After hearing mixed reviews about “Planet of the Humans” – released by Michael Moore on Earth Day, I had to watch. So, here’s a quick review:
This film has certainly caught some of our Big Green friends with their pants down, and while singling out these groups and individuals was probably unfair, the script is generally quite accurate.
I say unfair because, while many national environmental NGOs have been promoting some shitty things for years, like biomass burning, fracked gas, waste incinerators, carbon trading (and the list goes on), the Sierra Club and Bill McKibben are far from the worst culprits. There are wealthier, more influential NGOs whose hands are far dirtier. And these folks that director (Jeff Gibbs) goes after, have tried in recent years to make up for their past stupidity and misguided (usually misled by funders) support for a number of polluting industries.
That said, I couldn’t help but smile when Gibbs referred to “The Logging Conservancy”, because that’s what some other, very big greens like The Nature Conservancy continue to do – where much of our grassroots movement time is wasted getting them out of the way, so that we can deal with the polluting, extractive industries they provide cover for.
The first half of the movie is flimsy (boring, really), with timeline inaccuracies around the transitions from coal to gas and biomass, some misleading perspectives on wind and solar, as well as some cringe-worthy moments involving hippy academics dropping Malthusian, population bomb mumbo-jumbo.
Perhaps most egregious is what is lacking in the film. Where there are thousands of Environmental Justice organizers from Black, Brown, Indigenous, Migrant and Poor White communities across the U.S. – folks who have, most directly and successfully, been fighting the dirty energy industries on the frontlines for decades, the best Gibbs can do is interview a visiting activist from India? Really? And while Vandana’s brief spot is a good one, this lack of representation from the climate justice movement is the biggest miss of the plot!
Perhaps, if Gibbs had taken the time to meet with our movements working directly on the frontlines of climate chaos, collaborating with allies in labor and social justice movements to advance Just Transition strategies that serve people and planet, he would have discovered a more positive, hopeful and inspiring way to end the film.
Overall, I’d say this Earth Day release is only worth watching if you’re keen to know the complexities, contradictions and internal conflicts of our environmental movement.
However, unless you’re already an activist, don’t look to this film to provide any direction or clarity on the global ecological mess we’re in.
And if you are already active in our movements, I’d recommend skipping to around the 55-min mark where Josh from Energy Justice Network takes the film crew to look at the biomass incinerator in Vermont. The film only starts getting informative after that point..
Outside Trinidad, Calif., in an area known as Strawberry Rock, Walter, a 22-year-old UCLA student, is taking part in a tree sit-in to prevent a logging company from cutting redwoods and other trees. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times
EUREKA —The coronavirus has shut down most of Humboldt County, as it has the rest of the state, but some traditions of northwest California endure: Loggers keep felling redwoods, and eco-activists keep putting their bodies on the limbs to stop them.
Thirty miles north of Eureka, in a coastal forest just east of Highway 101, a generation-old battle between tree sitters and loggers enters a new chapter, even after local sawmills have closed.
Just off the highway in the town of Trinidad sits an old logging trail on property now owned by the Green Diamond Resource Co., a forest products firm.
From the trailhead, after a 20-minute hike through the dark, lush forest, one encounters a 13.5-acre clearing where hundreds of felled redwoods, firs and pine trees litter the ground. Tree stumps, broken branches, and a few sun-blotched, withered ferns poke through the debris.
It’s here, at the eastern edge of the clearing, that a group of young, masked activists are engaged in a different form of social distancing. They are taking turns sleeping in the upper reaches of a giant redwood tree. They are environmental activists working with an organization known as the Redwood Forest Defenders. And they are trying to stop Green Diamond from felling any more trees on this roughly 18-acre tract.
On Wednesday morning, one of the young activists, Walter — who is gender nonbinary and would only provide a Times reporting team with a pseudonym — sat 70 feet above the forest floor on a small, roughly twin-bed-size wooden platform. It’s where they eat, sleep, read and occasionally relieve themselves when they are on sit-in duty.
Walter is a 22-year-old UCLA student who was sent to shelter at home in Los Feliz during the pandemic.
