The Friendly Fire of Michael Moore

The premier documentary maker, up until now a voice of the left, loses faith in our species.

As any person with sufficient demographic variety in their WhatsApp group must have already verified during this pandemic, extremes are frequently encountered that challenge generally accepted truths. This happens, for example, when we see filmmaker and activist Michael Moore, mostly appearing as a hero of the American left, defending ideas which, up until now, barely managed to survive outside the conspiratorial sewers of the new ultra-right. When the scientific consensus had managed to practically silence climate crisis deniers, suddenly a film, produced and promoted by Moore, gives a gift of injecting life into languishing “denierism,” and explodes a friendly fire projectile into the heart of the environmental movement. It “… is like Bernie Sanders endorsing Donald Trump while chugging hydroxychloroquine,” the filmmaker and ecologist Josh Fox summarized in The Nation.

“It is truly demoralizing how much damage this film has done at a moment when many are ready for deep change,” tweeted Naomi Klein, the guru of anti-capitalism. “We have been here many times before … But never before have these attacks come from a famous campaigner for social justice, rubbing our faces in the dirt,” writer and activist George Monbiot wrote in The Guardian.

It is not that “The Planet of the Humans,” the documentary produced, written and directed by Moore’s regular collaborator Jeff Gibbs, denies the climate emergency. It is exactly the opposite. But, starting from ideological positions contrary to the spokesmen for the extreme right who now support the film, it promotes the same discredited myths that the deniers have used for years to support their position. It criticizes the consensus about renewable energies, stating that they are as polluting as fossil fuels, an old argument which today is completely false, and denounces them for having become mere tools of the big corporations, who have taken over the environmental movement to become even richer.

The background noise will seem familiar to those who know the work of the documentary filmmaker who won’t let go of his baseball cap, winner of an Oscar in 2002 for “Bowling for Columbine” and the Palme D’Or in Cannes in 2004 for “Fahrenheit 11/9,” criticism of the gun culture and the circumstances which lead to the 9/11 attack, and what is called “the war on terror.” The son of a secretary and an employee of a car manufacturer, his documentaries contributed to the education of a generation of progressive young people in a time of crisis for the traditional left. The work of Moore (from Flint, Michigan, born in 1954), largely transcends the political correctness of the center left. During the recent Democratic primary campaigns, he intervened in front of the crowds of Sanders’ followers, and challenged the general appeal for conciliation, after the fratricidal campaign of 2016, railing against the party apparatus.

One problem is that he is now shooting at his own people. “Planet of the Humans” is, as it defines itself, “a frontal attack on our sacred cows.” Sanders himself, who has already abandoned the race for the White House, raised the flag of the Green New Deal, an ambitious plan for transition to clean energy in the United States, whose adoption by the mainstream Democratic Party represents an historic victory for the same people that Moore destroys in his new film. “[I]t’s only your friends who can tell you when you’re messing up,” Moore told The Hill. “We are lifetime environmentalists, and if we can’t say to each other, ‘Hey. Look. We might be on the wrong path here because we’re not winning this battle.’ Everybody knows it,” he said. “So if we’re not winning, why don’t we have the discussion about what we need to do because it cannot go on any longer.”

Far from accepting an invitation to debate, the world of environmental activists attacked the film in an extraordinarily cohesive way. Leaders of the movement are accustomed to attacks from their traditional enemies, such as the fossil fuel business. [And referring to the film’s attacks on the environmental movement], veteran activist Bill McKibben, who is directly criticized in the documentary, explained to Rolling Stone, “They’re a punch in the nose, which turns out to be far less damaging than a stab in the back.”

Prestigious scientists and activists published a letter in which they asked that the “shockingly misleading and absurd” film be removed from a show that “trades in debunked fossil fuel industry talking points.” With this cover letter, there was no flood of distributors for the film. Neither Netflix nor other platforms want to show it. It was even taken down from YouTube, where it had more than 8 million views, after it was denounced for copyright infringement by an environmental photographer. Now it can be seen for free on the film’s website.

None of this intimidated documentary filmmaker Moore, a David with a long list of Goliaths at his back. “This is perhaps the most urgent film we’ve shown in the 15-year history of our film festival,” Moore said, speaking at the premier on April 22, Earth Day, at the festival in Traverse City, Michigan, that he also organized.

Moore claims, and this aligns with the environmental movement, that there is much more in play than climate change. Fishing, agriculture, timber. He proposes a holistic discussion about the destruction of the planet. He warns against the “addiction to growth.” Capitalism and the protection of the environment, he explains, are simply incompatible. And he concludes that overpopulation is the mother of all problems in a rather simplistic manner, according to his critics, that takes the film down a dangerous Malthusian pathway. “If there’s no great extinction, there’s no turning back,” an anthropologist argues in the film.*

In the midst of the campaign to launch the film, Moore found an argument in the COVID-19 pandemic, which dramatically reduces consumption, and with that, damage to the planet. “They said that people couldn’t change from one day to another,” Moore told The Hill. “But we have changed overnight, haven’t we in the last month? We are able to make serious fundamental changes in the way we live immediately, if we think we’re going to die. … This pandemic should teach us a lot about where we have failed when it comes to battling the climate emergency.”

* Editor’s Note: Although accurately translated, the quoted remark could not be independently verified.