"you think you're god because you have a robe and you can put people up the god damn river for 20 years? well you're not."

let's take this fucker down a notch.

that's right, "justice" corbett - you're getting dragged to federal court by a self-represented litigant that you decided you didn't want to take seriously.

i'll see you there.

so, i watched the planet of the humans this morning...

i didn't find this "documentary", if you want to even call it that, it was really more of a mash-up, to be particularly controversial, but i didn't find it very enlightening, either. it's really just the kind of empty trash you expect from the genre. while people like al gore and bill mckibben are really not defamable at this point, so this was relatively mild as far as these things go, i was also expecting it to focus more on a degrowth or depopulation agenda based on the reviews, and it really didn't; it made the classic discursive error of articulating a problem relatively well, without even really trying to present a solution. so, now what? and, if you just have crickets, then what was the point?

the film's thesis is something like this: the narrator was some kind of hippie from michigan that went up into the upper peninsula to live a thoreauvian existence, then, like thoreau, got jaded at the hypocrisy and ignorance underlying the movement defining what he did. so, now, he's lashing out at the ideology that led him astray, and the people he holds responsible for misleading him. also, we're all going to die if we don't smarten up. in the process, he ducks and weaves through all kinds of strawmen, some of which are more worthwhile to disassemble than others, without ever conceding the obvious point - sustainability implies moderation, by definition.

so, yes - if you had this idea that all we had to do was build millions of wind turbines and we'd be able to fly to the cottage on the weekends as offsets, then you weren't thinking clearly, but that has more to do with the underlying critique of capitalism than it does with anything about the environmental movement; he's certainly right to point out that there have been unrealistic expectations attached to green technology, but he's declining to point out that these critiques have been there all along, and that not many people bought into this as deeply as he seems to have.

i remember back in 2011, i met some kids at the occupy protest that wanted to go live in the woods, and were insistent on living "off the grid". they seemed to honestly think that burning wood was more sustainable, and wanted me to come with them. i couldn't believe what i was hearing; wood? no - that would be terrible. mass protest is about converting the grid, not avoiding it. but, all i got were blank stares, and i do believe they went out into the woods to live like nineteenth century colonists. let's hope they didn't shoot any indians.

as a lifelong environmentalist, myself, i've never had any desire to turn back the clocks, so i don't feel betrayed by the realization that it was a lie - i would have told you that in the first place. rather, we need to reduce energy by altering our lifestyle decisions, which means doing things like getting rid of family cars, and abolishing suburbs. i've never bought into the fantasy the narrator did; for as long as i can actually remember, i've been arguing that we need to change all of the things that the narrator thought we could keep. i'm consequently in broad agreement with the crux of the thing, even if it didn't provide me with any compelling insights.

the strawmans are consequently on both sides - he is presenting the environmental movement as promising things it has never promised, and he is presenting environmentalists as buying into promises that we've never really bought into. the critique may be valid if applied to himself, but that's just it - he should speak for himself, not pretend he's speaking for others. i know few activists that were as naive as he appears to have been.

so, yes - the future is going to need to be more efficient, but it's also going to need to utilize renewables as best as we can, and he shouldn't be suggesting otherwise. if all he really means to say is that solar panels are not a panacea and that wind turbines are not a magic bullet, then i'm hardly in disagreement with the basic point, even if i didn't feel it needed to be said. if all he meant to say was something like "there will be some place in the future for electric vehicles, but what we really need to do is get used to taking the subway" then that's a perfectly valid and reasonable position, even if he appears to be coming at it from a place of rather bizarre privilege that i'm having trouble relating to. but, we shouldn't move and shift in extremes - recognizing that solar panels are not a panacea does not rob them of all utility, and that's an error he seems to be leaning towards. he seems to want absolutes, extremes, certainties - and i guess maybe the section with the psychologist is him realizing that. he thinks like a fundamentalist; he's an extremist. we're not all like that, most of us can think dialectically, and will support moderate and pragmatic policy options.

the last thing i want to draw some attention to is degrowth, because we're kind of stuck in this; the film avoids the topic, but it leans there, so it's the inevitable next point, and i suspect there's been plenty of googling done...

if the argument is something like "we'd better drastically change our way of existing, or we're all going to die", where does degrowth leave us? these proposals would cut our population down to a few million. and, what happens to all these billons of people?

well, they die. which is what you were trying to prevent....? no?

i'm all for condoms and abortion on demand and all the other things we can do to try to reduce the growth rate, but be careful with these macabre degrowth types, who flirt with nazi implementation schemes that would wipe out 90% of us. you surely don't think you'd be chosen do you?

the reality is that growth rates in the advanced nations are slowing, or declining. the pen, here, is mightier than the sword; the best way to reduce the population is to eradicate poverty.