I just finished watching Planet of the Humans, a documentary on people working on the environment, as well as many people claiming to, who aren’t, though many mean well.

As you might expect, many people have told me about it. It was uncomfortable but I’m glad I watched it. It’s free on YouTube. Here it is to save you a click:

My thoughts

My mom asked me what I thought of it. I said it described where I was ten years ago, maybe more. Fifteen or twenty years ago, reading Limits to Growth and learning systems thinking revealed to me the folly of hoping that technology, which contributed to our environmental situation, would get us out. On the contrary, it’s exacerbating the situation.

The movie didn’t reach my discovery since then of how glorious and joyful life becomes after dropping one’s consumption 90%. I suspect the filmmakers didn’t try living that way so didn’t discover that joy. Like most they probably considered their pollution worth it since it would save yet more. I don’t know, maybe they cut back, but I doubt it since if they did, I expect they’d share the joy, community, and connection they found.

And that dropping our consumption 90% would solve a lot of problems. Now I want to drop mine more, for more glory, joy, community, and connection.

(Note: I value Bill McKibben’s New Yorker writing. I’m not sure they covered him fairly.)

I’ve record many relevant podcast episodes, plus my TEDx talks. Here are a few short ones:

310: The Start and End of Any Serious Conversation on the Environment

Episode 279: Role model and global leader Mechai Viravaidya

294: Population: How Much Is Too Much?

248: Countdown, a book I recommend by Alan Weisman

251: Let’s make overpopulation only a finance issue

250: Why talk about birthrate and population so much?

281: People don’t want to do small things. They want to do meaningful things.

275: Go Big

My first TEDx talk, Find Your Delicious:

My second TEDx talk, What everyone gets wrong about the environment

Coming soon: my third TEDx talk. For now, here’s a keynote I gave based on the third TEDx talk:

Resources for genuine, authentic, effective change

Frustrated at what looks like hypocrisy in the movie? Here are plenty of people and organizations showing and living genuine, authentic, effective change

• Low Tech Magazine, one of my favorite sites. Exiting the current system doesn’t mean the stone age. Black and white thinking like that comes from inexperience
• The Do The Math blog, one of my favorite sites. It’s accessible. You don’t need to know math, science, or engineering.
• Rob Greenfield, a role model. An article he wrote: Growing and Foraging 100% of My Food for a Year, his videos.
• Growthbusters
• Slow Food International
• Slow Food US
• Bea Johnson’s TEDx talk
• Mark Boyle‘s Life Without Technology series in the Guardian
• Me showing the results of avoiding packaged food and food with fiber removed
• The simple way this Japanese town has become nearly zero-waste (video version)
• A couple, Robert and Robyn Guyton, who converted a polluted plot in a New Zealand suburb into a food forest, saying “My philosophy in life about what to do in the world isn’t to go to a pristine area and live there and enjoy your life; it’s to find a place that’s degraded and fix it up”: Tour a Thriving 23-Year-Old Permaculture Food Forest – An Invitation for Wildness and The Essential Forest-Gardener – “don’t destroy life”

• ← 332: How leaders choose better
• My keynote at My Green Lab’s Sustainability Summit (Sneak preview of my third TEDx talk) →