On Earth Day, 2020, the world looked and felt a lot different than it usually did each spring. The COVID-19 pandemic has us all quarantined, working from home, making and distributing cloth masks, and hoping to keep enough distance from the actual virus that it doesn’t come any closer to our families than the news. We aren’t all that lucky.
April is when we usually head out into the woods to an annual camping event where we take classes about various primitive or earth skills. This year as everything got cancelled, we stayed home and kept ourselves in our own yard.
I posted this picture of my tree. We are real pioneers and activists. [This is sarcasm.]
On that day, a new film was released on YouTube, because that’s the only way an indie film can be released and expect to be seen… especially these days.
Planet of the Humans, by Jeff Gibbs and Executive Producer, Michael Moore. Here’s the trailer. Decide if you want to view the whole film.
After watching the film, I was devastated and disappointed in many of the green leaders who have spent the last twenty years in the forefront of the green movement. The film makes the case that green energy is not nearly as green or renewable as most people think. Not only this, but that many people and organizations have been pushing bio fuels as an alternative to augment power production and how this particular classification has been taken advantage of by the power industry and their investors.
The most chilling aspect of the story are the leaders we’ve been looking up to for years have played knowing roles behind the scenes to create wealth based on an industry that is poised to topple.
Solar and Wind energies rely heavily on the fossil fuel industry for their production and backup power. Bio fuels — aka TREES — have been quickly gaining a foothold in the ‘renewables’ category. Countries leading in clean energy are still heavily dependent on burning natural gas.
If any of this is bothersome to you, you will want to watch this film. As of this writing, it logs over 2 million views.
There are hopeful people in the film. Let’s all take a moment to learn more about Vandana Shiva.
Stay to through the end credits where you’ll find epilogue text with some apologies from some of our green heroes.
But, if you dig deeper, you’ll come across the responses. There are a few that bring the conversation around. Now we need to be careful about attacking the good guys. We don’t need to fight among ourselves. The ‘bad’ guys are doing plenty of that already. The point to make here is that even the good guys make mistakes from time to time and can even be caught off guard on film. Bill McKibbon is one of the people who wrote a response that will help anyone who — like me — were blindsided by his inclusion in the film to hear his story.
I hope leaving these links here will keep these topics fresh in your mind. What are our next steps? This film is a lovely example of how to present an issue without leading you to any specific conclusions. It can’t. We don’t have the ending of the story yet. What to do next with this information is up to you and me.