Visually the film is like some kind of Star Trek fan movie crossed with a National Geographic wildlife film, and is largely built around Gamble’s own years of ‘research’ into the question of what it is that “stops life on earth from thriving”.  A reasonable question to ask, but his approach can hardly be called ‘research’ due to the low standards he accepts as ‘evidence’ and his all-round lack of critical analysis.  His research, such as it is, is cherry-picked to deepen and support his established worldview, rather than the worldview being built from a careful analysis of the evidence.  As we’ll see, this is a dangerous foundation.

So here’s the film’s argument in a nutshell.  Humanity is killing itself and the world around it because free energy sources are being deliberately kept from us, cures for cancer are being kept from us, all because we are controlled by an invisible elite who want to create a ‘new world order’ to control us all and prevent us from thriving.  So let’s look at some of the film’s central arguments in turn.

Free energy machines

One of the key threads of the film revolves around free energy, the idea that we can generate unlimited clean energy by just tapping into the ‘torus’, a shape that supposedly pervades the universe (see right), and which could yield endless free energy.  ’Thrive’ would have you believe that there are dedicated independent scientists around the world bravely defying the laws of thermodynamics only to have their work seized by the FBI, their patents bought up and ‘lost’, or harassed into silence.  Yet all we are offered as evidence is some grainy film of machines that could be anything doing anything, and some smart computer graphics of spinning torus shapes.

If this amazing breakthrough that would rewrite science and win Nobel Prizes for anyone involved were actually a reality, and if you were going to spend huge amounts to make a film to argue for their existence which you would then put out into the public arena, surely you would get a working model of such a device into the studio with some impartial scientists to verify it in operation?  If they actually exist, and actually work, then this wouldn’t be a big challenge surely?  As Kyle Hill writes in his review of the film, “wanting something to be true does not make it more possible”, and “someone wanting to invent such a device is not evidence”.  ‘Free energy’ is a world notoriously riddled with charlatans and cranks.

Gamble argues that these technologies could provide “enough energy to transform the entire earth”, and here’s a key point I want to challenge.  The idea that free energy would be a universal good (even if it were feasible, which it’s not – the US Patent and Trademark Office gets so many nonsensical requests for patents on perpetual energy devices that they now refuse to even look at them without a working model) is deeply dubious.  Kimberly Carter Gamble, Foster Gamble’s partner, states at one point in the film that:

“… so much of the pain on the planet has to do with the lack of access to energy”.

Wow, now there’s a statement.  How many people on this planet would argue that much of the pain on the planet has to do with the developed world having lack of access to energy?  While of course for millions in the developing world, lack of access to energy is a huge impediment to being able to attain a reasonable standard of living and to move beyond poverty, in the developed world, cheap energy (you could argue that for the past 150 years fossil fuels have been so cheap that they might as well have been ‘free energy’) has allowed Western nations to conquer, plunder, colonise, mine, clearcut, dominate and oppress.

While it has also allowed us to do many good things, energy cannot be seen in isolation from our relationship with other resources.  Free energy would mean we would drain the aquifers faster, degrade the soils faster, work our way through the earth’s other depleting resources at an accelerated rate.  Nowhere in the film is the idea of limits even mentioned, apart from occasional mentions that believing in ‘scarcity’ is one of our problems.

Can anyone seriously argue that the United States (which is principally the focus of this film) with a new free source of energy would be a more responsible member of the global community?  Would they happily share it with the rest of the world? (the current stand-off about Iran’s nuclear energy programme rather indicates that they wouldn’t).  I would argue that it is only the realisation that we are nearing the end of the age of cheap energy, cheap fossil fuels, that is finally bringing some sense, some awareness of the fact that we live on a finite planet and that we need to live more responsibly.  Gamble’s argument that we could have enough free energy “to transform the entire earth” fills me with dread and foreboding rather than excitement.

We are told that oil companies are spending “huge amounts of money” suppressing free energy, with no evidence presented to support that at all.  I would hazard a bet though that if even any money at all is spent on such things, it is a tiny fraction of what is spent on climate change denial, funding dubious organisations which attempt to undermine climate science, all of which gets no mention here.  Of course we already have technologies that can harness natural energies and which provide clean energy – they are called renewables, we know they work, and we can install them today.  ‘Free energy’ is a fantasy, and will always remain so.  As Kyle Hill writes in his review, ”just because the universe is hard to understand and many times mysterious, does not mean that anything goes”.

