The Little Earth Warrior

I loved the mornings as a child in Miami, Florida. As the sun rose the land warmed up and you could begin smelling the aromas of different plants. From the canals, you could smell the algae, and all around me, there were birds chirping and landing to search for insects. 

I was only 10, but already I was deeply in love with the vast open brushland near my home in south Florida. There were patches of brush and trees popping out of the fields of tall weeds. This was my home, and it was the place where I could feel alive. Nearly every day after school my friends and I would play in the open land. We'd ride bikes on dirt trails, play army, and build forts. We'd make new trails through the brush, and the trees, turtles, and snakes all became a part of who I am.

The year was 1970 and Tricky Dicky was sneaking troops into Cambodia and, sadly, the Beatles broke up. The music was really good that year and included Simon & Garfunkel, the Carpenters, Jackson 5, and Diana Ross.

But there was danger in the air. Every day we'd hear the revving of earthmoving equipment, which slowly murdered and destroyed the natural places that we loved. Miami was exploding in growth and the development was pushing relentlessly westwards toward the Everglades.

One day after school we took a back way home through the woods, and I was shocked to see surveyor stakes planted all around our favorite patch of trees. I pulled a stake out of the ground — it would become the first of dozens that I pulled out over the years. If the surveyor replanted them, my friends and I would pull them out again. Eventually, the surveyors tied ribbons around large nails, stuck them in the ground, and hid them with leaves. We found each of them and pulled them out too.

But the relentless construction of homes continued, and our refuge in the woods kept shrinking. The homes in those days were built with concrete foundations, and my friends and I came up with the idea of burying a barrel underneath the sand, which was poured first before the concrete. When the concrete was poured, or when the barrel rusted, the foundation would cave in. For the mission, I enlisted the help of Eric, my friend and neighbor. Eric was a little guy, and he hung out with a large, chubby guy named Arnold. Arnold was a strong fellow and could dig the hole for the barrel. 

Eric was a little evil genius. When a police officer came to our school to talk about drugs, Eric stole the drug sample kit, and that afternoon after school I found him and Arnold in our favorite wood patch, next to the school, burning and inhaling the sample marijuana.

Eric also told me that, "If you are nice to girls they will give you a strip show," and he supposedly enjoyed a few shows in his front yard treehouse.

I wasn't there the day that Arnold buried the barrel, but apparently, he pulled it off.

Another friend in my group, Chuck, had an even more sinister idea. We would rearrange the spark plug wires on all the yellow Caterpillars, and so we did. I can only imagine the confusion of the operators when they fired up their bulldozers the next day.

Regardless of all our efforts, I learned that a group of boys can't stop the wanton destruction of greedy developers. No mercy is given to animals who need a home and little kids who want a place to play. After I moved from Miami the development continued west for another 20 blocks until it was finally stopped by buffer land, which separated the residential neighborhoods from the Everglades.

When my family moved to a tiny town in Central Florida called Fruitland Park, I continued my guerilla warfare against development and pulled up more surveyor stakes, let the air out of tractor tires, and hid and stole building supplies. For that, I was arrested at age 16, and so ended my efforts to save the open land of Florida. When I began my campaign to save Florida in 1970 the population was 6.8 million and today it's nearly 22 million. I realized early on that it is human population growth that is fueling the environmental genocide.

The red marker is where I lived and was the farthest edge of Miami's urban sprawl.
Since that time the westward expansion has pushed almost to the Everglades.

My family moved again to the Atlanta suburbs and again I saw the explosive growth and development. But I took a couple of decades off to do the American dream thing, which included college, career, church, marriage, house, and raising a family. In my 30s I was a church leader and was working long hours to start a new church in my hometown. But metro Atlanta was losing 50 acres a day to development and seeing forest after forest getting bulldozed was killing me inside. So, in 1997, I got back into the fight.

I joined the Sierra Club at age 37 and had the best experiences of my life. I signed up for the sprawl team where they trained me to be a speaker, and with my slide projector in hand, I went to various groups around Atlanta and gave a 45-minute talk on how to develop land more responsibly. At the time, I was told that fighting urban sprawl was a political problem, so I worked in the campaigns of green candidates, with good success. Our strategy was to get green commissioners elected in the suburban counties surrounding Atlanta. We were going to make a green firewall around Atlanta to stop the outward growth, but Governor Roy Barnes told me the sprawl would just leapfrog over my county and go into the next. Nevertheless, I had to try to slow the environmental rape of my county. 

A Broken Man

Today, the 10-year-old Earth Warrior is now a jaded and cynical 60-year-old man. I could not save the majestic forests and the homes to thousands of animal species. Every single day I grieve over my failure. I know that some trash I threw away 50 years ago as a boy is still in some landfill, slowly decaying. I try to live a humble and simple lifestyle and follow the example set by Jesus Christ. I buy less, keep my house cold and dark, and try to make a minimal impact on the planet. Even though I do these things, every American is a super consumer, Earth-destroying, being, and for my role in this carnage, I suffer from an eternal guilt that never goes away. 

To the trees, plants, and little animals, all I can say to you is that I'm sorry. I'm grateful for the handful of hiking parks around Atlanta, and all I ever want to do is go deep inside of the woods, with my dogs, and just stand inside a forest and smell the smells and watch and hear the insects and small animals, who scurry about their daily business. To me, human civilization is a total failure, and I just want to get away from it. Only in the woods can I find God, which to me is not a supreme being, but rather the emergent intelligence created by all living lifeforms. For one species to annihilate a million other species is the most horrible sin of all.

