Name: Roquero, Gynesis P.

BSNA1
Environmental Science

The film has received thus far, there are nevertheless some important aspects brought to our
attention by the movie.

Specifically, at one point in the documentary, Gibbs touches upon the religious and existential
dimensions underlying our ecological hot waters—aspects that, for what it seems, many of his
critics have left unaddressed. Hence the focus towards the end of this review will fall on the
cosmic role of religion (or cosmology, if we will) in helping us engage with “the great scheme of
things”, to use the phrase of one of the scholars interviewed in the documentary.

Planet of the Humans calls into question the solutions proposed by so-called renewable
technologies. Such solutions, Gibbs argues, are to a degree or another an extension-in-disguise
of the same problems created by our technological society. For one, solar panels and wind
towers still burn fuels to be produced; for another, they rely on copious amounts of minerals and
rare earth metals. More worryingly, what Gibbs calls “the narrow solution of green technology”
keeps feeding the pockets of a smaller few at the expense of the greater rest, leaving underlying
societal problems unattended.

Overall, the documentary thus aims to show how the creation of these panels and towers, as
well as the burning of biofuels and biomass, are also problematic, albeit in different ways if
compared with the fossil fuels they aim to displace. Old wine in new wineskins, in short.

Planet of the Humans certainly makes many important and illuminating points, especially about
the co-opting of environmental causes by corporate interests who use it mainly for positive
branding purposes. But its despairing tone and overall atmosphere of purity testing may have
the counterproductive effect of making you want to throw up your hands and ignore the
environmental movement's significant progress in recent decades. The loosely structured
assemblage of damning information eventually proves more numbing than illuminating.