Down the conspiracy rabbithole

Then we are bombarded with the full range of conspiracy thinking.  9/11 was an inside job, there is a conspiracy to suppress natural medicines, “Big Brother’s not coming, it’s already here”, we are one step away from a “military dictatorship”, a climate treaty in Copenhagen would have been “a tax base for tyranny”, there are ‘chemtrails’ in the sky to deliberately poison us, there is a deliberate attempt to reduce the world’s population underway, there is only a cancer epidemic because all the cures have been suppressed, etc, etc.

UFOs are also brought into the picture, which is odd as they serve little to deepen his argument, rather the argument seems to go like this: there are UFOs and they are extraterrestrial craft, and in order for them to have got here, they must have free energy machines, so therefore the Elite must know about this and be keeping it from us.  As he writes on the film’s website, “if we can expose the suppression, reveal the truth about ET visitation, and further develop new energy technologies that ETs apparently rely on, then we can decentralize power and make massive strides toward a thriving future”.  I’ll leave you to decide whether that 2+2+2=9 kind of logic makes any sense to you, and whether the word ‘apparently’ constitutes an evidence base.  Naturally, no evidence is presented to support this other than a few fuzzy videos of lights in the sky in different parts of the world.

Wheeled out as ‘experts’ to support the film’s arguments are Deepak Chopra and, erm, David Icke, among others.  Gamble is keen on talking about “my research”, yet his research, such as it is, is so undemanding that I am reminded of Sir Terry Frost’s words, “if you know before you look, you cannot see for knowing”.  Gamble wheels out the classic conspiracy theorists’ gambit, “could I be wrong?  Perhaps.  But what if I’m not?”  No, you are wrong.  And even if you were right, you have presented us with so little evidence to back up you claims that you would have no way of knowing whether you were right or not.

He also does the other classic conspiracy theorist’s trick of saying “don’t just take my word for it, do the research yourself”, offering links on the film’s website that all back up his arguments, rather than giving a rounded balanced view of arguments and counterarguments.  There’s some dreadful rubbish on there, the film ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’ is presented as evidence that climate change is probably not a problem, for example, and the appalling section on climate change beautifully states “those who point to solar activity as a cause of global warming are often ridiculed and accused of being funded by the oil industry, even when that’s not the case”.  “Even when”?

Ah, so that’s what ‘Thrive’ is all about …

Then, at the end of the film, we finally get into Thrive’s manifesto, it’s vision for the future and how we might get there.  There is lots in there that I wouldn’t disagree with, more local food, renewable energy, local banking, local shopping and so on, apart from free energy being thrown into the mix too.  But now, it is in this final section of ‘Thrive’ that the dark side of the film emerges.  One of the things put forward, alongside local food, renewables and so on, is “little or no taxes”.  Eh?  Where did that come from?!  Ah, now we get into the real agenda of the film, a kind of New Age libertarianism, a sort of cosmic Tea Party, and it all starts to get deeply alarming.

Gamble sets out his 3 stages to get to humanity’s being able to thrive.  Firstly, he argues, we need to hugely scale back the defence industry and the Federal Reserve.  Well I could go along with that, but then the second is “shrink government’s role in order to protect individual liberty”, and the third is then, because we are now freer, with “no involuntary tax and no involuntary governance” and with “rules but no rules” (?), we can all now thrive.  OK, whoa, let’s pause here for a moment.  Indeed the film’s website goes further, describing ‘involuntary taxation’ as “plunder” and ‘involuntary governance’ as “tyranny”.

Thrive's vision of a thriving world: no taxes, no government, 'free energy charging stations' and community markets.

In her review, Georgia Kelly quotes Oliver Wendell Holmes as saying “taxes are what we pay for a civilised society”.  In spite of all it’s cosmic graphics and pictures of forests from the air, it is in essence a kind of New Age Tea Party promo film, arguing for a society with no government, no taxes, no laws, alongside “interplanetary exploration”, which somehow combine to create a world that respects the rights of all.  Apparently, this would lead to a world where “everyone would have the opportunity to thrive”.  In reality, it would lead to a world in which the wealthy would thrive, but the rest of us would lose healthcare, social welfare, libraries, public transport, pension entitlement, social housing etc etc.  Sounds more like a surefire route to the kind of Dickensian world that led to the creation of a welfare state in the first place.

