It’s the 50th anniversary of the corporate holiday known as Earth Day. We’re celebrating with a T-Bone Biurnett song:
and with a new movie, possibly a noir, on the same theme called:
I’m going to start watching it now, but I’ve already listened to a couple hours of audio conversation with the producers and the director. Beforehand I’ll just preface with this.
I’m a species traitor.
Notes to follow.
We begin in 1958, which is shockingly early even to me. They knew. "We" knew, that burning fossil fuel would eventually kill off humanity, and most of the rest of life on the blue marble.
In the sixty years since, we’ve all counted on green replacements to eventually "meet our energy needs".
What Jeff’s film is about, first and early, is establishing beyond doubt that green energy solving anything on current and future scales of said need …. is a black, evil, capitalist lie for gullible well-meaning consumers like you and me.
Climate change is a massive problem, but it’s only a tiny deadly slice of the real, underlying, and much more massive problem of over-consumpiton, and "growth", and "prosperity", and capital.
"Every (human) culture offers its denizens hope of immortality, either literally, or symbolically", and exposure to competing cultures and worldviews exposes you to the very anxiety that those beliefs were constructed to eradicate in the first place.
(The quote and paraphrase are courtesy of Sheldon Solomon, and what he goes on to say is killer brilliant.)
In other words, beliefs and cultures, just like cigarettes and booze and crack, exist in the first place because they deaden us to mortality and other realities that would create anxieties that would debilitate you if you faced them without the addictive drugs of various promised lands.
Like the untthinkable reality in the graph.
The Star Trek drug, for example, is a very compelling and contagious story about the future that has absolutely no chance of ever portraying any possible human reality of the next 500 years.
We watch anyway, because it’s very soothing, just like any other fictional show, or religion or comprehensive secular belief system.
At the one hour mark in the film, the director starts a takedown of the country’s leading environmental thinker, Bill McKibben, and pretty much every other professional public intellectual with a dog in that hunt, except Vananda Shiva.
The takedown will extend to luminaries like Sir Richard Branson and your friend and mine Al Gore.
This leads to a restating of the case which places the Profit Motive at the center of the evil that is killing us. I’ll come back to that after I’m done watching.
"It’s not the carbon dioxide molecule destroying the planet.
It’s us."
The film closes with a sequence of orangutans. They’re shattered, traumatized, and literally dying brokenhearted, because the forest they lived in, miles in every direction, has been completely destroyed.
To keep our houses toasty and cozy, and to line the pockets of people who already own far too much.
I challenge you to watch it without tears.
As you cry, consider that many human beings have suffered just the same fate, since the dawn of the Industrial and Capitalistic Revolutions, and for just the same reasons.
As you cry, consider that in the years to come, the fate of the orangutans and the fate of the human poor, is going to be a fate shared just the same with plenty of bright, white, smiling, and even middle-class children and parents in what we think of as the safety zones of the capitalist empire.
I have to tell you that I’m a little too shattered myself to weave the elaborations I intended to here at the bottom.
Perhaps in the days to come I’ll make it there.