ENVIRONMENTALISTS HAVE REDUCED NATURE TO CARBON, WHICH IS ONLY A SMALL PART OF THE PICTURE
The environmental movement used to try to save wild things and wild places. Now it is reduced to pushing technology.
HART HAGAN: I saw Planet of the Humans in 2020 when it came out. And I also watched videos of you, Michael Moore and Ozzie Zehner, when you did interviews about the film after it came out. You were partly talking about the film itself, partly responding to the critics.
And you taught me that the environmental movement has compressed all environmentalism into carbon. We're going to focus on carbon, and we're going to say that if we're dealing with carbon, then we're dealing with the environment.
JEFF GIBBS: It’s interesting that you say that because just before I got ready for this interview, I was writing trying to write up a couple things about what I call the stolen environmental movement.
The environmental movement used to be different. When I was a little tyke people resisted giant hydroelectric projects. I mean they were even going to drown the Grand Canyon. But now hydroelectric is supposed to be green energy. But at the time it was seen for what it was. Hydroelectricity is the number one destroyer of freshwater habitats on planet Earth.
Fighting dams has always been part of fighting green energy. And then Rachel Carson came along with Silent Spring and the alarm about the toxifying the planet, which is still a hellacious thing.
And then very clearly, when I was in elementary school, it was pollution, pollution of the oceans, pollution of our rivers. Our rivers were on fire. Our lakes were on fire. And then endangered species, birds falling from the sky, habitat loss and destruction, overpopulation and overconsumption. We talked about the military industrial complex.
Then as you move towards the 70s and 80s, it became save the rainforest, save the whales. We had Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd. All these environmental groups were founded on all this diversity of ecological concern.
WHEN DID THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT GET STUCK ON CLIMATE CHANGE?
Suddenly, in the late 90s and early 2000s, I was deeply concerned, “Oh my God, the climate is snapping.” It was time for climate change to rise to the fore.
Only we got stuck on it, stuck on climate and carbon. And suddenly, all the other concerns began to recede into the background. They're still there, right?
But nobody knows that there's a UN Biodiversity Report saying that is an existential threat to life on Earth alone. Nobody knows that there's a UN report that says that the toxification of the planet is game over for the Earth. Nobody knows that Ecology 101 tells us that dividing the earth into fragments is in essence a game over by itself … roads, fences, transmission lines.
But now it's climate, climate, climate.
Climate change is real, and climate change is extreme but in the name of climate and carbon we can get away with anything, up to and including murder. It's being used to rationalize every destructive thing we're doing to the Earth.
I just went to the store. What did I get? I forget the product, but it was labeled carbon neutral. Everything is carbon neutral right? Even Walmart is carbon-neutral.
Mining is now carbon neutral. Imagine that.