Responding to any of the truly global issues, such as climate change (which ‘Thrive’ clearly dismisses as part of the conspiracy), would no longer happen due to intergovernmental co-operation presumably being interpreted as steps towards a ‘one world government’. The film presents its suggestions in complete isolation from any notions of ‘society’ and community, presenting a vision of the future where the entire global population is living the same lifestyle as Gamble, the resources to enable this presumably being imported from other planets, or perhaps created afresh using magic?

Nowhere in the film do you hear the words ‘less’, or anything about reduced consumption in the West.  Just as free energy and cures for cancer are our birthright, so, presumably, is the right to consume as much as we like – to think otherwise is to lapse into a ‘scarcity’ mindset.  What I find most alarming about ‘Thrive’ is that most of the people who have asked me “have you seen Thrive?” are under 20, and they seem genuinely excited by it.  Perhaps it is the simplicity of the message that appeals, the “all we need to do is” clarity of its ask.  But having to discuss why free energy machines are impossible and the shortcomings of conspiracy theories with otherwise educated young people who are inheriting a warming world with its many deep and complex challenges is deeply depressing.

How we might actually help the world thrive

‘Thrive’ is dangerous because it invites us to put our faith for the future in a fantasy.  A fantasy that free energy is possible, a fantasy that the only thing that is preventing us from creating a benign and enlightened society is a handful of powerful families.  Things that are already very successfully preventing the world from thriving include:

• climate change (you try thriving in a world with a world whose temperature has risen 11°F, as the IEA warned this week)
• the fact that we fail to see reducing our oil demand as a key as a key aspect of energy security, oil prices having quadrupled since 2003 and going nowhere other than up, UK North Sea oil production falling by 22.5% in 2011 (a record fall) and North Sea natural gas production falling by 29.5% (a record fall) in 2011
• Social inequality, which as the book  ‘The Spirit Level’ so brilliantly showed, underpins many of our other social problems
• Our economic system, designed to channel money upwards rather than downwards and to enrich the 1%, but this is a sufficiently abhorrent system (see, for example, Nicholas Shaxson’s brilliant ‘Treasure Islands’, review coming soon) without invoking secret societies and conspiracies to explain it

The solutions are already out there, there are proven technologies, proven strategies, and we need to work on all levels, as indeed the film argues, and to withdraw our support from a corrupt and ineffectual model which is taking us over the brink, and put that support into creating a more resilient, localised and accountable model.  However, it’s not about ‘interplanetary travel’, it’s about finding our feet, here and now, in the communities and the soils that surround us.  It’s not about ‘free energy’, it’s about learning to appreciate what a precious thing energy is and learning to live well with less of it.  It’s not about ‘no involuntary taxation’, it’s about taxes that disincentivise the things that are narrowing our future options, and incentivising the things we need to get in place urgently.  It’s not about ‘no government’, it’s about truly democratic government using its considerable powers to build resilience, decarbonise society, shift the collective focus.  The few countries in the world that are actually seriously engaging with the climate issue are those with stronger government, not weaker government.

I have occasionally been interviewed for a film and then squirmed with embarrassment when I have seen the final context in which my interview has been used.  I can only imagine that some of the progressives, such as Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, who appear in this film, are similarly horrified with ‘Thrive’.  It is a film that offers us nothing, and which, taken to its logical conclusion, would lead to our having thrown away the few options for actually thriving that remain open to us.  It is the film equivalent of a self-published book, with no critical editor rounding off the corners, and as a self-funded film a sense that you can do what you like.  Avoid.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZe1AeH0Qz8&feature=related

There is a huge boom in natural gas production going on in the US at the moment.  Gas which is locked up in shale and has proven very hard to extract in the past is now being made available through a process called hydraulic fracturing or ‘fracking’.  Here, wells are drilled deep into the shale, initially vertically, then horizontally, explosive charges then fracture the rocks, and then a highly toxic mixture of over 500 chemicals, many of them known carcinogens, is pumped under pressure into the rocks, followed by huge volumes of water into which the natural gas then dissolves, rather like the bubbles in lemonade.  Think of it as a huge Sodastream.  About half of this water is then pumped out again, the gas removed, and the highly toxic water is then, in theory at least, safely disposed of.

