Planet of the Humans: Is Michael Moore's Newest Movie Generating a Ton of Toxic Controversy?

I know that Michael Moore is highly controversial. Everything that he says and does becomes hugely debated, and he has plenty of people who qualify as haters. Nor are they all big fans of FOX News or Trump, or members of the Republican Party. I have known some people who at least claim to lean left, and some who consider themselves Democrats, who did not like Moore. He never shied away from pissing people off.

And trust me, this latest movie has pissed some people off, big time. Yet ironically, this time, the people who are most pissed off tend to be on the left. For once, some conservative-minded people seem to love this film, including writers at Breitbart, apparently. 

His new film is out now, called “Planet of the Humans.” Obviously, it is a play on the title of the popular (yet often misunderstood, or too lightly taken, “Planet of the Apes” movie franchise. The original idea actually came from French author Pierre Boulle's 1963 novel “La Planète des singes”. In it, he imagined a world where humans were suddenly subservient to apes, and there was a lot of symbolism in terms of racism and economic and political inequality. Frankly, it is powerful stuff, and the whole cartoonish aspect to the franchise, with toy lines and comic books and a generally light feel as it often felt like it was geared towards juvenile audiences, actually detracts from the power of the message. In fact, it challenges many assumptions that people in our modern society basically accepted without question.  

Moore’s movie is a play on that idea, except it is also different, obviously. It is about green energy. Like many other Moore films, it comes at a time when Americans are greatly divided over some key issues, and environmentalism has always been one of those issues. A strong majority of Americans, according to polls, understand and accept that climate change is real, and view it as a huge concern for the future. Yet, there are many – far too many, frankly – who believe that climate change is a giant scam. That includes the sitting president, who once claimed that it was all just a Chinese hoax, designed to hurt the American economy. So strong is the presence of climate change deniers in this country, fueled in large part by “research” funded by big polluting corporations with the specific intention of trying to muddy the waters in order to cast some doubts on the legitimacy of the science of climate change, that we keep electing prominent government officials who either minimize, or even outright reject, the need for action on this crucial matter.

There were many things that we could do to fight climate change. The most basic idea, dating back to my earliest days joining the Environmental Club back in high school, then joining the one at Bergen Community College (working my way up to eventually becoming president) was and still is probably the most effective and timeless. It is the three R's:

Reduce

Reuse

Recycle

Of course, there is more than that, but that would be a good start.  Particularly being mindful to reduce our carbon footprint, since there are just so many of us now, as the world's population just continues to grow and grow, adding yet more pressure to the planet and it's limited resources.

Yet, it felt like we could do more, to boot. Eat less meat, for one. Admittedly, back then, I did not understand the actual environmental impact of meat consumption, and as smart as they were, I am not sure that the vegetarians (some of them were a bit militant about vegetarianism) seemed unaware of the impact, as well. They just repeated the "Meat is Murder" kind of bumper sticker slogans and mentality, and one person, who I actually liked and admired quite a bit, also spoke about how cruel the actual production of meat was towards animals. Another thing that felt necessary was to elect officials onto government who would be aware, and who could take positive action. Make pollution more difficult, for one, and also, support the development of clean, alternative energy sources. That seemed like a no-brainer, at least until watching Michael Moore's latest movie.

Still, environmental concerns were not seemingly ever taken seriously. Most people back then (we're talking the late eighties and early to mid-nineties) simply did not take the threat of climate change seriously. And in one of the earliest signs that the United States was beginning to go in a direction that would increasingly isolate it from the rest of the world, the skepticism towards the science behind climate change was far stronger here than seemingly anywhere else. That trend, unfortunately, has not changed in the decades since, even if more people around the world - including Americans - came to finally accept that climate change is not some weird hoax, but in fact, a reality. 

