I finally watched Michael Moore’s documentary Planet of the Humans (well the abridged version).[1] I now have a better idea why so many leftist organizations were angry at his movie, indeed it gained so much anger it was even removed from YouTube at one point.[2] Why did the movie get such a reaction from progressives? Well, I think it is because it reveals too much too bluntly.
I remember at the time of the release many conservative pundits were lauding the film because of its bare-knuckled expose of the environmental agency. Anyone who has taken the time to look into so-called “green” energy can see that it is nothing of the sort. But Planet of the Humans bears this out with brilliant rhetoric and dialectic. There is a scene where Michael Moore asks a woman promoting an electric car how that car is charged, and it is very funny and very telling.
The car is charged off a grid that requires fossil fuel energy to work, as we all know is the case. Showing how giant fossil fuel giant companies are intricately involved in the environmental space, and necessarily so, is also powerful. And when you see in the movie how necessary coal and rock mining are to the process of making solar panels, it really just pulls the pants down on the whole “environmentalist” enterprise. Solar panels are incredibly fossil fuel-dependent: they are built from coal and quartz, and they are disposable. The gig is up on the whole enterprise.[3]
When viewed from this lens, it is not hard to see why so many conservative or right-wing commentators would laud this film: it gives a left-wing perspective on the overstated success of the environmental industry. Anyone even to the slight right of the political spectrum is called a climate denier, or conspiracy theorist, if they dare question the environmental juggernaut. It is a sacred cow that you are simply supposed to prostrate yourself before.
This is partly because those who want to save the environment have good rhetoric on their side. It is not hard to convince people that we need to preserve dying mammals, sea life and rivers, no one is against this that I know. It is also because state-funded subsidies have turned green energy into a very successful business strategy. But most importantly this happens because the whole media landscape is dominated by a quasi-leftist position that just assumes renewables are the answer and we are simply in the transition stage right now. You hear this perspective shared often in the media. Those who question renewables are at best treated like Luddites.
Michael Moore makes a mockery of this position showing that there has been no transition at all from renewables to fossil fuels. Rather, all the current environmental technologies are just fossil fuels in environmental drag. And why wouldn’t they be? When you consider how many taxpayer-funded subsidies are out there inspiring billionaires to get their tax credits, any fossil fuel company worth its salt would be finding ways to get their share of the pie. Governments seem willing to just consider the finished product, and not from what, or how the technologies are made. And, when you see how necessary mining coal is to solar panels or mining rare earth materials is for batteries, you realize that the fossil fuel and other mining industries have long, bright futures ahead of them.
But I suspect much of the left-wing outrage or at least some of it comes not from Michael Moore exposing the obvious truth about the fossil fuel-dependent environmental industry, but rather his blunt statement of the environmental movements less publicized true goal: population control.
When you step back and view Moore’s movie as a whole, it is not a boon to the right, but a clarion call to the radical environmental left. His message is not: green energy is a con, therefore let’s move on from this fool’s errand. His message is actually: green energy is not the solution, it never really was, population reduction is our only hope, so let’s get on with it. Indeed, the whole movie, at least the abridged version I watched, is a carefully and deliberately structured rhetorical enterprise designed to stoke fear in the heart of the watcher about what could happen to the planet, if we do not drastically reduce the human population now!!
Even the title of the movie, Planet of the Humans, is clearly a play on the famous Planet of the Apes movies. Moore is setting up a human life as we know it verse simian life, and by extension all wildlife, argument. The rhetorical message is clear: it is us or them, and the true environmentalist wants to help them, that is animals, not us. We are the species that has taken over the planet, that has gotten out of control, we are the problem. Let Michael’s voiceover speak for itself:
There is a way out of this. We humans must accept, that infinite growth on a finite planted is suicide. We must accept, that our human presence is already far beyond sustainability. And all that implies. We must take control of our environmental movement and our future…
…Less must be the new more. And instead of climate change, we must at long last accept that it is not the carbon dioxide molecule destroying the planet. It’s us. It’s not one thing, but everything we humans are doing. A human-caused apocalypse.
If we get ourselves under control, all things are possible. And if we don’t…?”[4] (emphasis mine).