Gasland, in part, tells the story of Josh Fox, who lives in a forest, near a river, in the house his parents built in Pennsylvania, and who one day received a letter from a gas company offering to buy the rights to extract gas from his land.  Intrigued, he set off to find other places where this was taking place.  The film is really the story of that trip.  What he found was that fracking is happening across the US, on a huge scale, and that in many cases, is having a disastrous effect on groundwater and on the communities that depend on that water.  He found communities suffering from all kinds of illnesses, and with water that comes out of the tap dark brown, smelling of benzine and other hydrocarbons, and, in many cases, in some of the film’s most spectacular moments, that can actually be set on fire by holding a lighter next to the water.  Being able to set your kitchen water on fire is as sure an indication as you could want that something is wrong somewhere.

‘Gasland’ reveals how the organisations supposed to be protecting many thousands of people aren’t, and how one of Dick Cheney’s final acts when in government was to change the legislation so that the companies carrying out fracking are exempt from the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act and a raft of other environmental legislation.  The industrial system’s model of find a resource, trash the place trying to get it out and to maximise the economic return, then get out doing the least possible to remedy the impacts of what you have done, is thrown into stark relief in this film.  The polluted water, once stripped of its gas content, is left to sit in ‘holding ponds’ where it often leaks out.  In theory it should be sent to landfill, but in one of the scenes that stayed with me the longest, some places now have machines that ‘evaporate’ the water, turning it into mist which blows away, taking its poisonous contents away to wherever the wind carries it.

Watching this film in the UK, you might find yourself thinking that this is another film about the US and some of the more outlandish things that happen there, but it isn’t an issue here.  However, fracking is now underway in the UK.  The first hydraulic fracturing wells are being sunk, as we speak, on a farm 4 miles from Blackpool, and many more sites are in the process of being identified.  The terms of their license mean that Cuadrilla, the company undertaking the drilling, doesn’t have to reveal the results of the explorations until 2015.  Many more are planned, and the Department of Energy and Climate Change has made it clear that it has no plans to call for a moratorium on the practice.

So, given the potential of the environmental impacts being so clearly experienced in the US, it might be worth asking what are the benefits of turning to fracking?  The UK imports much of its gas, currently from Qatar and Russia, among other places.  How might this affect our national energy security?  According to a recent report from the Tyndall Centre, displacing 10% of the UK’s current gas consumption would necessitates about 2,500-3,000 horizontal wells spread over some 140-400 square kilometres, requiring 27 to 113m tonnes of water.  ‘Gasland’ sets out clearly how the authorities who are meant to protect people from things like fracking are failing them horribly.  One woman reports confronting a public representative and saying “if you aren’t going to protect us, what should we do?”, and being told “get an attorney”.  However, with gas fracking starting here in the UK, we can naturally be assured, one would hope, that the powers-that-be are all over it, and intent on keeping a close eye on things.

However, when asked about the Blackpool drilling, the Department of Energy and Climate Change wrote that:

“Cuadrilla, currently operating near Blackpool, has made it clear that there is no likelihood of environmental damage resulting from its shale gas project, and that it is applying technical expertise and exercising the utmost care as it takes drilling and testing forward.”

Oh that’s alright then.

I would highly recommend this film as a powerful and graphic immersion in what ‘scraping the barrel’ looks like in practice.  In ‘The Transition Handbook’ I referred to the Alberta tar sands as the equivalent of an alcoholic going to the pub, finding the beer is off, and being so desperate for a drink that he thinks “over the years there must have been thousands of pints spilt on this carpet, I’ll boil it up and drink that”…  Gas fracking is like starting to blow bits of the house’s foundations up in order to find any spilt beer that made it through to the brickwork.  It may be marginally better than coal mining and all the horrors associated with that, and we can debate, as George Monbiot has been increasingly in recent weeks, the role of nuclear in all this and whether it is better or worse than coal or gas fracking, but really surely the message of this film, with its closing shots of huge windfarms, is that we can do better.