Skepticism clearly remains, however. Trump seems to mock these concerns, and he is not alone. Senator Inhofe once brought a snowball into the chambers of Congress as “proof” that global warming was not real, as if a snowflake served as proof that a cold and snowy day in Washington effectively derailed the entire premise of global warming, which is truly a childlike comprehension of what global warming, or climate change, actually is all about. Boehner mocked it as well, making a video on Earth Day a few years back, in which he claimed to enjoy green jelly beans in particular.  

Those are just some of the more recent examples, but there are plenty of others. In fact, climate change denial (and science denial along with it) has a longer tradition. I remember  as a young activist in the Environmental Club for first my high school, and then my college, how we were dismissed as “environmental wackos”. The idea that the entire planet was growing warmer, or that human activity was actually impacting the climate, was literally laughed at. It just did not seem real to people.  

That began to change in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when people suddenly began to feel that maybe there actually was something to this climate change thing. Members of the Bush administration, almost to a person, finally acknowledged that climate change was indeed real, and so nobody was laughing anymore.  

However, that did not bring about any major changes in environmental policy.  

Why not?  

Because suddenly, the argument against environmental concerns shifted from outright denial and mockery of the very idea of climate change, to accepting it as reality but claiming that it was not due to human activity, that taking action would prove too costly, that it would cause job loss. There was mockery on other fronts, as already mentioned. But most of it generally stayed away from outright denial, save for Trump’s stupid tweet, and Inhofe’s ridiculous claim that a snowball on a Washington winter’s day somehow proved that there was no global warming. On a personal note, there is a story from my own personal experiences reminiscent of this mindset. I remember a coworker telling me the same thing when we were stuck at work during a two-foot snowstorm. My response was basically to tell him that if he wanted to prove that the global warming “theory” was wrong, then he should care enough to at least get familiar with it. After all, scientists were not claiming that it would just keep getting warmer and warmer, but that weather trends would grow more extreme, which of course included more severe weather, including snowstorms and other kinds of storms. His winning smile started to diminish just a little when he realized that I hardly felt floored by what he had assumed was his checkmate argument.

In fact, I just had a very similar exchange online with a former high school classmate, and avid Donald Trump supporter. There was what I had assumed - wrongly, apparently - to be a non-political post about how strange it was to be seeing snow in the Northeast in May. He used that to comment about how it is cooler in Florida now than normal, and how basically, that exposed the fraud that is global warming. That, apparently, was the main thrust of his argument. I posted my own response to him in an early blog entry, and will not revisit this ridiculous "debate" more here.

The real problem, of course, is not the science. That has never been a problem, and ever since the vast majority of scientists came to recognize the legitimacy of climate change, there really has not been a scientific debate on the subject, despite what deniers would have you believe. No, the debate is restricted to the political field, which of course is itself greatly influenced by the economic arguments.  

To put it more simply, it is in the interests of some very wealthy elites to keep being allowed to pollute, to basically rape and plunder the world of it’s precious limited resources, in order to make a quick buck.  

There was a quote that I used recently in yet another recent blog entry that seemed to me to perfectly encapsulate the real problem and challenge of what makes meaningful action on climate change so apparently difficult, and it feels particularly relevant now, having watched this movie (but not necessarily for the reasons that you may be thinking). The quote is from American scientific lawyer and expert on climate change, James Gustave Speth:

I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change.  
I thought that with 30 years of good science we could address these problems, but I was wrong.  
The top environmental problems are selifshness, greed and apathy, and to deal with those we need a spiritual and cultural transformation.  
And we scientists don’t know how to do that.”  

-  James Gustave Speth

Why would this quote be so relevant after watching the movie, but not for the necessarily obvious reasons that someone might think? Well, to find that out, you have to watch the movie.

Speaking of which, now seems like a good time to add the link, so you can watch it for yourself. You can view it for free, at least for a limited time (although that time is running out). Here it is:

Okay, so let me end this blog entry here, and give anyone reading this a chance to see the movie, and digest the message. See what you think. I will return to this subject very shortly, hopefully tomorrow. In fact, it seems to me that this may take even more than merely two blog entries. Let's see.

Until the next blog entry, then!