And you know what? I'm smart enough to know by being alive all I'm doing is being a super consumer. Despite trying to recycle everything I can I still put garbage in the waste stream. My car and gas furnace still emits carbon into the air. I put poop in my septic system and every time I breathe I release carbon. I only stay alive for my children, grandchildren, and rescue animals. They are all I have. I have learned the hard way that the two things a living being can't do without are food and warmth, and I struggle to provide those things for my pets. 

Climbing on the Soap Box

So, Little Earth Warrior, what would you like to tell everyone? My message is simple: We all act like we're inside a big movie studio and that our behaviors have no impact or consequence. Maybe that would be true if there were just a few of us but now the Earth is massively overpopulated and we are collectively destroying her. Each day human population growth increases by 200,000, which is the size of a city like Salt Lake City, Utah or Little Rock, Arkansas.

This blog, titled "We Live on a Planet," is my oldest blog and I started it to remind people that we are not on a flat Earth sound stage or living in a soap opera. Rather, we are on a planet spinning through space.

Saving the Earth Groups

Ever since my great awakening in 2003 I've realized that mainstream environmental organizations only address the impacts of human activity and rarely work on the root causes. Yet, it's the "root causes" that we have to change, but facing these core issues often makes people uncomfortable. Strangely, I can write endless posts about whatever topic I want and no one will ever read anything, but as soon as I mention "guns" or "god" I get strong emotional reactions from people. At the risk of triggering someone, I'll say that the current, nationwide gun obsession takes us in the opposite direction of where we need to go. We need peacemaking and love, not more bullets. As for God, I wouldn't care less what anyone believes, but when people use their religious beliefs as an excuse for neglecting the Earth, I see that as a problem. No, everything is NOT "part of God's plan," and God will NOT "take care of it." He wouldn't even help his chosen people during the Holocaust, so he's certainly not going to help you.

The Causes of our Destructive Behavior

Soon after I rejoined the environmental movement, in 1997, I took a dive into Deep Ecology, which has become a life-long passion. Deep ecology is the philosophy that all living beings have an inherent worth regardless of their utility to human needs. The founders of this movement, which was born around 1973, include such big-name environmentalists as Rachel Carson, David Brower, and Paul Ehrlich. And it was Arne Naess, a Norwegian philosopher and mountaineer, who coined the phrase. Simply put, we need to think of ourselves as a part of nature rather than nature being something to exploit.

The Deep Ecology Platform, as stated by co-founders Arne Naess and George Sessions in 1984, can be found on the Foundation for Deep Ecology website. In addition to recognizing the "inherent worth" of all living things, the platform also states that human interference in the nonhuman world is excessive, and that the situation is rapidly worsening.

Silent no More

In the words of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “A time comes when silence is betrayal.  That time has come for us.” People give me a hard time for comparing Dr. King to Jesus, but I'm sure that Jesus would be flattered by the comparison. Martin Luther King is one of my greatest heroes, and his life was a gift not just to African-Americans, but to all of humanity. He was a man who stood up for not only racial injustice, but economic injustice and the insanity of the Vietnam War, and for taking a stand and speaking out, he was murdered. So, if someone loses a job or a relationship for standing up for a principle, well, that will never compare to being assassinated or being imprisoned for 27 years like Nelson Mandela. So, curse me, threaten me, and throw Bible verses at me, but I will never retreat from my beliefs in environmental sustainability, social sustainability, and my belief that capitalism must be drastically changed to save the Earth.

Did Someone Mention Capitalism?

Someone needs the courage to stand up and say, "capitalism is a massive disaster." On the micro-scale, I'm a big believer in capitalism because it increases efficiency and reduces waste, which is good for the environment. But what we are seeing now is capitalism that's out of control. When you have money it's easier to make more money. If you're rich, you can send your children to the best universities, and they immediately enter the workforce with a big advantage.

Either ecologically, socially, or financially, our current capitalistic society will soon collapse. We are accepting massive debt to have a wealthier economy now, but soon that debt will come to crush us. People ramble on about how capitalism creates innovation, but most of what I see is corporations simply gobbling up other corporations. Corporations are like rabid animals, like locusts, and don't care about workers and the environment, other than how they can be better exploited. We call this the "American Way of Life," but it's really the "American Way of Death." And, all the while, religion is used as an enabler to greed-driven capitalism and churches simply support the corporate institutions that support them. We see this most vividly with the millionaire politicians who work only to enrich themselves and their peers and will mumble something about "pro-life" to immediately get the evangelical voters behind them no matter how vile and corrupt the candidate is.

More than half the members of the U.S. House and Senate are millionaires. The median net worth for lawmakers in the House and Senate was $1,008,767 — up 4.4%, according to the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics. The rise in wealth takes place at the same time the median family income has been relatively flat or has declined. The growing divergence may help explain why Congress, beyond the politics involved, would allow unemployment benefits to expire.

Meanwhile, 1% of Americans and 0.001% of people worldwide are millionaires. Some lawmakers profited from investments in companies that have received federal bailouts; dozens are invested in Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America. In short, the wolves have taken over the henhouse.

A few points to ponder:

• The U.S. Congress is mostly composed of the 1 percenters.
• Corporations spend billions on lobbying the U.S. government.
• The U.S. government and corporations are closely interrelated.

