rebelpleb

I think the big crisis of our times is that our minds have been manipulated to give power to illusions. — Vandana Shiva Thousands of cars sit at The Port of Los Angeles 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 While the film may present outdated statistics about so-called renewable energy technologies (which should have been revised to reflect current trends), while it may clumsily cobble together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 overproduc...

Years ago, when I taught science to junior high school students, I would sometimes make an offhand remark to the effect of “Animals like us….”   One or more students would respond, “Miss, we’re not animals!”   I doubt my adolescent students were alone in misunderstanding their place in the biological kingdom. The disconnect between humanity and the natural world, to which every living thing belongs, characterizes all industrialized nations. Our Western prioritization of artificial systems (economy) over natural systems (ecology) laid the groundwork for our perilous conditions. We were in crisis before this novel coronavirus pandemic, and we will continue to be in crisis after. It’s a classic tragedy, with our hubris and ignorance leading to the near-term extinction of our species, because our values and paradigms remain rooted in fantasy instead of reality. Ecological degradation for economic growth We should all find it ironic that the economic condition wh...