Can shopping save the world? The Story of Change urges viewers to put down their credit cards and start exercising their citizen muscles to build a more sustainable, just and fulfilling world.

storyofchange.org

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With such a Wal-Mart aisle of causes and concerns to choose from, why did I decide to make a film about human population growth and consumption?  More specifically, why a feature documentary about the interrelation of those environmental factors with our own psychology?

When I started out two and a half years ago, I had what I would describe as the Bill Hicks/George Carlin attitude towards human population: too many people doing too much humping and eating.  We’ve all seen Doug Stanhope’s take on what the proper reaction to a Prius with a baby seat in the back should be (1:30 in the video I linked to).  That was me, circa early 2010.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the finish line.  As I made the film, I learned a lot more about the context in which we live, the cultural history, evolution and social programming we’re subjected to, and in the process my opinions on the matter shifted.  I suppose you could say that ideological bias doesn’t stand the challenge of evidence and exposure to complexity.  And nothing is more complex than the issue of human population growth.

The UN counts October 31st, 2011 as the “Day of 7 Billion”, on which the seven-billionth human joined us on this wonderful Spaceship Earth.  We have critical challenges facing us now and in the immediate future in social equity, economic parity, food distribution and eventually food production, energy, water, the list goes on and on.  The population issue has wrapped up within it all of the meat of the environmental movement, but also a great deal of our social and psychological landscape as well.  After all, how can one effectively separate the statistical proofs of environmental degradation from the deeper socio-psychological dynamics of the human societies doing the degrading?

That’s why I didn’t make a film about numbers.  I got into filmmaking for the same reason I have such a keen interest in anthropology – I’m fascinated by people and I want to understand them.  So the key dropped in my lap when I found out about the rodent experiments of John B. Calhoun, performed at the National Institute of Mental Health over a matter of decades in the mid-twentieth century.  The story of the rats and mice was so compelling, and in so many ways similar to our own, that I realised I could tell their story and from there I would have a jumping-off point to the myriad complexities of the human population story.

Personally, I avoid using the term ‘overpopulation’, as it implies that there are too many people.  Once you say there are too many, you imply that some of them should go, and by extension that means that someone has to decide who goes.  From that simple word, we are a hop, skip and a jump from the depredations of the Chinese one-child policy, the sterilisation of poor men in Indira Gandhi’s India, the catalogue of eugenic operations performed in the US, Europe and Scandinavia right up to recent times (the last forced sterilisation in the US was in Oregon in 1981).

Terrible things have been done under the pretence that we will save society by stopping ‘over-breeding’ or preventing the ‘unfit’ from reproducing.  Those actions and the logic that tried to justify them are indefensible, and ironically these attempts to save society end up frequently turning society into something that isn’t worth saving.  The environmental and conservation movement has some roots in the eugenic origins of the population movement of the early twentieth century, and there is no point denying or avoiding this.  It must be dragged into the daylight and shown for the horror that it was.  But we are here and now, and the fact that in the past unsavoury people have done things which they defended by cloaking themselves in similar concerns does not mean that there is no reason to have a conversation about these things now.

So no, I don’t think that saying there are ‘too many people’ is the right way to frame the conversation.  What I do think is that it’s high time that we had a real, honest conversation about ourselves, about the ways in which we interact with and affect one another, the things we do to one another and to our planet and how we can do a better job of looking after ourselves and this beautiful spaceship of ours.  That conversation has to begin somewhere, and my hope is that the film I have made can help us make a start.

Critical Mass trailer from Mike Freedman on Vimeo.

Mike Freedman is a filmmaker and writer based in London. Over the past two years, he has interviewed 60 of the world’s leading scientists, authors and academics on the issues of population, water,   food, peak oil, economics and sustainability for his debut feature documentary, Critical Mass, which is about the impact of human population growth and consumption on our planet and on our psychology. In addition to his film work, he is an occasional guest   lecturer at Bournemouth University and also gives presentations on the subject of population growth around the UK.  His writing has been published by Stakeholder Forum’s Outreach Magazine, The Daly News and Transition Voice.  He is currently raising money to distribute the film.

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Full Film

From the front-lines of conflicts in Mexico, Argentina, South Africa, Palestine, Korea, and the North; from Seattle to Genova, and the War on Terror in New York, Afghanistan, and Iraq, The Fourth World War is the story of men and women around the world who resist being annihilated in this war.

While our airwaves are crowded with talk of a new world war, narrated by generals and filmed from the noses of bombs, the human story of this global conflict remains untold. The Fourth World War brings together the images and voices of the war on the ground. It is a story of a war without end and of those who resist.

The product of over two years of filming on the inside of movements on five continents, The Fourth World War is a film that would have been unimaginable at any other moment in history. Directed by the makers of This Is What Democracy Looks Like and Zapatista, produced through a global network of independent media and activist groups, it is a truly global film from our global movement.

More info here

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We will not return to ‘business as usual’.

The Four Horsemen is an independent feature documentary which lifts the lid on how the world really works.

Website: fourhorsemenfilm.com
#FourHorsemenFilm

Directed By: Ross Ashcroft

UK Release 15th March

Featuring: Noam Chomsky, Max Keiser, Joseph Stiglitz, Prof. Herman Daly, Dr. Ha-Joon Chang, Simon Johnson, Michael Hudson, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, John Perkins, Tarek Al Diwany, Camila Batmanghelidjh, James Turk, David Morgan, Hugo Salinas Price and more…

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OccupyTheMovie.com a short film series & full length documentary coming late 2012. Support us and pre-buy your copy today, or have us email you when film is done.

Made in collaboration with: occupy.com

Speeches at the Occupy LSX protest @ St Pauls Cathedral, London here

Director’s Statement

‘It is possible to be militant and nonviolent.’ Martin Luther King

If one considers occupy in militaristic terms, like a nonviolent army, maybe we can borrow from a destructive discourse to organize constructive dissent.

This led me to the question: What would a nonviolent blitzkrieg look like? Who would rush the front lines? Who would orchestrate it? And is occupy capable of such a task?

I found occupy is one of the most creative social movements the world has ever seen. In under 6 months they lit up a thousand cities with general assemblies, flashmobs, light shows, strikes and marches. These are the nonviolent weapons at Occupy’s disposal.

We have yet to see if Occupy can use them in unison to win a large battle, something like Martin Luther King’s Montgomery Bus Boycott, which required a blitzkrieg-like focus fire on a single civil service for over one year. To date Occupy has fired at random times on random targets with random intensities. Occupy has opened up many battlefronts, but it has yet to focus on one at a time. This of course is due to the horizontal, non-hierarchical approach, which it seems would not be compatible with Blitzkrieg. But maybe this would be an exception to the rule, in order to win a big victory.

The blitzkrieg tactic, used in a nonviolent way, seems to be a worthy model to pursue this spring. What if, for example, there was a campaign of simplicity that everyone can get behind:

ONE TARGET – ONE DEMAND – ONE MONTH

Imagine if all the elements of occupy – organizers, protesters, flashmobs, whistleblowers, donors, filmmakers, journalists, hacktivists, etc etc – could focus fire on just one government official, one bank, one corporation, one institution, all at once, for one month, with one simple demand. Whoever the target was, they would be shaking in their boots, and would be more likely to give in if they knew they were Occupy’s single target.

Blitzkrieg simplifies the complexity of the battlefield for the attacker, focusing every weapon on one target at one time. This made it the most ground breaking strategy in the history of violence. Maybe it also has a place in the history of nonviolence.

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