immanence

This past week has seen a firestorm of reaction among environmentalists and climate and energy scientists to the online release of the film Planet of the Humans. Written, directed, and produced by first-time director Jeff Gibbs, but — much more importantly — executive-produced and actively promoted by Michael Moore, the film is incendiary and intentionally controversial. Since it falls squarely into the confluence of interests I study and teach about (ecology, film, social critique, cultural perceptions of the future, the impact of images and image production, et al.), I decided I should see it for myself despite the criticisms and calls for it to be withdrawn. Here are some thoughts on it, still somewhat inchoate and fluid from having just watched it last night.

1) The core message of the film is not new (and also not entirely clear). That message resonates with the long tradition of Malthusian thinking that stretches back to Thomas Malthus himself, picks up speed with the late 1960s publications of Paul Ehrlich and Garrett Hardin, and continues in some corners to this day. (The mention of Malthus and Hardin makes it sound like a right-wing, even eco-fascist, plot, but it needn’t necessarily take that form.) But it isn’t really an argument about overpopulation so much as it is an anti-industrialist, ecocentrist screed, the kind mastered decades ago by provocative thinkers like David Ehrenfeld, Paul Shepard, and my own Master’s advisor and mentor, John Livingston, alongside deep ecology polemicists like George Sessions and Bill Devall. (Yes, there’s a pattern there of white males, mostly bearded; more on that below.)

Back in the late 1980s, Livingston had produced a series with David Suzuki for the CBC called A Planet for the Taking which had a profound impact on me, and which in retrospect did this sort of humanity-critique much more sensitively than Gibbs does here. When that tradition engages with a more direct critique of the ideology of constant growth, or (in a word) of capitalist logic, which it does at times, it succeeds better. The same goes for this film: at times it manages to hit that nail on its head (though without considering what that might mean), and at times it falls far from the mark.

2) More specifically, the film builds its anti-growth case through a detailed critique of green energy. The green-energy movement and all the environmentalists associated with it — Bill McKibben, the Sierra Club, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and a lot of easier targets (Al Gore, Richard Branson) — are the most direct object of its critical gaze. The specifics of that critique — that the solutions presented by advocates of “green energy,” from solar and wind to biomass, are not what they’re being sold as, that they are inadequate to the task at hand, and that their proponents (who, we are told, are “leading us all off the cliff”) are not just compromised but delusional, if not evil — make for some interesting viewing. But a lot of the data presented to support that critique is years out of date, and all of it is highly selective in its presentation (it’s almost a textbook study of skewed argumentation). By pretending that it is not these things, the film is dishonest. With its single-pointed focus on ostensibly exposing the environmental movement’s capitulation to industrial capitalism (“The takeover of the environmental movement,” we are told, “is now complete”), the film risks losing any general value it may have and becoming a blunt weapon in a more specific set of debates.

3) So let’s get to that more specific arena (or the most important of them, from my perspective). There’s a good case to be made that environmentalism today has two leading edges, which are in competition with each other. The first of these advocates for some form of Green New Deal — essentially an updated version of sustainable development that places jobs, equity, and government leadership (of a social-democratic kind) at its core. The second is a “degrowth” model, often mixed with strong sentiments of biocentrism and sometimes more than a hint of doomism. (At its extreme, this becomes a fairly small group of people advocating for voluntary human extinction; they are marginal, but they will love this film.)

Though it doesn’t mention either group by name (probably because it was mostly shot before either term became popular), Planet of the Humans is a shot launched by the degrowthers against the green new dealers. It’s an unfair shot (which makes it a potshot) because of its inaccuracies, but it is basically an incendiary device aimed at a close internal competitor (i.e., internal to the environmental movement) that is hoping to draw on a much larger audience to increase its impact.

Whatever else they intended, then, the filmmakers certainly gave us something to fight (with ourselves) over. One interesting result is that many of those who have always given Michael Moore a free pass from criticism because we’ve agreed with his message are now having to wonder what happens when we disagree with him. There’s a useful lesson in that, connected with the question of how our biases affect our treatment of what we see, hear, and read. But I’ll let that one go.

