From challenging corporate CEOs to mocking Presidents, Michael Moore has been the left’s motion picture provocateur par excellence. His new film, “Planet of the Humans,” breaks new ground in criticizing not just capitalism but many environmentalists.
The film, executive produced by Moore and written and directed by longtime collaborator Jeff Gibbs, ponders humanity’s fate, opening with person-on-the-street interviews asking how long our species will survive. It uses archival footage to resurrect early warnings about impending ecological disasters: A prescient scientist predicts global warming in Frank Capra’s 1958 “The Unchained Goddess,” and “Silent Spring” author Rachel Carson sounds the alarm back in 1963. Despite pollution and the 1970s oil crisis, Gibbs asks, “Why are we still addicted to fossil fuels?”
He says that, when President Barack Obama announced a “trillion dollar green energy” initiative, “things were looking up.” But Planet looks into and behind the scenes of what happened to that purported push for alternative energy, asking: “Is it possible for industrial machines to save us from industrial machines?”
Along with “Green Illusions” author Ozzie Zehner, a “Planet” producer and interviewee, Gibbs alleges that “not one [major] facility in the world is run by alternative energy alone.”
The 100-minute documentary contends old-fashioned techniques are widely used as part of renewable energy. California windmills require diesel engines to turn their turbines. Animals are slaughtered to turn their fat into fuel. Electric cars require coal powered-plants to provide the electricity they use.
Gibbs also questions some environmental icons about biomass and other practices. Among the notables it puts on the hot seat are Bill McKibben of 350.org, Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune, Bobby Kennedy Jr., Virgin Atlantic’s Richard Branson, Michael Bloomberg, and Al Gore, whose 2006 eco-documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” scored Oscar and Nobel accolades.
“Planet” asserts that “billionaires and bankers” often exert undue influence on environmental causes, citing the Koch Brothers and their companies, like paper manufacturer Georgia-Pacific, as nefarious examples.
Onstage at an Earth Day rally in 2015, philanthropist Hugh Evans thanks Toyota, Citibank and Caterpillar—as “Planet” cuts away to the latter’s bulldozers opposing Indigenous people at an anti-pipeline protest. Gibbs, who narrates the documentary, laments: “The takeover of the environmental movement by capitalism is now complete.”
Throughout the film, Gibbs skewers those he considers “collaborators” and “a cancerous form of capitalism” that camouflages big business as “green” and co-opts prominent environmental leaders in the process. But to avoid the ecocide Planet believes is coming, Gibbs urges, the talking point that “we humans must accept unlimited growth on a finite planet” is unrealistic.
“Planet”’s harrowing grand finale harkens back to the sci-fi movie this nonfiction film’s title is derived from. At the end of the 1968 film “Planet of the Apes,” Charlton Heston makes a shocking discovery: The strange ape-ruled world the astronaut has encountered is actually Earth in the future. Gibbs’s documentary closes with real-life apes—orangutans tragically struggling to survive in a rainforest humans have devastated for profit.
Gibbs was a producer for 2002’s “Bowling for Columbine” and 2004’s “Fahrenheit 9/11.” Like Moore, he appears on screen narrating and interviewing, but he doesn’t have Moore’s proletarian panache and wit. His interrogatory style is reminiscent of Moore confronting General Motors CEO Roger B. Smith in 1989’s “Roger & Me” and cross-examining Heston—by then the NRA’s pitchman—in “Columbine,” which turned some off.
While Gibbs faults capitalism for our climate change crisis, he doesn’t distinguish between consumption patterns of the 1 percent, and those of the wretched of the Earth living on a dollar a day or the Americans living paycheck-to-paycheck. Certainly, the carbon footprints of corporate jet owners differ from populations in the Global South who can’t afford airline tickets. When so few have so much but so many have so little, it’s not solely a matter of consumption, but of distribution, too.
Planet of the Humans is available through May 21 for free viewing at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE&feature=youtu.be
Ed Rampell is a film historian and critic based in Los Angeles. Rampell is the author of “Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States” and he co-authored “The Hawaii Movie and Television Book,” now in its third edition. This first appeared at Progressive.org.
From The Progressive Populist, June 1, 2020
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