Planet of the Humans, an outstanding documentary by Jeff Gibbs and Michael Moore, drew a lot of attention when it was originally published on YouTube for free. But a coordinated censorship campaign lead to it being taken down from YouTube where it had been viewed 8.3 million times.
As Michael Moore wrote on his Facebook page:
“Day 4: Still banned. Our YouTube channel still black. In the United States of America. The public now PROHIBITED from watching our film “Planet of the Humans” because it calls out the eco-industrial complex for collaborating with Wall Street and contributing to us losing the battle against the climate catastrophe. As the film points out, with sadness, some of our environmental leaders and groups have hopped into bed with Bloomberg, GoldmanSachs, numerous hedge funds, even the Koch Bros have found a way to game the system— and they don’t want you to know that. They and the people they fund are behind this censorship. We showed their failure and collusion, they didn’t like us for doing that, so instead of having the debate with us out in the open, they chose the route of slandering the film — and now their attempt at the suppression of our free speech. “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Fascism is given life when “liberals” employ authoritarian tactics. Or sit back and say nothing. Who will speak up against blocking the public from seeing a movie that a group of “green capitalists” don’t want you to see? Where is the Academy? Where is the International Documentary Association? If you leave us standing alone, your film may be next. What is pictured above could be the darkened screen of your next movie. Do we not all know the time we are living in? All this energy spent trying to save our film when we should be saving the planet — but the green capitalists have once again provided a distraction so that no one will see what they’re really up to, so that no one will call them out for thinking we’re going to end the climate crisis by embracing or negotiating with capitalism. We call BS to that — and that is why our film has vanished. But not for long. We will not be silenced. We, and hundreds of millions of others, are the true environmental movement — because we know the billionaires are not our friends.”
Now the movie is up on YouTube again
Michael Moore presents Planet of the Humans, a documentary that dares to say what no one else will — that we are losing the battle to stop climate change on planet earth because we are following leaders who have taken us down the wrong road — selling out the green movement to wealthy interests and corporate America. This film is the wake-up call to the reality we are afraid to face: that in the midst of a human-caused extinction event, the environmental movement’s answer is to push for techno-fixes and band-aids. It’s too little, too late.
Removed from the debate is the only thing that MIGHT save us: getting a grip on our out-of-control human presence and consumption. Why is this not THE issue? Because that would be bad for profits, bad for business. Have we environmentalists fallen for illusions, “green” illusions, that are anything but green, because we’re scared that this is the end—and we’ve pinned all our hopes on biomass, wind turbines, and electric cars? No amount of batteries are going to save us, warns director Jeff Gibbs (lifelong environmentalist and co-producer of “Fahrenheit 9/11” and “Bowling for Columbine“). This urgent, must-see movie, a full-frontal assault on our sacred cows, is guaranteed to generate anger, debate, and, hopefully, a willingness to see our survival in a new way—before it’s too late.
https://planetofthehumans.com/
Bright Green Lies
From Julia Barnes, the award-winning director of Sea of Life, Bright Green Lies investigates the change in focus of the mainstream environmental movement, from its original concern with protecting nature, to its current obsession with powering an unsustainable way of life. The film exposes the lies and fantastical thinking behind the notion that solar, wind, hydro, biomass, or green consumerism will save the planet. Tackling the most pressing issues of our time will require us to look beyond the mainstream technological solutions and ask deeper questions about what needs to change.
The movie is available on Vimeo:
The fundamentals of radical environmentalism are self-evidently true, but are dismissed by a civilization in denial. A child can see that the sacred cow of economic growth in a finite environment is not only unsustainable, but suicidal. And every child is taught from a young age to deny this truth, because the cure — consuming only the essentials of life, and living in harmony with nature — isn’t profitable.
Life has survived on Earth for hundreds of millions of years because SUSTAINABILITY AND HARMONY WITH NATURE ARE SYNONYMOUS, while PROFITABILITY, EXPLOITATION, DESTRUCTION, AND HOSTILITY TO NATURE ARE ALSO SYNONYMOUS.
You can’t build a housing development without “clearing the land,” which means destroying an ecosystem. Cutting down a forest for the required lumber destroys another ecosystem, as do mining the necessary metals, creating a reservoir to procide the city’s water and hydroelectricity, etc. “Developers” may say the forest is replanted, but they replant it as monoculture, which is equally destructive.
Profit requires growth, which is a polite term for destroying more ecosystems. Ask yourself one question: Does any other species require perpetual growth? And is any other species causing a mass extinction? The fact that the answer to both is “no” is not a coincidence.
The insanity of industrialism is most apparent in the exponential nature of this growth. Between the first century C.E. and 1995, human population doubled 5 times. In other words, there were roughly 32 times as many people here in 1995 as there were in the time of Jesus or Julius Caesar. There are 5 times as many people on Earth today as there were in 1900. Humans use 10 times the resources we used in 1900. And while two-thirds of the resources used in 1900 were renewable, today two-thirds of them are non-renewable.
And that’s just the global average. The consumption-mad cultures of the U.S., Canada, and Australia consume four times the global average. And what else do these 3 have in common? They’re all colonial, built on huge expanses of stolen land — thus fueling the illusion that the potential for growth is infinite.
Realizing that Earth’s resources are finite, a sane society would be minimizing exploitation. But our insane society races ahead to use more and more. To any objective observer, it would appear that our sole objective is using up the Earth as fast as possible.
And in this mad quest, we are on the verge of success. Looking at the next 4 decades, the U.N. now estimates the world will be 40% short of fresh water requirements by 2030. By 2040, the tech industry says that computers alone will require more power than could possibly be produced, by any and all methods combined – whether “green,” gray, or black.