4) Looking at the film as a film requires that we look at its affective, not just its cognitive, appeals to us. And here I tend to agree with Alison Rose Levy’s analysis, at least up to a point. Levy writes:

Film is an emotionally persuasive format with great power to shape or limit our sense of possibility. Both in the film and in a recent interview on Rising, Moore enlists viewers by recounting a fairy tale, “Mother Nature has sent us to our rooms,” he says in a soft hypnotic voice. Then he proposes that each of us self-reflect on what we’ve done wrong. Crafted to speak to the inner child within each of us via the punitive social values we’ve internalized from this paternalistic society, Moore conflates both the natural world we have violated and the for-profit systems we’ve failed to check into a finger-wagging Mommy. 

There’s something of that finger-wagging Mommy in this film (with its heritage of masculinist uses), even if it’s beneath the surface, but it’s not the only thing going on. The film’s appeal is aimed both at our sense of justice (those environmentalists have been corrupted and are misleading us all the way to the bank) and our sense of collective guilt (at what “we” are doing to “our” planet). These are the “zones” into which it aims to bring its viewers. The film consists of vignettes that build its case, wacking us over the head a few times, and then leaves us, mouths agape, drooling on the dessicated forest floor.

The wacking over the head is best embodied in the scene towards the middle that starts at 36’50” with the title “How Solar Cells & Wind Turbines are Made (and Electric Cars Too)”, and continues for a little over two minutes. The filmmakers take their lessons here from the toxic sublime of Ed Burtynsky’s large-scale industrial photographs (as in Manufactured Landscapes) and Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisquatsi – all crazily hyper-sped up machinery rhythmically jangling to Emerson, Lake, and Palmer’s take on Prokofiev. Having seen so many of these moments (Reggio’s trilogy, Ron Fricke’s films, and others) has made me somewhat immune to their impact, but I suspect it won’t be that way for some audience members whose illusions about solar and wind energy are unraveling as they watch.

It’s the culminating few minutes, however, that summarize the film’s argument, distilling its take-home message into a concentrated set of images and text: the voiceover with its pithy “It’s not the climate change that’s causing the problem; it’s us,” and the image of a massive clearcut presenting the visual metaphor of a dead (“raped,” mauled, plundered, dessicated, murdered) planet. With its desperate orangutan fending for dear life in a field of utter devastation, this also underscores the connection with the Planet of the Apes that the film’s title riffs on: even the apes won’t inherit this Earth. If you’re the least bit open to this message, the ending carries a powerful, even devastating, punch.

5) The most interesting question about the film, for me, concerns the effects it will have on audiences broader than the ones most invested in its polemics. There’s a range of possibilities here. We’ve already seen the political right pick up on the film’s critique of environmentalists; they will echo and amplify that message where they can. Other people may want to ask deeper questions about the solutions offered by green energy advocates and about the Green New Deal. That could be fruitful in the long run, but in the context of a looming election it’s more likely to be retrograde.

One of the points made by critics is that the film asserts that the problem is much, much deeper than anything that green-energy advocates can address, but it offers no solutions and even no hope. The last scene is dismal enough to make sensitive viewers dissolve into a pool of tears. As with the Deep Adaptation movement and the Dark Mountain project, that is no doubt the point. But where the latter groups create communities of support around a set of life strategies — in the case of Jem Bendell’s Deep Adaptation, those strategies include building resilience, relinquishment (of life’s bullshit), restoration (of what’s been lost but can be helpful), and reconciliation — the film offers nothing like that, but just leaves you dangling.

Films rarely do offer full-fledged programs for changing the world. At their best, as I’ve argued before, films unsettle and provoke their viewers in ways that enable new sentiments and motivations, new perspectives and perceptions, and new forms of subjectivity to arise. This one isn’t likely to do much of that for most viewers, but one never knows: film-response is highly subjective and if its message hits you at the right time, this one could certainly do something for you.

