The Documentary

The Last Road Trip is a documentary about traveling in a 1983 Mercedes 300d from San Diego to Connecticut in early 2009, and the events surrounding the trip. The context of the trip is the ever sharpening relief of the significant changes facing the USA and world. There is currently a global economic pull back, and widespread, justified concern about the ability to return to previously accepted beliefs about economic growth and prosperity. This concern ultimately stems from two significant issues, climate change and peak oil.

The movie integrates the personal story of a somewhat typical, suburban Connecticut family, with the broader trends of economic decline, resource depletion and environmental degradation. When Michael Harris and his daughter slid off the road on a return trip from ice skating on New Year’s Eve day of 2008, it initiated a chain of events that lead up to the purchase of the older Mercedes Benz on Ebay. The car was selected in the interest of replacing the second of two family cars with something that acknowledged the longer term trends away from automobiles and suburban lifestyles.

Harris has worked as a sustainability consultant for about four years and has grown increasingly aware of the assumptions and frames of reference most people in the American culture currently operate within. Through this growing understanding, he has come to see the role of a deeper, non-rational connection with the world at large as an important component of the creative change needed to address global challenges. The accident was an event that informed Harris in a way to which he had never before been open. This process of creative flow ultimately underlies the film and offers a second, subtler message.

On the surface, however, the film chronicles the family trip to pick up the car. Already converted to run on vegetable oil, the documentary will record the efforts of the family to fuel their trip from the growing commercial biodiesel and  grass roots vegetable oil processing networks. As it unfolds, the film will attempt to investigate the appropriateness of biofuels and their impact on social and economic justice with regard to use of food-based feed stocks to make the fuel.

More importantly, the film examines the spiritual issues that are at the heart of both the problems and the potential solutions. It seeks to understand more about the dissociation from the natural world so prevalent in people  today, how this shows up as withdrawal and isolation, or is cast as recreation and sports that focus on skillful domination. It seeks to understand useful paths for going forward. What are they, and who are the people currently getting in touch with this new way of being? Compelling scenery of the American southwest underscores this theme.

Interviews planned include Richard Heinberg from the Post Carbon Institute, Kenneth Wapnick from Foundation for a Course in Miracles, Amory Lovins from the Rocky Mountain Institute, James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency; native Americans, the car seller, fuel station attendants and vegetable oil proponents, members of the Awakening the Dreamer movement and PowerShift 2009, local Connecticut activists and, among others, Eddie, the car body repair shop owner that was involved with the damaged car. The film seeks out representatives of Zen, Sufi, Christian, Hindu and other religions for their perspectives and includes comments from a local film maker, the chairman of Harris’ hometown green committee.

Ultimately, the film attempts to reconcile, on a personal level, the incredible urgency for change given the inevitable transition to a world with far less energy, food, resources, people and species diversity, with the cultural inertia that currently keeps virtually everyone of us continuing to do what we have done for so long, seemingly oblivious to the destructive results of our current institutions and systems. In the end, the film will reveal the need to accept our history and tendency to violence toward one another and toward the natural world, and the need to transcend this part of our nature if humans are to continue to exist as part of the web of life.