and they just differ in the turn, whether its falling or rising." "And then the word for one also means small." "So if you wanted to say "This is small and that is big"" "you would also use the word "HOI" to mean small." "And so there is actually no distinction being made between a sort of discrete numerical quantities and a sort of overall size." "Speaking life." "I am learning the native language of my area, because I want to speak and think and sing in the living tongue born of the mother on which I walk." "I want the birds and the grasses to hear my words as they were would hear the crackling frost and the talking stream." "I want the hills to befriend me as a speaker of the sweet language they have echoed for untold generations of its speakers." "I want to honor life, and words that speak life." "I want my family to share the beauty within these words and the wisdoms that come through them with words that know how to respect and express such voices." "So what do you think is the alternative?" "You know because a lot of people say you can't go back, I think I mentioned that earlier." "I mean that's the usual response." "Well I think we have to." "To me that's very annoying." "People just repeat that without thinking." "What does that mean?" "So we go forward into a worsening crazy reality..." "You know what I mean, that's kind of a mantra, that people say." "But what does it actually mean?" "I know that there a native people, who don't accept that all." "They would love to go back." "They had seen everything taken away." "They prefer the other way." "So let's listen to that for a change." "We are worthless." "We are shit." "We are a fucking virus." "But deep within us we can still hear the voices of the foremothers." "Calling for the destruction of civilization." "The way that I see it too is that people who defend advanced technology doesn't seem to understand, that you can't have the technology without the system." "Exactly." "You know, a group of... a small band of persons can't really develop a computer." "Exactly." "I think you make a very important point." "If you don't have the industrial basis, then you don't have any of this stuff, really." "And who is going to provide the industrial basis?" "That's the question I perennially ask in public." "Do you wanna go down to mine or work at the smelter at the warehouse on the assembly line?" "I don't." "And if you are a anarchist especially, how are you going to force people to do that?" "They're not going to do that willingly." "It's then a matter of coercion historically." "So if you want the computers and all these things, whatever it is, high-rises or something, then you're gonna have to do the work." "As you point out." "This is mass society, where people are forced to do things, then you have them." "But if you have a state of freedom, as you point out, a small group of people, isn't going to be able to provide that." "Which is the point Derrick Jensen makes." "Go ahead and do it." "But I don't think you have many people that wanna do all the metallurgy and all the toxic drudge work, and all the rest of it." "Then, how are you going to do it." "So in a way it's hopeful to me, in that regard, how much does it take to keep the system running and reproducing itself." "It's a very big matter of tension and coercion." "And really it's their problem not ours." "It's a problem if you wanna keep it all going." "But we don't wanna keep it all going." "I don't wanna keep it all going." "There have to be practical moves." "We have to get ready for living in a different way." "And I think there is more and more of that, there is more interest in that." "Not just anarchists doing it, of course." "There are all kinds of people." "But we have to start thinking about the fundamental questions." "What are we gonna eat?" "How are we gonna live?" "And all the rest of it." "If you are talking about making a critique of domesticated life and the rest of it, well, you got to have some options." "You have to be able to think about how did people used to live and what we could do to start the transition in that direction, I think." "How to make fire..." "Well this is the simplest plan, I will tell you." "600 prisoners walk out the main gate, they just walk out." "Right after evening room call." "They just walk out the front gate?" "That's impossible, that's crazy." "Except for one thing." "Nothing is impossible for us." "So let us create a plan." "Where six hundred prisoners, walk out the main gate." " Animal lives " " Human ponders " "Everyone strives to live ..." "From radiating power." "The Nazis killed 6 million Jews." "The Israeli army has killed one Palestinian child every three days since September 2000." "We are all animals." "300 Jews survived the escape from Sobibor." "Self defense is a choice... to live!" "We are all animals." "Can you understand?" "Someone said that you cant make the revolution by promising people less, well making the revolution part of it, isn't the way I put it, but the statement brings up a key point." "That is to me what we have now." "What we have now is less." "And going away from mass society really is more." "The further we go on the road of technological progress, the more reduced, dependent and artificialized, so forth, we are." "Isolation, stress, depression, anxiety, mounts, is this the more that we should be defending against the he less of re-connecting with the natural world?" "I don't think so." "And I think that more people can see this as the crisis comes in on all of us in all these different spheres of life." "What's needed is that we are unafraid to say that." "Unafraid to make it the basis of our efforts." "There's a paradigm shift waiting to happen, in my opinion." "Now as for banning the word hope, that sounds to much like pessimism or defeatism to me, quite frankly." "I'm hopeful, because I think people can begin to see how things really are, and where they're going." "It's easy to expose the lies about all this that the dominant culture pumps out..." "Just too much of an upfront to a basic sense of reality." "I'm hopeful, and I don't rule out before the end of the possibility of taking responsibility for dumping all this nightmare." "Dismantling it." "Written, edited and produced by Thomas Toivonen (helped by Vargtassa, Nattsmyg and others.)" "Cameras:" "Music composed for the movie by Thomas Toivonen" "Songs:" "Voices:" "All footage not filmed by Thomas Toivonen, Vargtassa or Nattsmyg are from the public domain." "For all the people... who wants to remain anonymous:" "Thank you for helping me with this movie." "Your altruism, unselfishness and rage... is a beacon of hope in a crazy, dark world." "Contact:"