He leaves this question hanging, and the movie fades into a scene of an orangutan habitat being destroyed. It is a powerful scene, truly it is. But the message it is serving is sinister: it is them or us. Moore brings all his film making talents to bear, to make the case that we need to deal with the human population problem.
It is important to note, though, that Moore’s argument is not new in the environmentalist sphere. There has always been a menacing undercurrent of population control in the green movement. It is sad to see over the years how many rational people have been duped by the cuddly and friendly persona that the green movement seeks to portray itself with. Because really, for some time, many in the movement have made it clear, that they see your family and my family, and everyone’s family as a problem that needs to be solved.
In any movement, there are the high priests, the evangelists, the converted, the laity, the nominal, the radical and the charlatans. The high priests are the status bearers of the movement, the famous ones, the Al Gores. The evangelists are the lesser priests who promote the movement through articles, books, foundations, roadside stands in the city, t-shirts, etc, etc.
The converted are those who were ideologically transformed into the movement, the people who once were lost in the dredges of V8’s and coal appreciation, and are now saved to the cause. The laity is just the ordinary people who say, “yes we should look after the planet.” The nominal are those who don’t really care but will pretend to be true believers for a night to get a date with the pretty vegan girl. And the radical are the true believers who are found in all the ranks up from the laity to the high priests, though in all those ranks there are also charlatans.
So, if we are charitable and recognize this to be true, this means that we are aware that not everyone who uses the environmentalist tag is a dyed-in-the-wool advocate of population control. But the radicals that advocate this agenda exist, and they are influential. It would be foolish to not recognize that this is a strong undercurrent in the green movement, and it reveals itself openly from time to time, like in Moore’s Planet of the Humans. In fact, it has long been integral to the movement.
A Blueprint for Survival, first an Ecologist issue and then a book printed in 1972, presents an interesting example here. The writers argue that:
‘Radical change is both necessary and inevitable because the present increases in human numbers and per capita consumption, by disrupting ecosystems and depleting resources, are undermining the very foundations of survival,’ wrote Ecologist founder Edward Goldsmith, Robert Allen and a team of colleagues, who named self-sufficient smaller communities, like those of native societies, as a model for sustainable living.
As part of a strategy for the future this forward-thinking team outlined ‘The Movement for Survival,’ which would be spearheaded by ‘a coalition of organisations concerned with environmental issues.’ This movement would eventually lead to the formation of the Green Party.[5]
In Blueprint, they outlined a strategy for pushing the world towards green endeavours and outlined their radical goals. They suggest things like a “raw-materials tax” to incentivize people giving up using the particular materials being taxed, by penalizing “resource-intensive industries and favour[ing] employment-intensive ones” and also a “power tax”, which we today would call a carbon tax.[6] They clearly wanted us to stop using the things we need for our standard of civilisation. But the writers were clearly aware that this would not be enough. The true goal needed to be to get consumption levels way down.[7]
For the writers of Blueprint, only population controls could solve this issue. As they note the maximum carrying capacity of the planet must be gauged and in their reckoning, “It is clear that our population is too large to permit the optimization of many social and ecological requirements.”[8] They were concerned that in 1972 Britain was already beyond its carrying capacity therefore it would need “to reduce its numbers before stabilizing.”[9] They suggest Britain reduce its population to 30 Million people.[10] Of course, they don’t just stop there. By their reckoning “the optimum population for the world is unlikely to be above 3.5 billion and is probably a good deal less.”[11] In 1972 the population of the world was already 3.8 billion,[12] and they were already calling for population reduction. They would be apoplectic if they saw the population of the world today.
The writers base this optimum population on certain consumption requirements that were well below the average for a developed country in their day. But ominously they warn us:
Utopian though they may be, unless these assumptions are realized, we are faced either with the task of reducing world population still further, until it is well below the optimum, or with condoning inequalities grosser and more unjust than those that we in the developed countries foster at present.[13]
To stop this apparently “ghastly” population problem, they must go all out to lower the birth rate by the end of the 20th century, so that recruitment “equals the rate of loss.”[14] However, some countries will have to actually reduce their population sizes to reach stability.[15] They then suggest how this can be achieved with various means including propaganda, advertising, celebrating childless couples as ideal, making contraception sterilization and abortion all easy to access and free of charge, as well researching other population control methods.[16] If these incentive-based methods don’t work, then in the meantime they discuss researching other “restraints” on population growth.[17] They acknowledge, that maintaining control of these changes will be difficult:
While there is good evidence that human societies can happily remain stand for long periods, there is no doubt that the long transitional stage that we and our children must go through will impose a heavy burden on our moral courage and will require great restraint. Legislation and the operation of police forces and the courts will be necessary to reinforce this restraint, but we believe that such external controls can never be so subtle nor so effective as internal controls.”[18]
Legal restraints and “internal controls”, i.e. anti-family brain washing! Still think the environmental movement is all cuddly and cute? Interestingly, they also suggest stopping all immigration.[19] Obviously two globalist agendas are coming to loggerheads with these plans.
