Sitting with the Trouble
“Planet of the Humans” demands we ask big questions, not parrot little answers.
Backdrop
If saving the planet was a competition, the environmentalism movement would be losing.
Insect populations, one of the biotic mainstays of our planet’s ecology, are crashing:
A 2014 review in Science tried to quantify [insect population]…declines by synthesizing the findings of existing studies and found that a majority of monitored species were declining, on average by 45 percent.—Jarvis, Brooke; The Insect Apocalypse is Here, New York Times Magazine, 2018
Carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere has been growing relentlessly:
The coronavirus-induced recession reminds us that the wellbeing of our populations is reliant on a consumption-oriented economy.
And the president of the United States is a climate change denier.
Bickering Egos
One of the hallmarks of President Donald Trump’s psychology is that he takes any criticism of his policies as a personal attack. Rather than choosing to engage in a constructive debate, his counter-party becomes an evil to be destroyed. There is no possibility for transcendence, emergence, or reconciliation; either you’re with him or you’re against him.
The outcry by environmental movement about Planet of the Humans, a recently-premiered documentary produced by Michael Moore, has quickly turned into a mud fight, hauntingly reminiscent of Trump’s tweet stream.
It is a sewer. — Bill McKibben
Wildly unscientific, outdated, full of falsehoods, and benefits fossil fuel industry promoters and climate deniers.—Josh Fox
As an aside, I’ll mention that I first met Bill McKibben at Slow Money in 2010, and have had half a dozen handshakes and conversations with him over the years. I have the utmost respect for McKibben’s resolve and pervasive support for a broad-based environmental movement (you can hardly pick up a book on the subject that doesn’t have a cover blurb by him on it). My notes here are not a personal indictment but rather an reminder for us to return to the heart of the issue at hand.
McKibben and Fox’s arguments are built on a false dichotomy:
Just because renewable energy can’t prevent climate chaos, doesn’t mean fossil fuels are defensible.
Nowhere in the film does Gibbs suggest that fossil fuels are part of the solution; to the contrary, he condemns mainstream renewables by linking them with fossil fuels, the underlying assumption being that fossil fuels can’t build the future we want!
McKibben’s and Fox’s rebuttals, with their focus on the outdatedness of Gibbs’ critique, are embedded with a concerning subtext: that Silicon Valley’s techno-utopianism is to be embraced. The dark side here is that a tech-first approach will deepen already untenable wealth inequality, accelerate resource extraction, and further alienate humanity from realizing that we are a part of earth, and her wellbeing is the foundation of our humanity.
In environmentalist David Fleming’s magnum opus, Lean Logic, he opens with a list over a hundred ways to cheat in an argument. The list concludes with a reference to the wolf:
The Fallacy of the Wolf: the fallacy that, since previous warnings of problem have been wrong, or premature, or misunderstood, the problem can be safely ignored. — Fleming, David; Lean Logic, Chelsea Green, 2016, page 499–500
Just because the boy who cried wolf is socially inept, doesn’t mean the wolf isn’t coming. Similarly, just because a strategy of increasing energy use fueled increasingly by renewables hasn’t yet let to planetary destruction, doesn’t mean it won’t.
Getting the Eugenics Out of the Way
Before we get to the core of the film, we should get a few things out of the way.
It was in poor taste for director Jeff Gibbs to include any comments about our global population. This is not because the global population bears no relationship to resource use (it does), but because this serves as prime dog-whistle politics for racism and eugenics. Here’s Breitbart picking up the bone Gibbs threw them:
The film argues that the only real way to save the planet is to control population and consumption — not to invest in “green” capitalism.—Pollak, Joel B.
Gibbs was quick to rebut this claim, but the damage was already done.
We never use the word population control. We’re not in favor of population control.—Gibbs, Jeff
The film is full of shortcomings:
- Outdated: it focuses on a period about a decade back, and should have been released many years ago
- Existence-oriented: where is the potential? What can we do now?
- It fails to link social justice with environmental justice, as Naomi Klein brilliantly did in her 2014 book, This Changes Everything, and gives almost all the air time to white men.
But just because it is sloppy and outdated, doesn’t mean it is wrong.