I will conclude with Premise 12 of the Deep Green Resistance, a deep ecology group:

"There are no rich people in the world, and there are no poor people. There are just people. The rich may have lots of pieces of green paper that many pretend are worth something—or their presumed riches may be even more abstract: numbers on hard drives at banks—and the poor may not. These “rich” claim they own land, and the “poor” are often denied the right to make that same claim. A primary purpose of the police is to enforce the delusions of those with lots of pieces of green paper. Those without the green papers generally buy into these delusions almost as quickly and completely as those with. These delusions carry with them extreme consequences in the real world."

Sources:
Foundation for Deep Ecology

The Tyranny of Entitlement, by Derrick Jensen

Photo by Richard Sagredo on Unsplash

Ode to a Fallen Empire

 

Imagine living at a time in history when your entire world falls apart in just three years. That's what happened when the Spaniards invaded the Aztec Empire in 1519. It's bad enough that your capital city was under siege, and starving, but then came smallpox, which wiped out 25 percent of the population.

The Spaniards not only had superior technology, but they formed alliances with the Aztec's enemies to defeat the Empire. The Spaniards came to the New World for only one reason — to plunder the wealth of the inhabitants. As the Spanish were raping and plundering their conquered territory, the Franciscan missionaries came a year later to begin teaching the indigenous people about Jesus. So, while their land and wealth were being stolen, the people of Mexico were given the gift of a Christian conversion. The practice of exploiting and converting continued into the years of New World slavery. By the 1800s, the full-scale conversion of American slaves was underway. They were taught the importance of being obedient to your master, which was an easy sell since the Bible is pro-slavery.

Fast forward a few hundred years and the Russian Orthodox Church was siding with the White Army in the Russian Civil War, against the Communists. When the commies won the war they weren't too happy with the Christian church. As a youngster, I got an earful about how the communists were godless and planned to take over the world. But I was never told about the corruption of the Russian church and how Christians sided with troops loyal to the Tsar. And fast forward to the Spanish Civil War, where the church was again siding with the conservative Nationalists, who fought against the Republican liberals, union members, and communists. So, once again, we see the church aligning itself with the bourgeoisie, landowners, and the wealthy. When history tells about the 6,800 Catholic clergymen who were murdered during the war, is it that unexpected?

Mother America

So, it's not surprising that the Christian evangelical church is siding with the capitalists in modern America. Am I the only one who notices the irony? Jesus was humble, lived a simple life, and said it was difficult for a rich man to get into Heaven. Yet the Republican Party is all about money, and engineering the government to benefit the wealthy. Then there is the issue of guns and violence. Jesus was the great peacemaker and was anti-violence, yet "God and Guns" is the mantra for much of the U.S. population. As God-fearing Americans load and reload, I'm wondering if anyone remembers that talk about "love your enemies" and "turn the other cheek." And to me, a gun shows a lack of faith — isn't God supposed to protect His children?

This car has a pro-gun sticker on one side and a pro-Jesus
on the other. Am I the only one who sees the irony?

In the modern church, I see many other contradictions as well. It's mind-boggling to me that any Christian can support Donald Trump. He is the guy who was having a sexual affair with a porn star, while his wife was at home pregnant with their fifth child. He's the guy who had an affair with a Playboy Bunny, boasted about grabbing women by the pussy, and who walked into women's dressing rooms during beauty pageants. The man cannot recite a single Bible verse and plays golf on Sunday mornings, yet I hear people tell me that he's "anointed by God" and "chosen by God." The paradox is that Christian fundamentalists are quick to pull Bible verses to go after the gay community, but Trump gets a free pass when he appoints a woman, Paula White, as his spiritual advisor, which goes against 1 Timothy 2:12, a verse that says women are not allowed to teach in the church, not have authority over a man, and must remain silent (KJV).

Cognitive Bias

 As I was driving home on Friday I was listening to a caller on a radio talk show. Instead of saying that Trump was "called by God," the evangelicals have had to quickly modify their story. The caller said that God only needed Trump for four years to load the courts with three conservative Supreme Court Justices and 300 right-leaning federal judges. 

Cognitive bias is where you force real-world events to fit the reality you want. When the evidence against a person's belief becomes overwhelming, they will often just change the story. The biggest example of this is young-earth creationist Ken Ham, who insists that dinosaurs and humans lived together, and he even built a full-scale mockup of Noah's Ark and put dinosaurs on it! In reality, there is a 65 million year gap between dinosaurs and humans.

Change Reality or Just Deny It?

While extreme cognitive bias simply changes a person's reality, a lighter form is far more common. This is where you just brush off, play down, or deny a fact that challenges your religious or political view. I see this often with evolution and climate change. People tell me that evolution and climate change are both "unproven" or "just theories," even though the evidence to support them is overwhelming. In the case of evolution, I know it challenges the Genesis creation story, and it has been a "bee in the bonnet" of the Christian church for 160 years. But when it comes to climate change, I don't understand the continued resistance. Again, I guess it goes against religious beliefs, or maybe the problem seems too big to correct, so it's easier to brush it off. I will say that if someone denies climate change or evolution, I now see them as a science denier. And, again, it's hypocritical because these same people enjoy the benefits of science every time they go to the doctor or get into their car.

A global pandemic only comes around about once a century, so we are living in a unique time. If you can witness what the COVID virus is doing to humanity and still deny evolution, you have boggled my mind. Sure, you can always throw out a conspiracy theory, which is a common coping mechanism for the weak-minded, or you can just say that a supreme being made it, which would make God a jerk.

