'I think the big crisis of our times is that our minds have been manipulated to give power to illusions'. — Vandana Shiva
Climate Crisis: Our Ecological Dysfunction Has a Marketing Problem (and it’s not Michael Moore)
I first heard of Jeff Gibbs’ contentious film Planet of the Humans (POH) sometime last year. Like millions of others, I viewed it just recently. Over the past week, the scathingly negative reviews I discovered disheartened but did not surprise me. While the film may present outdated statistics about so-called renewable energy technologies (which should have been revised to reflect current trends), while it may clumsily cobble together disparate aspects of the ecological effects of our species on the planet, and while it utilizes what may be characterized as calculating imagery to evoke emotional resonance (as all films do), the crux of Gibbs’ argument should not be discarded and deserves discussion: that we cannot achieve ecological sustainability without addressing the role of humanity’s overproduction and overconsumption.
It seems to me that people who watch this film project onto it what they want to see, much like they did with Advertising Age’s Marketer of the Year, President Obama, during his 2008 campaign. Rather than view the film for what it is, they see it through their personal lens. My lens is, at my core, that of a biologist, which means what I see concerns life and the preservation of life on this planet. What I see is that our ecological dysfunction is not merely one of climate crisis, but of the totality of human disruptions that impair the health of all organisms and ecosystems.
Compartmentalization and reductionism: “To a man with a hammer, everything is a nail”
Some critics of the film are proving to be as disingenuous as they purport the filmmakers to be. The film may be facile at times, but so are many of the critiques. Myopia on the topics of renewables and population (which I will discuss further down) overlooks the heart of the film: that we cannot continue to increase our economic growth and resource use on a finite planet; that we are leaving a morass of waste and pollution in our wake that is killing all life on the planet, including us; that our high-tech solutions to maintain our over-consumptive way of life have not done any good in terms of mitigating our colossal environmental emergencies; and that overexploitation of natural resources is a major problem that we refuse to address.
On the May 1st edition of Rising, filmmaker Josh Fox, who called for an all-out ban of POH, stated, “The IPPC is telling us that we have to reduce our emissions by 50%, OK, 50% in the next ten years. That means we have to replace 50% of the fossil fuel technology in the world — or more than that — with renewable energy.” This is circular logic that assumes only one possible solution: replacement of energy sources rather than reduction of energy use. Both are possible.
Critics like Josh quibble about the inaccuracies with the carbon budgets and carbon accounting of so-called green energy because they say that the renewable energy technologies explored in the film are now much more cost-effective and efficient than what the films claim. True enough. Yet there is so much more to the picture, which is why many of these reductive scientific analyses do not suffice in terms of overall ecological sustainability. Most look at carbon and little else within the life cycle analysis (LCA) of technologies. This is partially because there do not exist clear comprehensive metrics through which to quantify ecology, though researchers continually try. I know from my own experience conducting LCAs that pertinent variables are frequently omitted, either by design (they are not or because the variable does not have reliable data or cannot be numerically quantified. Thus, LCAs do not necessarily reflect a complete picture of the whole ecological footprint of the technology. Moreover, sometimes qualitative issues are more important than quantitative. (See addendum for example.)
Critics of POH rarely if ever mention ecological and environmental health, toxic pollutants, and general resource use, perhaps because a good number of them originate from high-tech and engineering fields. They do not account for the entire diverse ecosystem, with all of its flora and fauna, that was decimated to create that mirrored solar array in the California desert, as shown in the film. Land use, habitat loss, and toxic contamination are primary drivers of our biodiversity crisis. In creating that solar playground, we might win in terms of non-fossil fuel energy, but we lose in a number of other ways that are unaccounted for. They also do not consider the socioeconomic, political, and public health costs of our continually increasing resource extraction and industrial lifestyle, nor the human rights and environmental justice issues therein.