With the publication last week of a report showing that a rapid transition to a completely renewable infrastructure is possible by 2030, and Germany setting a record last year for the amount of renewable energy installed, the sooner we can leave the second half of the oil age behind the better.  The sooner we can shift our expectations, use less, and get a sense of the increasingly abusive process that filling our cars makes necessary, the better.  I found ‘Gasland’ a very sad film to watch.  Here is something that makes nobody happy, and represents corporations completely out of control.  It also takes you on Fox’s journey through learning more and more about gas fracking, to the point where it all gets too much for him and he stands and weeps by the side of the river.  I think it is vital viewing, and absolutely deserves the Oscar it came so close to winning.

You can order the DVD of Gasland here.

Review of ‘Blind Spot’ DVD.  2008.  Dislexic Productions. Directed by Adolfo Doring.

Any new peak oil film is inevitably going to be judged in the context of the films that have gone before it. Blind Spot is no exception. Does it offer any new insights or any new way of telling the story that previous examples of the genre haven’t? The answer, unfortunately, is no. In fact, I have to say that my despite being, as we have probably established by now, fascinated by the whole subject, I struggled to keep my eyes open for the full 88 minutes of the film.

Despite its very high production values, the format of Blind Spot becomes fairly stultifying after a while. Talking head after talking head (including many of your favourites, Heinberg, Deffeyes, Catton, Jensen, Tainter, a veritable cavalcade of peakists, doomers and catastrophists, all of whom are excellent), tell the peak oil story and why it matters, overlaid firstly with images of industrial society, and then with images of Nature and the environment. That’s it really, and there is not enough in that to sustain the viewer’s interest for an hour and a half (it certainly didn’t sustain mine).

I also struggled with the film’s basic premise.  As the back cover blurb puts it “… we have put ourselves at a crossroad which offers two paths, both with dire consequences.  If we continue to burn fossil fuels we will choke the life out of the planet, and if we don’t our way of life will collapse”.  Really, if there is no thinking of any way through, or any way forward, or indeed if our ‘way of life’ changing substantially is seen as an utterly dreadful option, then for me at least, this film has nothing to offer.

Does it have End of Suburbia’s in your face, earth-shattering analysis of our oil dependency and the kick in the pants peak oil will give us? No. Does it have Crude Awakening’s powerful narrative about how the Oil Age has destroyed environments around the world and led to our perilous state of addiction? No. Does it have What a Way to Go’s sensitive exploration of how peak oil and the impacts it will have on society are affecting us all, allowing us to sit in the place of really feeling how all this affects us? No. Does it even have the compelling if slightly hallucinagenic feel of Imposed by Nature, which feels almost like a Burroughs-esque peak oil road movie? No.  It is pretty much bereft of narrative, it doesn’t really tell a story at all.

Blind Spot felt to me like a collection of out-takes from End of Suburbia and What a Way to Go spliced together with some stock (albeit rather beautiful) footage of nature scenes. My sense is that peak oil films, especially if they are to distinguish themselves from those that have gone before them, need to tell a powerful story, they need to shock, or to inform with a fresh perspective, or they need to uplift and inspire with possibilities. This film does none of the above.  Whereas Crude Impact tried to be 8 different films at once and ended up doing none of them very well, Blind Spot feels like it is struggling to even work out what kind of film it wants to be.

It is important to say that I am writing this from the perspective of having seen many such films on the peak oil subject, from the life-changing to the dreadful. It is therefore impossible for me to speak from the viewpoint of someone who has never seen a film on peak oil before, and how this film would come across to them. I suspect they would find it mildly interesting for the first half an hour, but then they would start to lose interest, and this is a subject in which it is vital that people don’t lose interest.

The recent film Age of Stupid (previewed at the Transition Network conference) did a great job of telling several stories in such a way as to weave a compelling narrative. It had drama, pace and ambition (although it was also pretty unremittingly focused on the problem rather than what we might do about it), all of which are missing from this film. The other thing that is fascinating to observe is that when you make a film about peak oil, unless you also look at responses and implications, you will end up with an almost exclusively male cast, as Blind Spot does. The interviewees are an esteemed, wise, but rather predictable collection, it would have been good to see some less often heard voices (when, for example, will we see a film with Sharon Astyk in it?).