6) Perhaps the most interesting effect that it is able to provoke, however — and is doing already — is that it is allowing environmentalists to position themselves in relation to its arguments, which means along at least a couple of important axes.

One such axis distinguishes between economic business-as-usual and what we might call “radical transitionism.” (If there’s an echo of the post-Soviet quasi-field of “transitology” or “transitionology,” it’s a fitting parallel that comes with a suitable warning: end goals, and the assumptions that underlie them, require a fair bit of thought.) The end point of most such “eco-transitionology” is left open, though it requires some form of “degrowth” and some vision of a less intensive civilization — perhaps a communitarian, decentralized, “utopian socialist,” eco-anarchist, bioregional world that remains coordinated enough to keep local groups from overpowering others and giving rise to the whole set of problems all over again. (Shades of A Canticle for Leibowitz.)

Business-as-usual is obviously dominant in our society, with novel lines of it developing as rapidly as the imagination allows (for instance, through planetary geoengineering, mining the deep sea, et al.). Confronting it will take all kinds of maneuvers including the kind presented in this film. There have been fruitful debates between Green New Dealers and Degrowthers that this film could help bring to the foreground — but doesn’t. (See here, here, here, and here for instances of that debate.) Equally helpful would be some debates over “red” versus “green” paths forward.

A second important axis distinguishes the anti-humanism of the privileged (usually white dudes) from what I would like to call the neo-humanism of the multicolored global multitudes. Moore and Gibbs have themselves acknowledged that the film features too few diverse voices (link coming when I find it again), thankfully without pointing to the film’s token “good environmentalist,” Vandana Shiva. But counting the number of white, male faces as opposed to others is not where this conversation needs to end up. It’s rather a question of strategy and of alliance. Do we go it ourselves (the filmmaker and a few friends in this case) to stake out a position that alienates and even demonizes potential allies? Or do we build on existing, broad, and diverse coalitions to make a case that would appeal to a much larger swath of the unconverted?

On the latter question the film seems, so far at least, to be a remarkable failure. But doing that doesn’t seem to be the filmmakers’ goal. In terms of what the film actually does, it succeeds in making a few important points, wildly scrambles any potential alliances it might generate — alienating many environmentalists (the image of a clearcut comes to mind here), finding questionable allies on the far right, and so on — and fails to present anything to be hopeful for.

Its bottom line could be seen as this: We, industrial humans, are doomed. But it provides no direction in cultivating what that might entail for living on this planet, if indeed there is any option outside of industrial humanity. The “we” of that framing is left unexamined.

What Gibbs and his colleagues miss is that Planet of the Humans might only be Planet of Some Humans, in two senses. First, their own perspective reflects a failure to imagine that their transcendental overview of our species — the (white, male, god’s-eye, speciesist) view of “humanity” as a singular entity devouring the world around it — might not be the only one possible. And second, they fail to envision that what they critique — the industrial capitalist growth imperative — may not be the only humanity that is possible. If Bruno Latour’s argument that “we have never been modern” has been a productive intervention into thinking about modernity, then it’s also very much worthwhile to consider that “we” have never been human yet. (Let alone post-human.) We still need to determine what being properly human might mean (with a little help from those who have been doing that differently for millennia).

Planet of the Humans does not offer any sense of what kind of humanity may yet be possible. That, for me, is its deeper failing (deeper than the skewed presentations of data on solar energy and the rest). But it’s also admittedly a high standard.

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A side note: There’s a lot of Vermont in this film, and I know several of the people depicted. That should be neither here nor there, but it adds to the discourse of Vermont’s “clean, green” brand, which is interesting to people like me who study that kind of thing. Too bad Bernie’s presidential candidacy can’t give that a bit more ballast on the national stage these days.

And I should mention that reviews and responses to the film seem to be popping up every minute. Among the better ones I’ve seen are Brian Kahn’s in Gizmodo, Alison Rose Levy’s in Common Dreams. And here’s Josh Fox in The Nation. By the time you read this, there will probably be many more. That means it has obviously hit a nerve and left it buzzing.