"Perhaps the most important media message of our time," says Jan Lundberg. This is nothing less than a CAT scan of the current human and non-human condition. The film recognized the following four predicaments as ones that especially stand out: peak oil, climate change, species extinction, and population overshoot. It shows how these issues are actually symptoms on the surface level, and delves into the root causes.

It keeps on going where films such as An Inconvenient Truth and End of Suburbia stop. It provides an historical perspective to show how we arrived in the present situation, and looks at why we are stuck here. The "Technofix" is also analysed -- you know, the precept that technology can just keep on powering us forward in this direction that we're going. In the movie Daniel Quinn presents the analogy that civilization takes 200 bricks everyday from the bottom of its building and uses them to make the building taller, leaving the foundation in peril.

The movie provides no easy answers, no five things you can do to save the world. Sustainability is just too big of a topic to squeeze in. Instead it challenges us to forsake our denial and look into ourselves for answers. It quotes a Hopi elder, "We are the ones we have been waiting for."

It will be a delight to have the filmmakers do a screening and dialogue session here when they tour the West this fall. If you are going to be around Fresno, CA on October 29th you might want to stop by.