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Louis Project wrote
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/28/climate-dangerous-documentary-planet-of-the-humans-michael-moore-taken-down
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Richard Heinberg, who is featured in the film as interviewee but who is
not identified with its production or construction of its story line,
gives a more balanced picture in this review
https://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/richard-heinberg-review-planet-of-the-humans/.
I agree with him that over all, given the limited exposure available for
any documentary critical of prevailing convention, and the depth of the
crisis, this documentary is worth watching. It does without question
open up a lot of areas that most people, if not the more-or-less
informed who are providing these critiques, are still gulled and totally
uninformed about.
Of course he's right about facile technofixes and the ominous overtones
of production for profit taking over the environmental movement; but my
flesh creeps every time someone brings up overpopulation, as Heinberg
does here and as also does this documentary, as a main problem, without
more. It's left up in the air, to float around and collect all kinds of
toxic reactions.
First of all, the population has increased virtually exponentially for
reasons that need to be aired and explored, so that the right wing and
their liberal cohorts (even some on the left) don't prevail in
identifying victims as cause and being complicit in one way or another
in elimination of the poor and those least able to protect themselves.
Just to review some of the considerations:
Reasons for the population explosion include of course advances in
sanitation and healthcare and the fact that, until very recently, most
of the world's people were in rural, peasant, farm-based communities,
where the life they lived became increasingly at risk as capital drove
them to the wall by monopolizing the best land and by producing massive
quantities of cheap agricultural goods; and with the continuing poverty
and high mortality rates, historically and concurrently and among other
cultural reasons they produced more children to provide for reproduction
of the products of their land and for their old age in regions with no
public provision for the elderly.
Then it's readily evident that, as more fortunate nations produced more
adequate foodstuffs for much of their populace, the birth rate in those
places rapidly dropped, as it would anywhere, given more adequate
satisfaction of needs.
And needless to say, the poor in the world are not at all the consumers
of diminishing resources responsible for per capita overconsumption -
rather, it's the upper and middle classes, who remain largely in denial,
oblivious and culpable in these and related crimes against humanity.
Distribution of what's now produced is so skewed across the planet, so
much of the arable land is given over to livestock, biofuels and other
superfluouscommodities, or otherwise occupied with useless or
dispensable luxury and sprawling conurban complexes, and is abused by
mono-cropping, fossil fuel-based fertilizers and pesticides and
clear-cut forests and dead soil. How would we know how much is enough or
how many people is really too much? Certainly not by divination or by
sputtering old Malthusian misconclusions.
That's not covered in the comments on this documentary that I have seen.
And the discussants don't grab on and hold fast to the ineluctable
conclusion that it is neither technofixes nor even solar and wind
alternatives nor individual adjustment in consumption that will solve
our problems; again, it's root and branch extirpation of capital as the
primary (dis)organizer of production of our needs.
I kind of identify with Vijay Prashad, that we should no longer
juxtapose ourselves as the "left" against some balancing "right": we
have proceeded way beyond that - capital as solution is dead, and so
figuratively are its apologists.
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