“That was the trigger,” said Walter. “I was feeling a lot of guilt about my carbon footprint, and I felt I needed to do something radical. I just couldn’t go along with life as it was.”
Walter, a 22-year-old UCLA student, is taking turns with other activists sitting in a redwood tree to prevent logging in an area of Humboldt County. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)
Walter is now part of a small rotation of Redwood Defender activists who sleep in the tree. They take turns, spelling one another every couple of days.
They say they are not worried about falling out, even when they get buzzed by the occasional nocturnal flying squirrel, or startled by mice searching for food.
“I’m strapped in, just like a climber,” Walter yelled down to a visitor, pointing at the ropes and harness clipped and anchored to the tree trunk.
Walter and fellow activists began this particular tree-sit roughly two weeks ago, soon after the logging company’s contractor, Lord of Light, began clearing the tract.
It’s in an area the organization successfully defended before, between 2012 and 2017. But, in February, the company was given the green light to start again.
Three weeks ago, according to Walter and two other activists who identified themselves as Lupine and Birdhouse, the Lords of Light, a Green Diamond contractor, went in and started cutting.
Wearing a mask for both the coronavirus and to protect her identity, Lupine, 24, is taking part in a tree sit-in in Humboldt County to prevent further cutting of redwoods and other trees. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)
That’s when the defenders went in, and Green Diamond stopped.
“We immediately ceased operations for safety purposes.” said Gary Rynearson, Green Diamond spokesman. He said by the time the activists appeared, 75% of the trees on the tract had already been felled.
“I don’t know why they’d come in during this period, when everybody else is shut down and people are struggling to make a living,” he said, noting his frustration at having to put the contractors out of work.
He said Green Diamond works hard to cut timber sustainably, and supports state and federal protections for vulnerable species in the area, such as spotted owls, a variety of salamanders and frogs and the Humboldt marten, a cat-sized carnivore.
California has declared the timber industry, like farming and municipal waterworks, an essential business during the COVID-19 outbreak. Although construction is down and several sawmills are shuttered, loggers continue felling trees.
In Scotia, 50 miles south on Highway 101, tens of thousands of tree trunks are neatly stacked in empty lots near Humboldt Redwood Co,’s sawmill.
The Humbolt Redwood Co. sawmill in Scotia, Calif., is not operating due to coronavirus restrictions, but logging is still happening and trees are piling up. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)
According to Steve Isherwood, a board feeder at the mill, the wood keeps piling up even though the mill’s been closed for almost three weeks.
“It just didn’t make sense to keep the place running if there was no place to send the lumber,” he said, standing on his lawn, which is located across the street from the vacant mill.
John Andersen, director of forest policy for Humboldt Redwood, said the mill has stopped buying new logs, although it continues to store trees from the company’s own lands.
Isherwood is furloughed indefinitely, he said, and has applied for unemployment — he’s one of 2.7 million Californians who have done so in the last month. And while he’s concerned about the economic outlook, he said there are some upsides to the mill being closed: For the first time since he moved into his house seven years ago, he can hear the sounds of frogs that live along the nearby Eel River, and the air is clear of smoke and ash.
“It’s pretty nice,” he said of the quiet, comparing it to the deafening ruckus of the nearby power plant, the clanging of loading trucks, and the grinding of the saws that run nearly 24 hours a day during normal mill operations.
Rich Gordon, president and chairman of the California Forestry Assn., the state’s timber industry trade group, said many sawmills across the state have shut down, or have severely curtailed production.
“Some of them are getting to the point where they have too much lumber, with construction being stopped in several counties,” he said, noting the halt in construction is not statewide.
Green Diamond’s Rynearson said that, while all three of the state’s redwood mills have shut down, Douglas fir mills are still operating. That wood is generally sent out on ships from Eureka’s harbor, up the coast to Washington and British Columbia, where it’s turned into products such as toilet paper.
As for the tree sitters, Rynearson said there’s not much to do. The company will retrieve the logs it has felled in the area, but they aren’t going to do anything to escalate the the conflict.
Gordon agreed that was the right call.
