I watched ‘The Planet of the Humans’ a while ago and was deeply disturbed by its contents. Upsetting. It’s a pseudo documentary that was released on earth day by Micheal Moore. It has been widely discredited with many false facts that it presents. It paints the green movement as a waste of space and energy. It claims that our investments in wind and solar are baseless and futile.

As an environmentalist I found its content deeply disturbing. I believe it had a deep political underpinning stance. It took certain politicians to task, and pointed the finger without deeper analysis.

Green washing is happening all around us. Just look at how BP spent billions on rebranding itself with a green logo yet is still a fossil fuel. I feel better filling up my truck from a giant green flower. Sorry, a sarcastic personal remark, but deeply psychologically true.

It was disturbing to see heroic green organisations taking money from our worst polluters.

The film does A good job of highlighting some of the green washing. But it falls short in so many other ways.

I read the comments in so many online discussions about global warming. That it’s in our imagination is the most naive. That it’s caused by the sun is another, or that it’s just a natural occurrence is another. A natural cycle, is just so misleading. We are clearly destroying our planet, and we are paying for the consequences.

Mostly it boils down to politics doesn’t it. To really combat global warming and our consumerism and rampant industrialisations. To combat corporate greed and even personal greed will take mammoth changes to the world.

To be honest I don’t know an environmentalist who thinks that by adding a couple of solar cells to thier roofs will fix the worlds problems. But, I can tell you they hope that a tiny contribution, will help. That they try hard to alter thier personal lives to reduce thier carbon footprint. Every tiny bit helps.

It is such a huge problem isn’t it. There isn’t an immediate fix. It is huge ongoing systemic changes that will drive us forward to solving this. We do clearly know what they are.

At this point I still have hope for us. I do. I really do.

We need to clear out our political decision makers and install true leadership. We have current world leaders who are showing us how this can be done. I’d like to point the finger at New Zealand who has shown us what can be done, in looking after people and the planet simultaneously with an elected government. Amazing. Giving the environment legal rights. Wow. That is incredible foresight.

Continual economic and population growth is the problem.

We need to take a stance on population control. It’s time all church leaders endorsed and encouraged birth control. FFS. We need smaller families the world around. Offer free sterilisation for all who ask. The biggest thing we can do for population control is to provide more quality education for women around the world. Financial incentives for smaller families can start easily. Birth control can easily be made freely available world wide.

We can mandate recycling and reusable containers, longer warranties on new products. It isn’t to hard to make things that last a lifetime rather than one year and six days. Built in obsolescence can be fixed with legislation. Spare parts and repair can be encouraged and required.

We can stop moving people and things around the world and look for more local ways of living and surviving. Do we need that piece of plastic that has been shipped around the world?

We desperately need a carbon tax, and to pay the true cost of using fossil fuels to run our lives. Cheap flights and fuel must be a thing of the past.

We must stop all logging of old growth forrests and start planting trees everywhere. Trees are natural carbon sinks. We need more not less. An ideal employment pathway. The ultimate green reform. The most helpful step forward.

I find myself saying… it’s time for a change.

Isn’t it amazing that with the current pandemic we can change our habits so quickly and effectively. I hope that we can apply these same changes permanently towards our environmental disaster that grows bigger by the day.

Bottlebrush. Esperence. Western Australia. Photograph and text copyright © Len Metcalf 2020