They also advocate small, tribal/town like communities, which are decentralized, locally supportable, and most importantly they need to “create community feeling and global awareness rather than that dangerous and sterile compromise which is nationalism”[20] (emphasis theirs). They say we should put less focus on car ownership, and encourage mass road transit, and rail, i.e. busses and trains.[21]
It is right about now, that some of my readers will be recognizing a certain famous UN agenda. This agenda is real, and the information I am presenting is not from any conspiracy site, but rather from a book, published by the Ecologist, and read and endorsed by many, which, it appears, has had a lot of influence in global politics in the last 50 years. Population control has been integral to the environmentalist push from very early on. Indeed, without a massive reduction in the human population, the environmentalist movement cannot achieve its goals. This is stated clearly in Blueprint, Planet of the Humans, and other works as well.
Another example is the highly influential work, The Population Bomb, written in 1968 by Paul Ehlrich, which also tackled the so-called population problem. Smithsonian Magazine describes it as “one of the most influential books of the 20th century.”[22] Population Bomb asserted that we had run out of the ability to produce enough food for everyone, and predicted that there would be mass starvations in the coming years, and a massive increase in the world death rate.
Like the writers of Blueprint, Ehlrich’s book argued:
…many of the day’s most alarming events had a single, underlying cause: Too many people, packed into too-tight spaces, taking too much from the earth. Unless humanity cut down its numbers—soon—all of us would face ‘mass starvation’ on ‘a dying planet’.[23]
Ehlrich believed that his book’s main asset was that it made the topic of population control and the acceptable topic of debate.[24] Which is clearly correct, as it inspired many other works and discussions of its kind. But, according to the Smithsonian, it did so much more; it helped launch the nascent environmental movement, and it “…fuelled an anti-population-growth crusade that led to human rights abuses around the world.”[25] Why? Because people took it utterly to heart. People thought the world was about to end and end badly. Sound familiar? This sense of apocalyptic doom has been a mainstay of the environmentalist movement from then till Planet of the Humans. But notice that it was population concerns that actually sparked the environmentalist movement.
You can get a sense of Ehlrich’s bleak view of humanity from this excerpt in his most famous book:
The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrust their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people. . . . [S]ince that night, I’ve known the feel of overpopulation.[26]
The book was popular, but not universally loved. Many came out against its claims,
Driving the criticism of The Population Bomb were its arresting, graphic descriptions of the potential consequences of overpopulation: famine, pollution, social and ecological collapse. Ehrlich says he saw these as “scenarios,” illustrations of possible outcomes, and he expresses frustration that they are instead “continually quoted as predictions”—as stark inevitabilities. If he had the ability to go back in time, he said, he would not put them in the book.[27]
But whether people loved it, or hated it, it was influential. Population Bomb
contributed to a wave of population alarm then sweeping the world. The International Planned Parenthood Federation, the Population Council, the World Bank, the United Nations Population Fund, the Hugh Moore-backed Association for Voluntary Sterilization and other organizations promoted and funded programs to reduce fertility in poor places. “The results were horrific,” says Betsy Hartmann, author of Reproductive Rights and Wrongs, a classic 1987 exposé of the anti-population crusade. Some population-control programs pressured women to use only certain officially mandated contraceptives. In Egypt, Tunisia, Pakistan, South Korea and Taiwan, health workers’ salaries were, in a system that invited abuse, dictated by the number of IUDs they inserted into women. In the Philippines, birth-control pills were literally pitched out of helicopters hovering over remote villages. Millions of people were sterilized, often coercively, sometimes illegally, frequently in unsafe conditions, in Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Indonesia and Bangladesh.