By 2050, the Intergovernmental Policy Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) says there will be up to 700 million global hunger refugees — meaning people leaving their overworked homelands in the hope of avoiding starvation. And according to computer projections (published last year in “Scientific Reports”), there is a 90% chance that civilization as a whole will collapse irreversibly, between 2040 and 2060.
And what do our leaders plan to do about it? They would build “green” and “renewable” power for an increasingly electric world — more than doubling power requirements, by means of technologies that have a 25-year lifespan, are toxic, non-recyclable, non-degradable, and would themselves add catastrophically to global warming.
The space techies, meanwhile, say we can mine the asteroids and Mars. They overlook a few things, however. We’ve abandoned gold mines in South Africa, because even gold isn’t worth the cost of retrieving it from 2 miles underground. So, 2 miles underground isn’t economical, but 300 million miles above ground is? These techies promise that “Star Trek”-type technologies will make it all possible — the only problem being that these technologies don’t exist, won’t exist before civilization collapses, and would exceed feasible power requirements, even if they existed today.
In short, industrial humans base our hopes for survival on the faith that “surely someone will think of something.”
And that’s the whole problem. Someone HAS thought of something. We thought of industrial agriculture and modern cities, which are rapidly draining the world’s aquifers, while annually expanding deserts, destroying forests, sterilizing topsoil, and poisoning the land, rivers, lakes, and ocean. We’re even deliberately pumping poisons into the ground, often irreversibly polluting those rapidly disappearing aquifers.
Seven million people die each year from air pollution, without the world taking notice. And yet we obsess over a virus that might kill that many once — all as we dig up more viruses to obsess over in the future.
Yeah, somebody always thinks of something. That’s the problem. We pride ourselves on our inventions and innovations, and look down on indigenous tribes because of their body paint, superstitions, and their failure to have learned much more than how to make fire, build tipis, weave baskets, craft bows and arrows, and beat drums.
What amazes me about indigenous tribes, however, is their ability to do everything needed to survive, while sustaining nature instead of destroying it. Indeed, they are far superior to us, in that, generally speaking, every male tribe member knows how to do everything that men in their societies do, while every woman knows how to do everything that native women do.
When our civilization collapses, most city dwellers will either starve or steal, and then starve when there’s nothing more left to steal. Meanwhile, the few indigenous cultures we haven’t wiped out will simply go into whatever forests we haven’t destroyed, and find all the things real people need to live IN nature, rather than destroying it in the false hope of making something “better.”
Yes, I’ve been there, too. I’ve drooled over hot cars and motorcycles, enjoyed 20th century conveniences, thrills such as water skiing, and flying to countries half way around the world. But knowing what it cost the planet for me to get there, I wish now I’d been born in a forest, learned its ways, and never seen a vehicle more sophisticated than a horse or a canoe.
Of all the statistics I’ve learned, the one that tells me all I need to know about civilization is that human life expectancy DECLINED when we abandoned the old ways for agriculture, and didn’t recover the loss until the 20th century. And now — thanks to the pollution and chemicals produced in the 20th century — life expectancy is going down again. That’s really all you need to know about industrial civilization.
I agree with you except for the following:
1. Don’t give short shrift to overpopulation. Overpopulation and overconsumption are the twin roots of these problems, and the problems won’t be fixed by obsessing on overconsumption alone. It’s not just HOW we live, it’s equally HOW MANY of us are living. In many cases, overpopulation is a more fundamental and bigger problem than overconsumption. For example, industrial society would not even be possible without gross overpopulation.
Human overpopulation began 10-12,000 years ago when people began the evil practice of agriculture — which by definition means KILLING NATIVE PLANTS, and thereby the animals that depend on them, to grow what humans want — that provided an unnatural overabundance of food. Like the microbes in the Petri dish experiment that we all did in high school biology and like all other animals, the increased food led to a human population explosion. The fact that this was considered a good thing, at least by the large majority who left hunting and gathering for agriculture (“go forth and multiply”), further shows the depravity and immorality of the human mind.
The only evidence we have of how many people could exist on Earth while living in proper ecological balance with all ecosystems is the ten million people who lived on Earth before humans began practicing agriculture. Starting a discussion with the beginning of the industrial revolution, when people were already overpopulated by 100 TIMES, is far too late and perverts the issue by assuming that a billion people on Earth is OK; far from it.
2. The real root of these problems is deeper than the physical/material world. By practicing agriculture, humans chose to obsess on ego, intellect, and manipulating the physical/material world, instead of focusing on wisdom, empathy, and expanding our consciousness. (Whether this choice was conscious or unconscious is a separate though related issue that I’m not addressing here.) The only way to substantially and permanently fix these problems is for humans to mentally and spiritually evolve, starting with a reversal of the devolution I described. As long as humans maintain the same bad attitudes and obsessions, nothing will change for the better substantially, regardless of how much people like us fight this juggernaut.
My wife and I watched the original version of Planet of the Humans before it was censored. I learned that it was going to be censored, so I said “we have to watch this now before they censor it.”
Anytime something is censored you can correctly assume that there’s something in it that the rich & powerful don’t want you to know. This movie is a perfect example of that.
Jeff remarks that he and his wife watched the original version of Planet of the Humans “before it was censored”. Does this mean “before YouTube blocked its availability” (and now this original version has been restored to YouTube viewing)? Or does it mean the video available today is not the original one? And, if that is the case, what part(s) is/are excised?
Yes, before YouTube censored it. The video today is not the same as the original, though the content removed was just a few seconds. I think what was removed was footage of a mine in China, but I can’t remember. The pretext for forcing the filmmaker to remove the footage was some technical BS about patent or copyright infringement that’s not even legally meritorious, but again I don’t recall the details.
Thanks for this clarification.