Streaming on You-Tube now
The new movie put out last week by Michael Moore and directed by Jeff Gibbs arrived prophetically the same week that the COVID-19 pandemic reached its first peak.
This film is distressing to watch. It’s like a difficult surgery; maybe necessary to help we ailing humans, but also painful to go through.
Jeff Gibbs posits that much of the green movement has been either hi-jacked or greenwashed to the point where we, the patients of Dr. Earth, are foolishly getting green around the gills. He completely sympathizes with the environmental movement, but he sees the crony corporatism that always seems to creep into our capitalist system.
He sees the deforestation in the name of bio-fuel. He sees major environmental leader like Bill McKibben and Al Gore as being duped. He makes many cogent points, but with a rather wayward surgical blade.
At the end you don’t know if you feel nauseas about factory farming, stolen elections, the sad end of orangutans, or Al Gore’s fall from grace. It’s like maybe the anesthesiologists threw everything and the kitchen sink on our heads just to knock us out.
The truth about our degradation of Earth is real. But this film doesn’t capture some of the hope we really need to recover from all the injury, including COVID-19, that we have recklessly created with our zoonotic insistence on factory farming and interference with habitats that need our protection.
It would have been helpful if he referenced E.O. Wilson’s half earth kept wild campaign, or Jane Goodall’s Roots and Shoots, Or find a way to reveal all the good work of Paul Hawken, et. al, Project Drawdown, which provides more than just alternative energy solutions. The lifetime work of David Suzuki, and other naturalists, also comes to mind, and is left out.
Without simplifying the problem with a surgical laser focus, Planet Of The Humans , veers about. We need as a civilization, to simply follow nature’s ecological laws of non-waste.
When you create garbage — in politics — or on air, water, or sea, you simply have a polluted system. This primary lesson seems to get lost a bit in the film.
In fact, the very times we are living through right now with the pandemic are proof that we can do better if we know better.
People are talking about science and listening to expertise. Even the most religious among us are staying away from church because they believe perhaps, that God helps those who help themselves.
Faith in our ability to collaborate and improve is crucial.
Taking care of one another is something we can learn to do. Taking steps to protect our living life support system tackles everything at the same time. We need global reform in food revolutions, eco-justice, race and gender equity, and people willing to stand up to authoritarian leaders. And, like 350.orgs, Bill Mckibben is fond of saying “we need everybody to change everything.”
If we are only to look at green energy’s carbon footprint, at present, we look to closely at the bad and don’t see the potential for good. For example, Planet of the Humans didn’t mention safely designed thorium reactors, or retro-fitting buildings. It doesn’t address the problem of no access to birth control and reproductive health for women worldwide. They don’t explore the coming revolution in food industry that this pandemic is going to unleash.
In short, the Gibb’s surgical blade thrashes around at lot so the viewer feels somewhat bloody and shredded afterward. Even though they tacked on some reversals of sentiment about our biggest environmentalists at the close of the film, it was not quite enough to inspire.
Nevertheless, Planet of The Humans is worth watching. If you have no other way to get the surgery you need, it’s best to at least know the truth about some of our worst human habits.
It may be just one more way for people to wake up from our coma and smell the Texas Tea.
—
This post was previously published on Greener Together and is republished here with permission from the author.
—
***
If you believe in the work we are doing here at The Good Men Project and want to join our calls on a regular basis, please join us as a Premium Member, today.
All Premium Members get to view The Good Men Project with NO ADS.
Need more info? A complete list of benefits is here.
Talk to you soon.
—
Photo credit: Christyl Rivers