As I write this a large portion of the U.S. population believes the election was "stolen" from President Trump. These far-right people constantly criticize the competence of Democrats, but now they are suggesting that the Democratic Party conducted a massive cheating operation that was so brilliant that it didn't even leave evidence. Again, this is where the cognitive bias becomes absurd.

How To Respond

All of us should try to continually pursue the real truth and reality, and not just bend or change facts to fit our beliefs. After all, MAYBE YOUR BELIEFS COULD BE WRONG! I always try to be an open-minded person. When President Trump did something good, like prison reform, securing a trade deal with China, or helping with the UAE-Israel peace deal, I commended him. But when he pulled out of the Paris Agreement, I was livid. After all, one of the reasons Trump got elected was because he bragged about his great negotiating skills. But in reality, the only thing "great" about Donald Trump is his ability to be the poster boy for the Dunning-Kruger effect, which states that incompetent people think they're the best at everything.

Over half my life I attended church and I remember how angry my Sunday School teachers would get if I asked a difficult question. I wasn't trying to trip anyone up, I was just a Curious George. In my college years, a teacher simply said, "Your question sounds like heresy." In other words, SHUT UP, Todd. In more recent years, when I've had political or religious discussions people respond by "oh wow," or "I can't believe you'd say that," or, they just say "OH MY TODD," and, thus, the name of my main blog — ohmytodd.org.

So, I really don't know how to talk to a person that has a political or religious belief system that is harmful to environmentalism. How can I reason with a science denier, when saving the environment is all about science? 

One interesting development is that Christianity in America is in full-scale decline. Whether you look at statistics from the Pew Research Center or Gallup Inc. you'll see that church membership across the nation is decreasing every year. I don't want to see the Christian church go, but what I do want to see is the end of the corrupted religious institutions that ally themselves with Big Business, millionaires, and Wall Street. What I'd love to see instead is a new movement that follows the teachings and examples set by Jesus, rather than cherry-picking the Bible to fit a right-wing agenda. And as young people continue to leave the church in droves I hope our country will become more accepting of science and the environmental realities that we must face.

Green New Deal

When I see overweight, middle-aged white males attacking visionaries like Greta Thunberg and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez I am heartbroken because these young women are brave and courageous. But all I hear are things like "Greta is coached by her parents." and "AOC was a former bartender." SO FUCKING WHAT? Then I have to hear the argument about how the Green New Deal will take away jobs, make utility bills rise, and cost the government trillions of dollars. Are you kidding? We still import a lot of oil and energy self-sufficiency would bring these foreign jobs back home. In regards to the cost to the government, the price of combating constant wildfires and constant hurricanes, as well as other environmental impacts, will eventually cost more than any green investment. Instead of conversations constantly attacking and belittling the Green New Deal, people could say, "It's a good start and gives our country a positive direction."

So, when Vice President Pence says that climate change is just something "that liberals are interested in," I hope the fly flies right into his mouth. All of Pence's sanctimonious behavior is unimpressive to me and will mean little when our cities are underwater and our agricultural system is destroyed. So, Mr. Vice President, you can walk out of football games and not have lunch alone with women, but nature DOES NOT CARE about your self-righteous antics. Nature is completely driven by physics and how we as a people choose to live and behave will directly impact the quality of the Earth and quality of life for future generations.

Conclusion

If you want to come out of your intellectually biased haze and seek the real truth, I always encourage seekers to start by visiting the Union of Concerned Scientists website. They lay out the issues facing our world in simple, easy-to-understand language. 

If you find yourself denying or changing facts to fit your worldview, maybe that view needs a second look. If you want to really understand the history of your religion, I encourage you to study the work of Bart D. Ehrman, a New Testament scholar. Guess what, he will tell you things you might not want to hear, but maybe it's time you listened.

I don't want to be the guy who goes around peeling off Band-Aids, but I'm not going to sit idle while "reality," is continually beaten down, distorted, and denied. As I've said before, I'm that ratty little kid in the parable, "The Emperor Has No Clothes." I'm sorry if I hurt anyone's feelings, but I will never, ever be silenced.

Photo by Dave Monte on Unsplash

Michael Moore: A Treehugger Gone Bad?

I've spent the last two weeks watching interviews and reading articles about the release of Michael Moore's latest documentary, titled "Planet of the Humans."

Needless to say, Moore has stirred up a hornet's nest. I can't help but like Jeff Gibbs, the movie's director and narrator, who has a history of environmental work and who had his start in the movement the same way I did. At age 9 he got pissed when a bulldozer began flattening the woods near his home and he fought back by putting sand in the gas tank. I was a late bloomer and didn't jump into the fight until age 10 when my friends and I rearranged the spark plug wires on bulldozers near our home. I continued my guerrilla war against developers until age 16 when I was finally arrested.

So, I was saddened to see Jeff Gibbs cobble together a documentary that's basically a hit job on the U.S. environmental movement. My own research has proven that much of the film's footage and information goes back to 2005, with most of it pulled from the 2010 - 2012 era. Now, come on, green energy is like PC computers — the technology is continually evolving.

In the movie, Mr. Gibbs loves to play "Dennis the Menace," and he sneaks backstage at "100% green energy" music festivals and catches them with electric power hookups or generators. In fact, the movie is filled with "gotcha" moments where he pulls dated and out-of-context interview snips from the nation's environmental leaders and sticks them in his movie. He particularly goes after the Sierra Club and Bill McKibben and his 350.org organization.

Mr. Gibbs appears obsessed with biomass energy, but the two organizations mentioned above now oppose it, and have done so for years. Furthermore, biomass garbage and wood only accounts for a fifth of the green energy mix. The idea of biomass, as I understood it, was to burn waste and wood scraps from lumber mills to create a little energy. If some capitalists have taken it further by clearing forests and building wood pellet mills, well, that doesn't necessarily make them "environmental."

The documentary reminds me of my college days in English 101 where you make a thesis statement and then spend the rest of your time supporting it. The film could have still done this without relying on so much obsolete and slanted information. In the green energy movement we know much work remains to be done on energy storage and smart grid technology, which makes electricity transmission more efficient. We know that to reach true nirvana green energy needs to produce green energy. Right now solar panels and wind turbines are made by heavy industry, which reduces their efficiency when you do a total life cycle analysis. Yes, Mr. Moore and Mr. Gibbs, WE KNOW that we must mine materials out of the ground to make wind turbines. We get it.

But doing something is better than doing nothing, and green energy is moving in the right direction. We know that renewables cannot match the powerful BTUs of nasty oil. We will need to make the products that use the electricity more efficient, and we need to learn to use LESS electricity.

The movie implies that we treehuggers have sold out to the capitalists and that we've lost our way. No one is spared in this movies and hits are taken at McKibben, Al Gore, Van Jones, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Thank goodness sweet Greta was spared from the hour and 40 minutes of green bashing.

Okay, we know that the capitalists have moved into the green energy movement. We sort of need them because they are wealthy and most of us treehuggers are poor. Shoot, we can hardly afford to gas up our SUV's, which we need to transport our kayaks and bags of granola.

Granted, I know the capitalists have their usual sinister motives. They want to continue growth and our current materialistic lifestyle even after North Dakota is completely raped and pillaged and they can't squeeze any more oil out of the shale rock. But for green energy alone to replace fossil fuels at our current consumption rate is, I believe, impossible.

I remember in the early 2000s there were peak oil discussion groups, books, videos, and many greenies were saying we'd run out of oil soon. Then everyone got a big surprise with the success of the fracking industry, which is giving us a few more decades of oil and gas, and allowing us to belch more carbon into the atmosphere. My point is that the future is always full of unexpected surprises and if we can invent fracking, I'm sure we will invent some incredible green energy breakthroughs that don't exist now. I applaud the progressive politicians in the U.S. who have rolled out the Green New Deal, which is a great starting point and a way to get the discussions started.

As for the attacks on the Sierra Club, sir, you are dead wrong. I've been a member for 23 years and have held 8 different positions and have won 10 awards. As soon as I joined, a group of members introduced me to the Simplicity Movement, which I still try to follow today. The Club also works on transportation efficiency, almost as much as it does on green energy. Funny that you didn't mention that, Mr. Gibbs.

And in the eco community I'm seeing many positive movements, such as the tiny house trend, buying locally grown foods, and urban farming. So, after spending most of the movie insinuating that green energy is a pipe dream, a delusion, a fantasy, and maybe even a religion, Gibbs does talk about two other items in the equations — reducing population and consumption. But as I just mentioned above, we ARE working on the consumption issue.

Population and Social Justice Warriors

In regards to human population, I joined the Sierra Club in 1997 to work on population and urban sprawl issues. For years, I took the Malthusian view of population growth and figured that we would just keep on breeding until we were too hungry to screw. But I have since learned that other factors come into play before starvation, such as economic collapse and the high cost of living. For instance, eastern Europe, including a handful of former Soviet states, are now shrinking in numbers. I believe much of this is due to broken economies that are suffering from mass corruption and the plundering from oligarchs. In western Europe and Japan I believe the high cost of living is playing a role in the negative or near-zero population growth.

I am a member or past member of several organizations that address population growth. The main tenets I've always supported are: gender equality, eduction, and universal access to family planning services. These three items alone would greatly slow population growth.

Unfortunately, the highest rate of population growth is in Africa, which is already suffering from mass poverty. When good people from abroad came to wipe out malaria and various childhood diseases, and when they came to teach better agricultural practices, they only succeeded in creating more hunger and poverty. While we want everyone on the planet to have a happy and healthy life, family size must also be addressed. For the rest of this century most population growth will come from central and south central Africa, where projections show another billion people being born. The situation is pretty much irreversible because of the current huge numbers of young people in those areas.

When the movie mentions dealing with population, the Social Justice Warriors (SJW) go nuts. For instance, fellow film producer Josh Fox gets emotional over the phrase "addressing population growth," and makes the assumption that Moore and Gibbs are promoting population control, and he takes it a step further, saying the middle aged white guys want to control the births of people of color. None of the film's creators ever said or implied that, but Fox has a meltdown in one interview and insists that they are. While I appreciate how SJW's care about their fellow human, their hyper sensitivity and obsession with political correctness is overboard. I've met them and find them to be just as righteous and pompous as many religious people. Fox goes so far as to use the term "eco fascism." Give me a break, dude.

In the United States, population is also becoming less of an issue, especially now that Trump has placed a ban on immigration, due to the virus. There are now 10 U.S. states that are losing population, with West Virginia leading the pack. With the coal industry greatly reduced in size, there's not many jobs left in the Mountain State. Hawaii is an example of a state where high living costs are apparently driving the population decline.

Despite the apparent flattening of most growth curves around the world, with the major exception of Africa, the human population explosion is still a major issue and the biggest contributor to climate change. I do not know how many people the Earth can hold but right now we are fishing out our oceans, turning them acidic, and polluting them. We are also polluting our soil, air, and rivers. Each year we release billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere and we are nearing the point of irreversible climate change.

Nuclear Power

Oddly, the 100-minute movie only devotes 6 seconds to nuclear energy. For the last 20 years I've been wondering, "Why can't we just address the problems of nuclear energy?" The big challenges right now are safety and what to do with the waste. Back in 2000 a friend told me about the potential of breeder reactors, which would greatly reduce waste. A type of breeder reactor that uses thorium instead of uranium, and relies on molten salt is particularly promising. However, salt is highly corrosive and that's a huge problem to overcome.

If a safe thorium reactor were invented then it could provide the massive energy needed to melt iron ore and build the wind turbines, solar panels, and electric cars we need for a green future. The troubling downside is that it would allow the capitalists to continue their push for unlimited growth on a finite planet and wildlife habitat will still be destroyed, population will surge again, and our quality of life will diminish in a crowded world.

Natural Gas

The only new thing I learned from the entire documentary is quite troubling. We treehuggers celebrate every time a coal power plant is shut down. Electric utilities close these plants down because us greenies needle them with lawsuits, but it's not such a painful decision because many coal plants are extremely old and inefficient. Natural gas has dropped in price making it more viable. We greenies jump up and down and scream "hurray," when a coal plant closes because natural gas is 50 percent cleaner than coal. But if the U.S. continues to grow, the "clean benefit" is offset. So, here is the troubling part: When a coal plant is shut down it's typically replaced by a much larger natural gas plant, which I'm guessing is designed to accommodate future growth. So, okay, Moore and Gibbs finally had a "gotcha" moment that is legitimate.

 Overconsumption and Capitalism

Another one of the few times where Gibbs gets it right is toward the end of the film where he mentions overconsumption. I find the material-obsessed lifestyle in our country, which is promoted by the capitalists, to be disgusting. Such a lifestyle flies in the face of the greatest teacher in history, Jesus Christ. Jesus taught humility, and based on his own life and statements it's evident that he supported simplicity.

In our capitalist culture we are taught to "buy stuff" from a young age. It's what keeps the economy going. But we have an economic system that is driven by greed, selfishness, and self-interest. None of these are Christian values. In the commentary that came out after the film, Gibbs suggests that we should have an economy based on compassion and caring for one another. Again, he gets it correct. And this leads to the whole crux of the issue and a major theme of my blogging: we need a new economic system that is based on the positive attributes of humankind, such as empathy, and not on the negative attributes, such as greed. Right now there is a troubling alliance between evangelical Christians and capitalists, under the banner of the Republican Party, and I find the blatant hypocrisy to be a sad joke.

The Green Religion

In response to the insinuation that we environmentalists expect green energy to be the golden panacea, I would say yes, but we know technology must continue to improve. This reasoning is different from what I see among conservatives and Christians. Conservatives have looked me in the face and said, "climate change is unproven," or "it's part of a natural warming process." I know right-wingers usually just parrot Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, but making such statements is intellectual dishonesty, delusion, willful ignorance, and blatant lying. I've also had Christians tell me "God has a plan," or they say the rapture will save us, or, at least them. So, no, we treehuggers are not delusional, but I believe our ideological opponents are.

Battling Climate Change

One thing that Moore and Gibbs firmly have in common with the environmental community is that we all believe that climate change is a serious threat. But their movie is almost solely focused on bitch-slapping renewable energy and suggesting it's a fantasy. Obviously, stopping the climate change fiasco will require other measures as well. Here are my thoughts:

• We need to vastly reduce the size of the nasty, polluting meat industry. For one thing, it's incredibly inefficient. We grow crops to feed animals and then slaughter animals to feed humans. Why don't we just eliminate the "middleman," so to speak, and grow crops to feed humans.
• We need to plant trees and develop large green carbon sinks. The great tropical rainforests of Latin America, west Africa, and the Pacific islands are important regions for carbon sequestration, yet they are threatened by human development.
• Promote a greener transportation system that utilizes mass transit, bullet trains, and cleaner forms of transport.

Conclusion

"Planet of the Humans," is a poorly contrived documentary that makes straw man arguments and assumes what we environmentalists think and believe. As it turns out, we are more rational and realistic than most of the groups who oppose us. The insinuation that renewable energy can never solve the problem, so we may as well burn fossil fuels, infuriates me. It's always hard breaking ranks with the marchers and I expect to get a lot of flak from the petrol addicts and various special interest groups, but to be turned on by fellow enviros is disconcerting. The one and only good that comes from this movie is the comment Gibbs makes in the post-movie commentary, where he talks about needing a better economic system.

I know the conservatives love this film and they squeal with delight when treehuggers eat their own. But let me tell you something, you jolly right-wingers. Everyone is handed a script when they are born and some people are so conditioned as children that they don't even have the ability to question their religion or culture. So, you can make all the jokes you want about Greta and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but your belief that oil supplies are eternal and that the Earth is infinite is a false idol. You can do the bidding for the 1 percenters all you want, but all you do is accomplish nothing. You are not slowing down the melting of the glaciers in Antarctica, and when they melt our coastal cities won't immediately flood but they will be more susceptible to killer storms and regular flooding. You can brag about the money you throw into the brass offering plate and how many church committees you serve on, but Antarctica is melting and that's just one of the many negative consequences of climate change. So, enjoy your grape juice and crackers and sing songs from your tattered hymnal, but don't judge me for trying to actually make the world a better place.

Sources:

Inside Clean Energy: 6 Things Michael Moore's "Planet of the Humans" Gets Wrong, by Dan Gearino, Inside Climate News, April 30, 2020

Michal Moore Produced A Film About Climate Change That's a Gift to Big Oil, by Leah C. Stokes, Vox, April 28, 2020

Planet of the Humans: A Reheated Mess of Lazy, Old Myths, by Ketan Joshi,  Ketan Joshi - Energy, Science, and Technology blog, April 24, 2020

Response: Planet of the Humans Documentary, Bill McKibben, 350.or, April 22, 2020

Sierra Club Statement on Inaccurate and Misleading YouTube Video, by Jonathon Berman, Sierra Club website, April 24, 2020

Antarctica: What Happens If the "Doomsday" Glacier Collapses?, Just Have a Think, March 15, 2020

"Planet of the Humans" Review: Contrarian Eco-Doc From the Michael Moore Stable, by Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian, April 22, 2020

Thorium: Is it the Future of Clean Energy, Just Have a Think, January 26, 2020

And now the documentary:

Michael Moore Presents: Planet of the Humans | Full Documentary | Directed by Jeff Gibbs

Here's the commentary: "Planet of the Humans" Earth Day Live Stream w/ Michael Moore, Jeff Gibbs and Ozzie Zehner


 Photo: Ahmed Zayan

From the Big Bang to the Big Oven

When I was born in 1960 there were 3.02 billion people in the world. If I live until 90 I'll exist in a world with 10 billion people. In the last two centuries humanity has hit "outbreak," which is a biological term for when a species exceeds the boundaries of natural selection.

For those of you who believe that we are above the other animals you are dead wrong. Outbreaks occur all over the world with various species. Unfortunately, it always ends badly. If you put some Protozoas in a Petri dish and add some nutrients the population will explode until all resources are consumed and everyone dies. In the eighth grade I looked into a microscope and was amazed to watch Protozoas having babies — they simply break apart into two separate organisms.

The human population explosion began in the 1950s and 60s, following the agricultural revolution and advances in medicine. As early as the 1960s and 70s scientist began showing concern. We knew that improvements in technology and medicine were making the population blowup but we didn't know what was going to kill us. Industrial agriculture has done an amazing job at keeping up with human growth, but at the cost of clearing forests, poisoning our soil with chemicals, and putting tons of methane into the atmosphere.

When I was age 10 the fear was that we'd simply kill ourselves with pollution or nuclear war. But, lo and behold, we've made substantial progress in cleaning up our rivers and air, and somehow avoiding a nuke show.

Yet, we turn around again and another challenge is facing us. The carbon dioxide from all the coal and oil we've been burning has accumulated in the upper atmosphere, and is creating a greenhouse effect on our planet. When people tell me they don't believe in climate change, I tell them to sit in their car, with the windows up, on a hot day. Their response is, "Awww, Todd, I ain't gonna do that."

Everyone wants food, warmth, and nice junk. To achieve that we burn more fossil fuels, and as the population grows, well, we keep sending more carbon into the air. A cruel irony is that a massive population cheapens the cost of labor. In crowded places like Asia labor is so cheap that it's profitable to put them to work in a factory, pay workers nearly nothing, and then send the cheap junk they make to America, using freighters that burn heavy diesel fuel. After barfing up enormous waste to get the product to the local junk store, we happy American consumers buy the stuff, take it home, and then it breaks. It's all sort of vain.

So, the unexpected surprise is that we won't run out of food because we'll just keep slashing and burning forests to make room for more pastures and farms. We will bioengineer food to make corn cobs the size of baseball bats and pumpkins as large as houses. Hurray, there's plenty of food — pass the salt. Unlike the Protozoa we won't eat up our food supply, rather we will just cook ourselves in our carbon waste. The polar caps will melt, much of our best land will be under water, and our relatively stable climate will become like the climates of other planets — harsh and unpredictable. That good ol' rain that has watered our crops for a hundred years will go away, and when it returns it will flood and wash away the soil.

Screw the politicians and screw the oil industry because this all comes down to you and me. Are we any better than a single-celled animal that swims around in a dish? I doubt that we are, but we have frontal lobes in our brains, and we are expected to use them.

The Human's Story

Your skull looks exactly like the skull of your ancestor from 20,000 years ago. That's because our frontal lobes had already evolved and it was just a matter of evolving the brain inside it. But if you go back 1.65 million years ago you'll see that our ancestors had a brain that looked like a bicycle helmet — the front of our skulls were slanted — great for reducing wind resistance but bad for advanced thinking. See, we had no frontal lobes then.

I used to think that a God or aliens made us smart but there is enough time for it to have happened on its own. Evolution works through mutations and natural selection, and somewhere along the line our brain got bigger through a mutation. Some people believe that burning protein around a fire pit made us smart.

At 120,000 years ago we became capable of symbolic thinking. That's when we could use a gesture, word, number, or drawing to represent something. It's probably around then when we started conjuring up the idea of an afterlife, which is a form of religion. Then, at 80,000 years ago, humans were able to start thinking creatively. That means we could not only use a tool but we found ways to improve it, and thus technology was born. And at the same time we developed more abstract thinking and started developing our religions. Most of what we know about our past is based on drawings and items found in caves and in human gravesites.

Religion

Today, there are 20 major religions in the world. Many religions begin indoctrinating children at a young age and by the time they are adults their ability to think critically is gone. Furthermore, religious people tend to live in bubbles where they are surrounded with others who think like they do. The end result is a serious case of confirmation bias, where world events are twisted to support a person's beliefs. Those who think differently outside the bubble are given insulting names like heretic, scoffer, apostate, infidel, heathen, and pagan. If you sense something is wrong with your belief system you'll be gaslit, ostracized, and some religions will even have you executed.

The problem is that the narratives of these religions don't address the challenges of the times, and instead explain away everything with ancient stories. "It's all a part of God's plan," you are told.

A Treehugger's Perspective

My narrative is simple: Overpopulation, overconsumption, and a live-for-the-present mindset is destroying our planet. To address this we must adopt simple lifestyles, make family planning services universal, end fossil-fuel use, and plant trees like crazy. Immediately, people will challenge me by saying "the Earth can handle it," "warming trends are natural," "God has it under control," etc.. It's a mild form of gaslighting were people try to make me question my own convictions. Rather than approaching a problem with critical thinking, I'm amazed at how people brush me off with a religious explanation or they repeat something they've heard on a talk radio show. To me, using religion or anything else as an excuse for inaction is simply denial and laziness. Climate change is one of those faraway issues that no one wants to address, unless they've been hit by a natural disaster or their home is underwater.

A Questionable Narrative

I was brought up in the Born Again Christian narrative, and even at age 8 I was trying to sort it all out. Originally, the god who became god of the Jews and later the Christian god, was just one of many gods worshiped by the Canaanites. As far as I can tell, Hebrews were a spinoff from the Canaanites who lived in the Promise Land and likely intermarried with other tribes. The Hebrews became monotheist and adopted Yahweh, a war god, as their main god.

Now, a fellow blogger added up all the people that Yahweh killed in the Old Testament and came up with a figure of 2,476,633. This is the literal murder number going by scripture, but if you add events where a death toll wasn't provided, like the Great Flood and Sodom and Gomorrah, the firstborn Egyptian children, etc. the figure hits 25 million. If you want a list of Yahweh's kills, visit the Dwindling In Unbelief blog. Now, in Yahweh's defense, he IS a war god so he was just doing his job in many instances.

After slaughtering Amalekites, Egyptians, Midianites, Canaanites, Perizzites, and other neighboring nations, and after drowning everyone in the freaking world, God has a son who comes to earth. But, according to the Trinity, the son WAS God (now you can see why I was so confused as an 8-year-old). After thousands of years of murder, Jesus comes to talk about love, forgiveness, kindness, etc.. Now, I believe, revere, and respect the teachings of Jesus and my research concludes that He existed. But to have a murderous war god suddenly come to Earth and be warm and fuzzy for 33 years, well, the optics just aren't good.

During His brief time on Earth, Jesus told people to accept him or they'd go to Hell. As a youngster I was essentially told that we are all born sinners, God can't tolerate sin, so we have to go to Hell unless we "accept Jesus into our hearts." Now, as an evolutionist I firmly reject the idea that I was born flawed. Humans are simply advanced mammals with a built-in nature designed for survival. For God to create us and say we are screwed up is troubling. I do not lie because I've learned that it's better to tell the truth and take the consequences because in the end your integrity remains intact and people respect you more. I have never stolen except one time when I had some tools from a former employer and didn't know what to do with them. I was required to keep the tools in my car trunk because theft was so rampant where I worked, and when they closed the division I worked in and my boss left, I had no one to return them to. So, for this wrongdoing a bad fate awaits me. I recently burned myself removing a cookie tray from the oven and it HURT. But in Hell your entire body will be burning not just for a second, but for trillions of years (eternity). To me, this punishment is overkill for stealing a pair of pliers and a screwdriver, but it's in the Christian narrative and who am I to question. But I will gladly take this punishment rather than to live with a god who murders babies.

Is Everything Perfect?

Are you fine with the way things are in this world? Do you just ignore the constant mass shootings in America? Do you ignore the news reports showing our climate is approaching chaos? Are you satisfied because you drive a Lexus and throw twenty bucks in the offering plate every week? Is the world okay for you because the stock market is up, even though our current president is sinking the country with deficit spending? As you watch Pee-Wee Herman reruns and sip on your Budweiser, are you thinking about how happy you are? If you've sucked up the prosperity gospel and think everything is well, then whoopee for you. But if you are like me, and sensing that something is very wrong with the mainstream nationalistic, Born Again, narrative, then I encourage you to take action. Making the massive changes necessary to avoid climate catastrophe will require a united effort by everyone. Break free from your bubble and childhood indoctrination and join me in the struggle to reduce carbon emissions. It's easy to laugh at me, make jokes about me, and brush me away. It's hard to break out of your cozy life and become a warrior for the environment. Call me crazy, but I assure you that the 20 manmade religions on this planet don't provide the answers. The answers are provided by the geologists, archeologists, historians, astronomers, climate scientists, biologists, and the hundreds of scientists and researchers in other disciplines who all provide a consistent story of how we got from the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago to where we are now. I will cook on Earth and I will cook in Hell, but at least my integrity will be intact and I can die with peace for knowing that I at least tried.

Wake up, America.

Sources:
"How Will We Survive When the Population Hits 10 Billion," by Charles C. Mann, TED Talk
"The Roots of Religion," by Genevieve von Petzinger, TEDxVictoria


Markus Spiske