Derrick Jensen
Derrick Jensen - Photo: Dawn Paley - END:CIV
If you are too lazy or don’t want to buy Derrick Jensen’s best-selling book Endgame, try at least to watch the documentary END:CIV. Made by film maker Franklin Lopez, END:CIV reminds us that every civilization ends – whether the Roman Empire or that of the ancient Mayans (whose modern-day descendants are reportedly saying 2012 is “game over”).

Jensen tries to wake us up to the fact that we are rapidly heading for an endgame. The documentary, based on his book, tries to shake us out of our comfort zone to show just how we are wrecking the planet.

Try to catch the documentary at a showing, buy a copy, or see if you can watch it online.

Here is what the film website says about the documentary:

If your homeland was invaded by aliens who cut down the forests and contaminated the food supply, would you resist? If creatures from outer space made the water so poisonous you wouldn’t dream of drinking it, would you try to stop them? If monsters released toxic chemicals that caused cancer in the people you love, would you fight back?

These aren’t idle questions. It’s happening now – except there are no aliens. The culture that’s cradled us since birth is a killer.

END:CIV illustrates the brutality of a civilization addicted to systematic violence and environmental destruction, and the heroism of those who confront it head-on. Rapid-fire video-game graphics, interviews, war footage and satire mock the excesses of the global economic system, even as it implodes around us.

END:CIVDerrick Jensen asks: “If civilization lasts another one or two hundred years, will the people then say of us, ‘Why did they not take it down?’ Will they be as furious with us as I am with those who came before and stood by? I could very well hear those people who come after saying, ‘If they had taken it down, we would still have earthworms to feed the soil. We would have redwoods, and we would have oaks in California. We would still have frogs. We would still have other amphibians. I am starving because there are no salmon in the river, and you allowed the salmon to be killed so rich people could have cheap electricity for aluminum smelters. God damn you. God damn you all.'”

Documentary interviews include Captain Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Society and writers James Howard Kunstler (The Long Emergency), Gord Hill (500 Years of Indigenous Resistance), Waziyatawin (For Indigenous Eyes Only), Lierre Keith (The Vegetarian Myth), and Stephanie McMillan (Minimum Security). López interviews indigenous activists Qwatsinas (Nuxalk Nation) and Rod Coronado (Pascua Yaqui); environmentalists Steven Best, Zoe Blunt, Dru Oja Jay, Macdonald Stainsby, and many more.

END:CIV documentary website