So would I recommend it as a film you might like to show in your Transition groups? Sorry, not really. You might find it useful to show certain clips, certain sections from it which discuss different aspects you find interesting, but as a call-to-arms, as a powerful immersion in the challenges coming our way, as an invitation to be a part of creating the post-peak world, or even as something to scare you out of your wits, Blind Spot is a pretty unsatisfying and un-nourishing experience.

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You can see a trailer for Blind Spot and order copies of the DVD here.  The film’s official website is here.

Reynolds is one of those great stubborn, persistent and driven people upon whom the dissemination of a great idea often depends. His work began in the 1970s, when having trained as an architect, he decided that what architecture was providing for the world was in fact ‘endless horseshit’, which failed to meet either the needs of people or planet. He became fascinated by the creation of low-cost housing which used recycled materials, and which created self-reliant systems, homes that generate their own power, gather and treat their own water, and grow their own food. In that upsurge of innovation and creativity that emerged from the first oil shock of 1973, he began to build prototypes.

His first structures were at communes, and on radical hippy projects where people had time, energy and enthusiasm but little money. His first buildings were outlandish, highly experimental and each one provided scope for testing and refining. He worked driven by a faith in what he was doing, and a belief that the right doors would open at the right time. “I always thought if you’re doing things right for people, they’ll find you”, he says in the film.

The importance of this scope to experiment comes through in the film as a very strong theme. The Earthship concept was born of trial and error, of operating at the cutting edge. Reynolds was operating outside the law, building Earthship subdivisions which provided little in the way of services, principally because, being autonomous buildings, they didn’t need any. As he puts it “outside the law is the place where the information lies”.

In time though, the law decided it had had enough. Reynolds found the full weight of the New Mexico planning authorities thrown at him, and his work was subjected to relentless scrutiny and regulation. In the end his work was became so restricted that he stopped working. As he puts it “I had lost the freedom to fail”.

His response was to create a bill which allowed areas of land to be identified as zones where experimental buildings can be developed, where the building regulations are relaxed in the aim of developing sustainable housing. Reynolds argues that if the US government can ring fence many thousands of acres to test nuclear bombs on, thus rendering them entirely useless for thousands of years, then why can’t a couple of hundred acres be put aside for unusual buildings?

The film follows Reynolds through the endless corridors of the New Mexico legislature, as he tries to get his bill passed. I won’t spoil the story by telling you if it gets passed or not, but his persistence and his decision, as someone from a strong counter-culture, alternative background, to don a suit (the scene of him buying a suit is priceless) and “climb in through the arsehole of society and get into its bloodstream” (as he colourfully puts it), speaks volumes about his depth of principle and dedication to his art.

Perhaps the most moving part of the whole film is when, with his own architectural practice in tatters, he heads to the Andaman Islands in the wake of the tsunami there to see how he and his team can help. The island’s population has been reduced from 35,000 to 7,500, and the settlements are devastated. Reynolds and the crew set to, building a house which captures its rainwater, stores it in a cellar, draws air in over the water to keep the air cool, and is built using tyres and old bottles (and rather a lot of cement, it must be said).

What sustains the film and keeps it beyond just being about unusual buildings is Reynolds himself. He is an obsessive, who has single-pointedly pursued an ideal, a vision, for nearly 40 years, in spite of all that has been thrown at him. His wife refers to him as a ‘freak magnet’, given the unlikely crew of dedicated Earthship builders he has assembled. It is people like Reynolds, who saw the vital importance of an idea that long ago and have doggedly persisted at refining and developing it, (one could add to the list Bill Mollison, Masanobu Fukuoka, David Holmgren, Emelia Hazelip, Robert Hart…) to whom we owe an enormous debt.

We can fund all the researchers in all the Universities in the world to research various aspects of how a post peak world might function, but unless we go to those who have been working tirelessly for many years, who have learn as much from their failures as from their successes, our research is pointless. ‘Garbage Warrior’ is a passionate, rousing and engaging look at one of the great mavericks and cultural creatives of our time. It is a study in the power of hard work, supportive community and a good idea. It is about the power of applied common sense. Above all perhaps, it is about the power of being naughty in a world which increasingly disapproves of such behaviour. ‘Garbage Warrior’ is quite wonderful, and I recommend it very highly.

You can find out more about the film and buy copies of the newly released DVD here.