“Historically, there have been efforts to have the sheriff go in and arrest protesters like these,” he said. “But, given the coronavirus pandemic, and what everyone else is dealing with these days, going in to arrest someone for trespassing is probably not a high priority.”
Los Angeles Times reporter Susanne Rust and photographer Carolyn Cole are embarking on a road journey throughout California. They aim to give voice to those in remote parts of California as they grapple with the worst health and economic calamity of our lifetimes.
DONATE: Have a few extra bucks? Care about the great redwood forests? Support Redwood Forest Defense. Please send donations via Venmo to @redwoodforestdefense
This Earth Week, we’re flooding the US-based investment firm KKR &Co with calls, emails, and tweets to stop the company from buying the Coastal GasLink pipeline.
The Coastal GasLink pipeline threatens Wet’suwet’en land, water, air, and people.
KKR has plans to purchase 65% of the Coastal GasLink pipeline with Alberta Investment Management Corp (AIMCo). KKR is a US-based private equity firm with an atrocious record of putting profits over people.
The good news? The sale won’t close til June. Which means we still have time to stop it.
If we #ShutDownKKR, we can stop the financing of the Coastal GasLink Pipeline — but we need to mobilize online together right now.
Here’s what you can do to join the KKR communications blockade TODAY and #ShutDownKKR:
Call KKR by dialing 1-888-593-5407 and following the instructions you hear from us. Need some talking points for your call? No problem. See below.
Tweet at @KKR_Co and tell them just how awful they are for ignoring Wet’suwet’en concerns about their rights, the climate, land air and water. Need some tweet inspiration? See below!
Why is this important right now?
Despite the COVID-19 crisis, TC Energy is still going ahead with Coastal GasLink pipeline construction and sending more workers and federal police officers onto Wet’suwet’en territories, putting communities at even more risk. Billionaire oil and gas CEOs see the COVID-19 crisis as an opportunity to push through whatever they can when the world is looking the other way.
KKR must be held accountable for ignoring the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs, putting Indigenous land and people at risk, endangering Indigenous women by building man camps along the route, and fueling the climate crisis.
Throughout the day, dozens of people reached out to ask if we had been duped. Some even asked if this was the work of the notorious laughtavist pranksters, “The Yes Men.”
The IMF and other financial institutions did announce some small debt relief measures at around the same time as we sent out the email. But these measures are disgustingly inadequate. The IMF’s Catastrophe Containment and Relief Trust (CCRT), for instance, provided less assistance than the US Federal Government provided to large corporations in the most recent bailout package.
We are in the midst of a global pandemic, and the world’s poorest countries need to be able to mobilize every available resource to provide for the health and wellbeing of people who have been made vulnerable to this virus. And when we emerge from the pandemic, there is no going back to the old normal. We need to build to a new normal where we’ve dismantled the interlocking systems of oppression that created this incessant stream of climate, public health and economic crises.
So the IMF has not canceled all debt yet. But they are responding to the pressure and we need to keep up the pressure! Our friends at Jubilee USA are campaigning for much needed reforms among the international financial institutions like the IMF. Sign their petition and support their work!
And today’s action also shows that we CAN take disruptive action during the global pandemic both online AND in person. Over the next several months, physical distancing and wearing face covering is going to be essential to slow the spread of COVID-19 and keep our communities safe. We all have a responsibility to act responsibly. But we also can’t afford to sit on the sidelines while people die, the corporations line up to fill their pockets and the government quietly rolls back protections. We need to be responsible and keep each other safe and healthy, but we also need to continue to fight a just and sustainable future.
Between Earth Day and May Day, we’re going to take bold action (both online AND in person) to take aim at the interlocking systems that are creating the crises our communities are suffering from and build a collaborative framework for a healthier, more just and more sustainable world.
We’re working on some exciting action plans for those 10 days–imagine using lots of eco-friendly paint to paint a mutual on a side street in front of an evil billionaire’s home, or hanging massive banners in iconic locations around the district, or using bicycles to haul solar powered PA system around town bring the voices of front line communities to the institutions that are facilitating the destruction of their communities.