In the 1970s and ’80s, India, led by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay, embraced policies that in many states required sterilization for men and women to obtain water, electricity, ration cards, medical care and pay raises. Teachers could expel students from school if their parents weren’t sterilized. More than eight million men and women were sterilized in 1975 alone. (“At long last,” World Bank head Robert McNamara remarked, “India is moving to effectively address its population problem.”) For its part, China adopted a “one-child” policy that led to huge numbers—possibly 100 million—of coerced abortions, often in poor conditions contributing to infection, sterility and even death. Millions of forced sterilizations occurred.
Wow! It doesn’t help that Ehlrich predicted in other settings that
“’Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,’ he promised in a 1969 magazine article. ‘Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come,’ Ehrlich told CBS News a year later.”[28]
“Ehlrich does not see himself as responsible for such abuses,”[29] and it is probably unfair to blame anyone man for such drastic actions taken worldwide. The population control mantra was taken up by many at the time and has continued till this day. It is a strong undercurrent of the environmentalist movement, and as you can see from Plant of the Humans, famous advocates of climate change and its effects are still calling for population control to be taken seriously today. It is not so much one man, but the movement itself which holds the blame for such drastic reactions.
Christians know that the Bible says that we should be fruitful and multiply, Genesis 1:28 – “And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” To multiply is good, and God blesses this activity. This does not mean that we should not take steps to care for forests, and sea life and endangered species, and more. We are called to steward this earth, manage its resources well, and share them more adequately. But there is a big difference between this and the radical nature of the call to reduce population numbers expressed by the environmentalist movement.
Many Christians, indeed many people, have forgotten or chosen to ignore just how radical certain environmentalist goals are. They have been laundered through a public relations process designed to present a cute and cuddly face to the world, and as noted if you talk about global plans to reduce the population of the earth you will get called a conspiracy theorist. But it is not a conspiracy, it is fact that an influential part of the environmentalist movement has always had as its goal a smaller world population, which will drive down consumption so that the earth can regreen. They justify such radical ideas, because of their fear of a supposed coming great catastrophe. But, as the Smithsonian notes, despite what The Population Bomb claimed,
…in fact, famine has not been increasing but has become rarer. When The Population Bomb appeared, according to the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization, something like one out of four people in the world was hungry. Today the proportion of hungry is about one out of ten. Meanwhile, the world’s population has more than doubled. People are surviving because they learned how to do things differently. They developed and adopted new agricultural techniques—improved seeds, high-intensity fertilizers, drip irrigation.[30]
Things are not getting bleaker, they are getting better, and until Covid hit, poverty was on the decline. Of course, worldwide shutdowns changed all of that.
But calls to get louder about population control continue. In It’s time environmentalists talked about the population problem, Butler writes:
In all the talk of tackling environmental problems such as climate change, the problem of population growth often escapes attention. Politicians don’t like talking about it. By and large, neither do environmentalists—but former Greens leader Bob Brown has bucked that trend.
Brown recently declared the world’s population must start to decline before 2100, telling The Australian newspaper: “We are already using more than what the planet can supply and we use more than the living fabric of the planet in supply. That’s why we wake up every day to fewer fisheries, less forests, more extinctions and so on. The human herd at eight billion is the greatest herd of mammals ever on this planet and it is unsustainable to have that growing.”
Research suggests our species has far exceeded its fair share of the planetary bounty, and Brown is right to call for the global population to peak. It is high time others joined the chorus—not only other environmentalists, but those concerned with international development and human rights.[31]
What is he implying there about the so-called “human herd”?
The article also stresses the importance of birth control, family planning, educating women, and “universal access to reproductive health and family planning”[32], all of which is just code for abortion and the pill, and suppressing birth rates. Indeed, the more I have read on the environmental movement, the more I realize that “sustainable growth”, “sustainable development” and “sustainable population” are all just euphemisms for we need fewer people.
Butler notes that environmentalists today tend to steer away from this topic because it is unpopular[33]. But people need to be aware that the environmentalist movement keeps coming back to this linchpin because their foundational documents show that green energy is not enough, the environmentalist plan can only work if the human population is far less than it is today. Indeed, they want it far less than it was 50 years.