We’re Using Two Magnitudes More Resources than Historic Baseline
There is one thing that journalists should be talking about in reviewing this document: its core thesis that we’re two magnitudes deep into ecological overshoot (the graph above illustrates this point):
[Civilization has] a total human impact 100 times greater than only 200 years ago.—Gibbs
In Jamhoor’s critique of the Green New Deal, we find echoes of this sentiment:
Even if the US transitioned completely to renewable energy and technologies like electric cars, it would still be engaging in unsustainable exploitation of nature and natural resources.—Vijay Kolinjivadi & Ashish Kothari
In the 2016 text, The Carbon Farming Solution, permaculturists Eric Toensmeier points out that, although regenerative agriculture has massive potential to transform humanity’s relationship with the planet, it can’t replace the quantity of energy that we’re used to using:
There is not enough land to produce enough hydrocarbons to replace the vast amounts of fossil fuels, which represent the accumulated photosynthesis of hundreds of millions of years. — Toensmeier, Eric; The Carbon Farming Solution, Chelsea Green, 2016, page 270
As the New York Times Magazine made undeniably clear in their 2018 long-form article on climate change, our chance to avert climate chaos was thirty years ago:
Are there times burning biofuels is worse than burning petroleum? Absolutely:
Is it hyperbolic for Gibbs to argue that renewable energies can’t replace our current levels of energy consumption without ecological collapse? Absolutely not! As Charles Eisenstein establishes in his 2018 book Climate,
“It is not civilization that we’re risking; it is the living earth that is at stake.”
Post-Rationalism
When focusing on the numbers, it is easy to fall into a rational analysis of our situation. What if now is a time for us to sit with trouble—a time when the global economy has ground to a halt, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic—as opposed to moving right into problem-solving mode? Before we arrive at a solution, we may need to step into a new phase of consciousness.
We cannot extend our senses to the whole of humankind without the sensitive and sentient Earth getting us there. It is this vast and sensitive sphere, glimmering with sensations, that grants us that ability to feel and resonate with one another, to ache when another aches — whether it be a small girl hospitalized in Iran or a young elephant whose mother was killed by poachers, whether an old man struggling to breathe in China or an aging sea lion snagged and tangled in a fishing net. Our real collective Flesh is not that of “humankind” as an autonomous abstraction, but is the living Body of this biosphere, breathing. That’s us.—Abram, David. In the Ground of Our Unknowing, Emergence Magazine, 2020
In his essay on the coronavirus, The Coronation, Eisenstein argues that our collective psyche’s inability to deal with death is at the crux of our current global crisis.
Ours is a society of death denial, from its hiding away of corpses, to its fetish for youthfulness, to its warehousing of old people in nursing homes.—Eisenstein
Some of the most visceral imagery in the film depicts the behind-the-scenes imagery that make our high-tech world possible.
Is the ability for me to type this essay on my laptop worth the suffering of children mining cobalt in Africa, or Indigenous peoples being displaced for lithium and aluminum mines? I won’t pass judgment on this. And before any of us jump to a conclusion in either direction I ask of you: sit with the fullness of the experience. Sit with the pain and beauty together. This is the only way to answer such questions.
What if things are going to be very different going forward? What if the world of tomorrow can’t be the world of yesterday? What if our assumptions about the ways we use energy can’t carry us into the future? This is what is at the core of Gibbs’ message, and it is childish to attempt to discredit his critique by calling it fake news because we don’t want to face its core message.
Just as the political machine here in the US has the populace trapped in a narrative of Republicans or Democrats, McKibben and Fox fall into the trap of attempting to establish that there are only two options on the table: their way or Big Petro. Again, this is a false dichotomy: there are literally an infinite number of other paths forward; that is the beauty of reality!
Do we need the Green New Deal that does more than green energy and addresses economic justice? Yes! Do we need an administration that reorients the economy away from capital concentration and towards provisioning for all? Yes! Do we need regenerative agriculture? Yes! But we should remember that just because we’ve checked these boxes, doesn’t mean we’ve guaranteed a livable future.
Now might be a good time to cite the principles of the Dark Mountain Manifesto, established eleven years ago:
We live in a time of social, economic and ecological unravelling. All around us are signs that our whole way of living is already passing into history. We will face this reality honestly and learn how to live with it.
We reject the faith which holds that the converging crises of our times can be reduced to a set of ‘problems’ in need of technological or political ‘solutions’.
We believe that the roots of these crises lie in the stories we have been telling ourselves. We intend to challenge the stories which underpin our civilization: the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our separation from ‘nature’. These myths are more dangerous for the fact that we have forgotten they are myths.
We will reassert the role of storytelling as more than mere entertainment. It is through stories that we weave reality.
Humans are not the point and purpose of the planet. Our art will begin with the attempt to step outside the human bubble. By careful attention, we will reengage with the non-human world.
We will celebrate writing and art which is grounded in a sense of place and of time. Our literature has been dominated for too long by those who inhabit the cosmopolitan citadels.
We will not lose ourselves in the elaboration of theories or ideologies. Our words will be elemental. We write with dirt under our fingernails.
The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us.
Hold these principles as you watch the film, give its creators the benefit of the doubt, and you might end up in a more fecund place than McKibben and Fox.
Want to make your own decision? Stream the film for free here:
