Reverence, Resistance, Resilience film series: Two Short Films About Shaping the Future
Thursday March 15, 2018 6:00 pm
The Economics of Happiness and
Joanna Macy and the Great Turning
Free and Open to the Public.
Light refreshments, courtesy of the Friends of the Athol Public Library
Conversation to follow
Please register by calling 978-249-9515
Join us for a screening of two short films:
The Economics of Happiness (20 minutes) and
Joanna Macy and the Great Turning (26 minutes)
The Economics of Happiness describes a world moving simultaneously in two opposing directions. On the one hand, government and big business continue to promote globalization and the consolidation of corporate power. At the same time, all around the world people are resisting those policies, demanding a re-regulation of trade and finance—and, far from the old institutions of power, they’re starting to forge a very different future. Communities are coming together to re-build more human scale, ecological economies based on a new paradigm – an economics of localization.
We hear from a chorus of voices from six continents including Samdhong Rinpoche, the former Prime Minister of Tibet’s government in exile, Vandana Shiva, Bill McKibben, David Korten and Zac Goldsmith. They tell us that climate change and peak oil give us little choice: we need to localize, to bring the economy home. The good news is that as we move in this direction we will begin not only to heal the earth but also to restore our own sense of well-being. The Economics of Happiness restores our faith in humanity and challenges us to believe that it is possible to build a better world.
Joanna Macy and the Great Turning is a 26-minute film about the opportunity we have to come alive to our truest power, to 'look straight into the face of our time, which is the biggest gift we can give,' and to participate in the Great Turning.
What is the Great Turning? It is, as Joanna describes it, the shift from the industrial growth society to a life-sustaining civilization. It is, she believes, the third major revolution of human existence, after the agricultural and industrial revolutions.
'The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth,” says Joanna, 'is not that we are on the way to destroying the world — we've actually been on the way for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves and each other.”
This is a thoughtful, and ultimately hopeful, film for anyone concerned about the future of life on the planet.
Conversation will follow the film screening, led by Anna Gyorgy. Anna has long been active in ecological and peace work: writing, ediiting, organizing -- and gardening -- with hope for the future. Anna coordinates the Women & Life on Earth Internet Project (wloe.org) with the Traprock Center for Peace & Justice (traprock.org). From 1985-2013 Gyorgy was based in Germany, where the website grew as part of a German WLOE organization. A final project of that group was making subtitles and web information for the 2011 German version of the full-length film, The Economics of Happiness.
Now back in her home area, she is on the Wendell Energy Committee, and through Traprock continues work on the website, hoping to expand it as a useful resource for current social and ecological justice movements. In 2018 she was elected to the coordinating committee of the Franklin County Continuing the Political Revolution (fccpr.us), a progressive organization based in Franklin County, Mass.
This film screening is a collaboration between the Athol Public Library & North Quabbin Energy. North Quabbin Energy is an informal network in north-central Massachusetts, started in 2005, that supports and facilitates communication with people and town energy committees to share ideas and projects concerned with issues relating to energy use. Members work to educate themselves and their neighbors about the true social and environmental costs of current energy consumption patterns and to find ways of changing individual and collective habits of energy use through conservation, use of renewable fuels, and support for local and regional enterprises that reduce dependence on imported resources. http://
Free and Open to the Public.
Please register by calling 978-249-9515.
Light refreshments.