Literally, according to many in the environmentalist movement, you and your family are the problem that need to be solved. Think about that.
The scriptures have a positive view of family, “Go forth and multiply.” The environmentalists, who are willing to talk about it, say, “More people IS the problem. The human herd is too big.” But if you read through their predictions, you will see that rarely do they ever come to pass. So, if their bleak outlook is continually wrong, and their philosophy is anti-family, something we know is the most important thing, why do we continue to listen to these people?
If you think the world is overpopulated, go for a drive out west, you can drive for hours and not see a soul. The size of this country is rather daunting really. Even China and India have massive tracks of untapped land as far as the eye can see. It is time to call out the environmentalist movement for what it is: a cover for an anti-human agenda. I would love to see more focus put on greening the deserts, now that is a worthy goal, that some countries are actually working on.[34]
If you think I am going too far in calling our the environmentalist movement, read the sources in this article, watch Plant of the Humans, not one of these is a fringe source, they are all mainstream and open about their goals: to them, the human herd is an issue, a problem that they believe needs to be solved. It is a chilling thought.
The truth is you and your family are not the problem. You and your family are the hope of the future. Have three kids, five kids, or even 10 kids or more. Because if you want to have a say in the future, you have to show up, the only way to do that is through having a family. So, to all of you who are doing that, I salute you. Let’s win the future.
List of References
[1] Planet of the Humans, 30 Minute Documentary, accessed on 26.10.2020.
[2] Watts, Jonathan 2020, “Michael Moore film Planet of the Humans removed from YouTube”, The Guardian, accessed on 26.10.2020. “Smith filed the complaint to YouTube on 23 May after discovering Planet of the Humans used several seconds of footage from his Rare Earthenware project detailing the journey of rare earth minerals from Inner Mongolia. Smith, who has previously worked on energy and environmental issues, said he did not want his work associated with something he disagreed with. “I went directly to YouTube rather than approaching the filmmakers because I wasn’t interested in negotiation. I don’t support the documentary, I don’t agree with its message and I don’t like the misleading use of facts in its narrative.”
[3] Planet of the Humans, 30 Minute Documentary, accessed on 26.10.2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQ0utEg7vkg
[4] Planet of the Humans, 30 Minute Documentary, accessed on 26.10.2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQ0utEg7vkg
[5] https://theecologist.org/2012/jan/27/ecologist-january-1972-blueprint-survival
[6] Goldsmith, Edward 1972, Blueprint For Survival, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, pp33-35.
[7] Ibid pg36.
[8] Ibid, pg44.
[9] Ibid, pg45-46.
[10] Ibid, pg46
[11] Ibid, pg46.
[12] https://www.google.com/search?q=world+population+1972&oq=world+population+1972&aqs=chrome..69i57j0i457j0l6.5055j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
[13] Goldsmith, Edward 1972, Blueprint For Survival, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, pg46.
[14] Ibid, pp47-48.
[15] Ibid, pg48.
[16] Ibid, pg48-49.
[17] Ibid, pg49.
[18] Ibid, pg50.
[19] Ibid, pg48.
[20] Ibid, pg 52-55.
[21] Ibid, pg57.
[22] Charles C. Mann, 2018 “The Book That Incited a Worldwide Fear of Overpopulation
‘The Population Bomb’ made dire predictions—and triggered a wave of repression around the world”, Smithsonian Magazine, sourced online on 23.10.2020, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/book-incited-worldwide-fear-overpopulation-180967499/.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Ibid.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Ibid.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Colin D. Butler 2020, “It’s time environmentalists talked about the population problem”, Phys.org, accessed 23.10.2020, https://phys.org/news/2020-10-environmentalists-population-problem.amp?fbclid=IwAR2jHGwii4dLoQbA0oRK-5MTIy-uXjtXK6OOILTPReSnfU_A51qaAU0DtYQ
[32] Ibid.
[33] Ibid
[34] Wiedenbach, Annette 2020, “China Makes Serious Efforts To Re-Green Its Deserts”, Climate Scorecard, accessed 26.10.2020, https://www.climatescorecard.org/2020/02/china-makes-serious-efforts-to-re-green-its-deserts/#:~:text=China%20has%20become%20the%20recognized,as%20Champions%20of%20the%20Earth.
