Response to Jeff Gibbs and Michael Moore's "Planet of the Humans".
[ Edit 04/27/2020 - having done a little background research on Dr Vandana Shiva, who gets glowing treatment by Jeff Gibbs, I shudder. She is on record promoting the conspiracy theory that Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is distributing vaccines in Africa in order to install "microchips" to regulate women's reproduction, and that the purpose of his AIDS vaccine work is to "exterminate Africans". Needless to say, either Michael Moore and Jeff Gibbs failed to do background checks, or decided to leave this information out. Not sure I can still give this a "B+", even if I agree on the level of alarm. If they give a pass to lies about one wealthy person, what does it say about the others the documentary castigates? Seriously guys, stuff like this ruins an otherwise very important message. - Robin ]
This is a powerful, if imperfect documentary about the rapid spoiling of the Earth. I totally agree with about 70% of it.
The strengths of Jeff Gibbs' video include taking-on of environmentalists caught inside a "righteousness trap" (the "cultural" social constructs @~48m, "the right has religion" is spot on). I also applaud Gibbs' dissection of the abuse of subsidies and their unintended consequences, and his fearless look at
Holocene or "Sixth Mass Extinction".
Sharing Jeff Gibbs' taste for Socratic Method, I'll spend more paragraphs on constructive push-back. The weaknesses of the documentary are typical of Moore-brand "gotcha" journalism, such as unfairly equating lesser-consumption (conservation) with the levels of consumption prior to the conservation. The opening scenes showing how used cars used to be dumped in rivers within our #OKBoomer lifetimes merits a closer look, because
Rachel Carlson didn't clean up those rivers by herself. Corporations (scrap industries, steel mills, and politicians) had a lot to do with fixing that consumer practice. More on that below.
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| Blame Corporations for Human Population Growth? |
Gibbs shares Michael Moore's inclination to focus guilt and blame on people who have money, whether the money is earned from conservation or by elephant hunting. Yes, Jeff, a vegetarian monk is eating vegetables which are grown with scarce water and fossile fuel driven tractors - but on a
per capita basis, she consumes
far less than human carnivores. Yes, Jeff, solar panels are built with mined metals and quartz. So are tanks and missiles - are they therefore the same investment? Yes, Jeff, solar panels have maintenance and replacement costs... but so do cameras. I missed the part where you did the math to show solar was not break-even investment, or where you compared longer-lasting reuse/repair/maintenance systems to the quickie dog and pony show solar investments you rightfully criticize.
Perhaps the best moments of the documentary (
"Herd of Elephants in the Room") starts at minute
45, 50 seconds... This piece of film correctly and proficiently makes the point that Humans consume too much to sustain nature. The remainder of the documentary essentially asserts that Sierra Club, Union of Concerned Scientists, 350.org, etc. are just part of the problem, offering more "
moral licensing" to consumers than actual education to cut out activities that are primary cause of the problem.
It's a difficult thesis - Solar power makes us feel better about mining... Therefore Solar Power is to blame for Mining (original sin)? Smells like Moore-brand gotcha. But there's a legitimate point as well.
Don't get me wrong, I think there is far too little of this kind of self-examination (I do the same for recycling systems). But you can make this better. While the criticism of the huge impact of mining is true, it makes a difference whether we use that mined aluminum, copper and steel to make missiles and guns, or roller coasters, or solar power systems. If all mining is "original sin", you are building a righteousness trap similar to those you criticize. Even if it's possible to build solar panels out of 100% recycled content, it's wiser to let the free market decide which metals (recycled or mined) go where. In fact the documentary is strong where it shows "ego boosting" environmental placement (e.g. solar panels at concerts, Richard Branson's infamous coconut powered jet)... solar farms should be put in strategic locations.
The renewables industry needs this discussion. But Gibbs may lose listeners by equivocating the Joshua Tree Forest with other barren desert landscapes; if you appear to conflate a worst example incident with common practice, you lose the appearance of fairness, and undermine your own case. Yes, the very worst examples in the documentary are clearly designed for the consumer/ticket buyers demand to have their cake and eat it too. But if those are meant to typify solar, I don't buy it.
The part about solar panels being "connected to the grid" and supplemented by carbon fuels at night or in the rain is also a cheap shot. Still, come on, cutting carbon use by half is not the equivalent of as using twice as much. Jeff Gibbs and Michael Moore's decision not to edit that false equivalency out foreshadows the leak in their dam.
Solar power fields required mining, the most polluting activity on the planet. So do movie cameras.
The rigorous outing of "biomass" subsidies (see 1 hour 0 second mark) is original and way overdue. Cutting down every tree on the planet would power the planet for about one hour. And after finishing the documentary, there is definitely a taint to organizations (like local 350.org) promoting trees ("wood chips") as a replacement for natural gas. And the interview with Sheldon Skidmore, Social Psychologist at Skidmore College, is worth re-re-watching. The "righteousness trap" blogs could not have said it any better.
As a resident of Middlebury, Vermont, I do really appreciate the pushback on biomass and upon the Ayatollahs of Carbon (My generation is more about rain forest, coral reef and endangered species).
Unfortunately, it seems like every time Planet of the Humans reaches peak insight, it retreats into blamecasting. Like most Michael Moore documentaries, there is an underpinning of religious scapegoating of "corporations". Moore never quite admits that the cycle of consumerism and increased standard of living, and life expectancy, world-wide, at the lowest unit cost, drives the system. Demand and Supply dudes.
