Capsule review of “Planet of the Humans”
Jeff Gibbs offers a useful corrective.
His movie could have been excellent, but it was only just good. He seemed to be preoccupied with the critique of biomass. He failed to give a sense of: “Well, then, what to do if the current movement is flawed?”
This was not really a Michael Moore film, but I think Michael Moore recognized that Gibbs’ major points involve truths that need to be articulated:
* Industrial civilization can’t be powered by solar and wind. It requires mega-power. Cleaner or more efficient ways of generating that much power won’t save us.
* The major environmental organizations are mini-empires. They won’t save us.
Gibbs can be understood to be saying that, overall, we have way too many people consuming way too much stuff requiring way too much energy while depleting way too many resources and destroying way too much habitat.
Having a realistic perspective regarding the state of the crisis and regarding the shortcomings of the extant environmental technologies and institutions is worthwhile. Jeff Gibbs could have devoted more of his movie to what he has in mind To Be Done. At the very end he says: What’s been presented might seem overwhelming but “there is a way out of this.” He implies that the answer lies in deconstruction, devolution, and de-growth: “Less must be the new more.” But what he offers is too thin and too vague. One paragraph at the very end.
We don’t want to discourage activist energy. But, on the one hand, the truth about solar energy (for example) and about 350.org (for example) is something that needs to be acknowledged. But, on the other hand, Gibbs’s presentation is a bummer. What he has in mind can be presented in a positive and encouraging way:
