Earth Day, 2020

Speaking of Earth Day.

I learned about the video, "Planet of the Humans" by Jeffrey Gibbs and Michael Moore, and reviewed here in the Guardian, yesterday and watched it last night via Youtube. I'm not making any editorial comments pro or con since I don't know if anyone has fact checked all of the assertions, but it gives pause to how we think about the "environmental movement" today.

Link to the movie here. Warning, it is an hour and forty minutes long but since we are all home bound...it moves right along. Warning number two: you might want to have a stiff drink handy towards the end of the show.

So Happy Earth Day everyone, if that is in keeping with the present situation. I was around for the first one in 1970 (I was in tenth grade) when we permanently stained the water line on our little family 12 foot fishing boat from the toxic stew floating on the Buffalo River, and when soap suds floated prominently in Ellicott Creek near my parent's house east of Buffalo, NY. Being old gives one perspective on how much we have accomplished, but also how much we have ignored. The heavy pall of pollution from primitive gasoline driven cars and heavy industry is gone, but some of that is gone because like jobs, we have outsourced our dirty side of the house to other nations while ensuring cleaner air and water here with legal constraints and better technology. Now we worry about the invisible threat: CO2 and global warming. But as the movie makes clear, greenhouse gases are the tip of the (melting) iceberg. Rampant human growth and its resulting resource consumption are the elephants in the room.

 I'll embed the movie, as long as I am not violating anything and assuming the Youtube lawyers do not object (in which case I'll just leave the links). But the link above is a larger screen back at the source.

Acknowledgements to Jeff Gibbs, Michael Moore, and Youtube for giving us something serious to think about as we pat ourselves on the asses for being forced into not driving or being able to buy tons of stuff on this fiftieth Earth Day. Maybe that is the solution.