Capitalism provides what humans demand, and pointing a populist laser at greedy corporations seems pointless. Snidely Whiplash and Monty Burns are not forcing us to eat sugar, or forcing Chinese demand for "wet market delicacies", or forcing Africans to use charcoal stoves. You are offering me the choice of deflecting blame for my consumption onto rich people. That's the exact type of logic driving dog-and-pony-show biomass and "solar rock concerts". Cheap shot ricochet.
Here's a modest proposal - stop editing out the stronger case by capitalists you doubtless got on tape. Capitalism sequesters dollars in billions which would otherwise be spent on cutting down more trees. Earth has a high fever, and yes "Planet of the Humans" is growing both in population and consumption per capita. But show a little nuance about the actual things that could "flatten the curve" such as lower population growth in developing markets (generally a result of urbanizing), and the efforts to replace charcoal stoves (most cooking in Africa is based on unsustainable forestry).
Michael Moore's solutions generally look like this - Let us blame the corporate cooks and dishwashers who "profit" (earn income) off of the dishes we order in our earth cafeteria. The people paying for the food are the innocent, the people accepting money to cook the food and wash the dishes are "motivated by profit". Now he's attacking the very NGOs who want us to change to a more sustainable diet... not because they were wrong (many instances of that, for the very echo-chamber reasons the documentary correctly asserts), but because they accepted donations from wealthy people (back to "original sin" Mike).
There is a counter premise that should have been heard out at least once in the 1 hour and 40 minutes. Those corporations are far from perfect, far from transparent, but also far more likely to develop something like nuclear fusion or other carbonless energy, than you are. Dividing the trillions of dollars - whether "stolen" or "produced" by corporations - equally among 7 billion consumers does not strike me as better a solution to shark fin soup and endangered species platter than the non-profits leveraging successful capitalists.
Go back to the opening minutes of "Planet of the Humans". It starts with how much worse the environment was in the USA in the 1950s. "There was so much water pollution that rivers caught on fire." And he points out "Forget about throwing plastic bottles in the water - we tossed our CARS in there!"
The old 1950s cars shown above were discarded by consumers. Corporations - Recycling Corporations - figured out ways to recycle them and cleaned all the sites up. Corporations invented smokestack scrubbers and water filtration... and made profits. The Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries later became one of the nation's top Lobbyists... with the profits they made recycling a problem (dumped cars) into an alternative to the very mining Gibbs and Moore criticize. Getting a big corporation to invest in better systems is not "hypocritical". Sometimes it backfires, sometimes there are unintended consequences. Sometimes proponents are lulled into depending on corporate donations, or fall into a "righteousness trap" that blinds them to those mistakes. But Gibbs and Moore are leading us into a "victimhood trap" or #resentmenttrap (a blog I've drafted but yet to post).
"Planet of the Humans" earns a B+ [C+ due to Dr Shiva conspiracy BS]... it's necessary and rare to stop us environmentalists from patting ourselves on the back, and to use scientific method to prevent biomass abuse. But there's no actual direction, no conclusion, no path to action except the Michael Moore guilty-money-populist-demagoguery, the money-guilt-resentment formula he's famous for. When consumers demand conservation, and are willing to pay more for margarine made from orangutan-friendly Indonesian plantations, corporations will deliver it.
Consumers are demanding the moral licensing. Consumers are rewarding NGOs and corporations who deliver confirmation bias, and guilt assuagement. And touchee - high tuition colleges like Middlebury are eager to provide it. But Jeff Gibbs documentary ends on a false note. He admits that consumer demand drives what is supplied, yet doesn't follow it to a logical conclusion. For Gibbs, consumer demand is not in the drivers' seat in a capitalist economy.
Are we to believe that the population growth and per capita consumption (increased standard of living worldwide) is not from individuals making babies and buying stuff? The environmentalists Gibbs takes on have a mission to nurture the human instinct to nurture.
Often, they get it right, and direct their efforts scientifically to sustain future generations. Yep, biomass is a bust. But no one - not NGOs nor corporations nor mining conglomerates nor politicians nor consumers - is expendable in that effort. I worked with a virgin copper ore smelter to clean up CRT glass piles 10 years ago, and the fear of liability proved too high a hurdle... which is why CRTs are lying abandoned like 1950s cars. Environmentalists and miners didn't trust each other.
The documentary may be excellent in offering us a frightening vision, and depriving us of moral licensing provided by recycling and ordering Impossible Burgers. The camera's focus on orangutans at the finale emphasizes my other point - palm oil plantations are growing as a direct-to-consumer-demand function, and the only way to save the orangutan is to stop people from buying palm oil (the key ingredient in margarine) - or to work with the commercial growers to diversify those plantations for orangutans to live among them. To flatten the curve, we need to curtail consuming gold, palm oil, meat, and sugar and make sure things manufactured have the longest possible useful lives. Let's not forget that that the NGOs being held to Gibbs and Moore's scrutiny are the ones who taught us that... [#righttorepair law here].
Back to the 4th minute of the video,
we see evidence that consumers produced a problem, and business cleaned it up. I often criticize unfettered business (Big Shred, Planned Obsolescence) and critique the same type of non-profit (Charitable Industrial Complex) that Gibbs and Moore take on. But I'm not stupid enough to think that profit and growth are based on anything other than consumer demand. We just have to be smart, and have to get smart quickly. The blame game by Michael Moore is wearing thin.
