The being now known as “Timothy Scott Bennett” landed on this planet in rural “Michigan,” one of the so-called “United States” currently occupying a large portion of the landmass known to some as “North America.” Astonished by what he saw around him, he set about to learn all he could of art and science, religion and spirituality, writing and filmmaking, in order to better understand the society into which he’d been born, and the strange behaviors of the human beings he encountered. He believes that if he can help to make clear and conscious the assumptions, beliefs, taboos, denials, and orthodoxies of the dominant global industrial culture, some humans will be able to break free of the confines and limitations of that paradigm. He trusts that this will be a good thing. To that end, he and his wife, Sally Erickson, created the feature-length documentary What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire, a film which journeys through the present predicament on Planet Earth, looking at climate chaos, mass extinction, oil depletion, overpopulation, and the culture of domination and disconnection that now appears to be unraveling. He currently lives with Sally in coastal “Maine,” which is another of those “United States.” He rides his bicycle, watches for whales, soaks up the sun and the wind, and remains utterly astonished. -from the "about the author" page of All of the Above ____________________________________ Timothy S. Bennett, Writer/Director is an artist and filmmaker who now lives in a small coastal town in Maine. Born and raised in rural Michigan, he began his inquiry into environmental and cultural issues in the late 80s. His academic background is in anthropology, religion, education and film. He is the father of three grown children. What A Way To Go is his first feature-length documentary. His talent for “big-picture thinking,” along with his ability to see through the taboos, denials, and orthodoxies of the dominant culture, combined with his poetic writing style, makes for a documentary experience that is both compelling and informative. Filmmaker’s Statement “Something happens when you read four hundred articles on climate change. And half a dozen books on oil depletion. Something happens when you spend a day Googling “mass extinction”, or ” oceans”, or “depleted uranium”. Something happens when you spend three long years delving deeply into the present global predicament, and into the economic, political, spiritual, psychological and cultural forces that have brought us to a point in history where we can seriously ponder the extinction of the human species, and the mass extinction of much of the life on this planet. Something happens when you not only look at it, but also allow yourself to feel it – the grief, the outrage, the loneliness, and the fear. Something happens. Denial fades away. Denial cannot endure in the face of that much information, and that depth of feeling. After long decades of activism and effort, planetary ecosystems are closer to collapse than they have ever been. I can think of three basic reasons for this. First, we have largely failed to look at the whole thing at once. Second, we’ve refrained from deeply feeling our predicament. And third, we haven’t been asking the right questions of the right people. What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire is an attempt to fill in these missing pieces. By looking at as much of the whole as we can, by creating a feeling experience of that whole, and by asking the deep questions of culture, psychology and spirit that lie at the root of our situation, it is our intention that What a Way to Go will break through the denial that has us locked in inaction.” -from the Filmmaker's page on the What a Way to Go website.