Death Denial in the Anthropocene, Don't Look Up, and Steven Donziger
Including Norway's Sanity, Sustainable Dish, and More!
#30 Sheldon Solomon - Denial of Death in the Anthropocene
My point is that infinite growth is only good for malignant tumors and compound interest. That in any other natural system, you don’t want a positive feedback loop that culminates in increasing frenetic activity that spirals out of control. In nature, we want balance. We want homeostasis. We wanna get to the point, to quote Mary Poppins, where “enough is as good as a feast.” — Sheldon Solomon
This week on the podcast, we share our interview with experimental psychologist, professor, and author, Sheldon Solomon. We hope you guys think this interview is as hilarious and informative as it was for us. Sheldon is clearly a brilliant, loquacious, and genuine dude. This episode was recorded in May(ish) of 2021, but was always a seminal piece for our project: we talk about how death denying delusions are running rampant in modern culture, how the blind belief in the inevitability of progress is taking us down a dark road, and how the acceptance and awareness of our mortality can help us turn our attention to the vistas of awe and enchantment necessary to create the more beautiful world we all want to live in.
It was so great to go to upstate NY and meet Sheldon and his wife, Maureen. We had such a wonderful time, eating around his backyard fire-pit. We had no idea how crazy our year would end up being, and how much we would grow. I (Maren) couldn’t have known then that my Grama would indeed die in 2021, but spending time with the two of them helped prepare me to be in that room with Grama, and gave me a framework for working through the grief of loss, and the awareness of my own mortality.
We really hope we can have another conversation with Sheldon in the future and go even deeper. This interview was a blast, and we’d love to do it again!
Pssst! If you haven’t yet, please give us a 5 star rating on whatever podcast app you use to listen to the show! We know we have many haters coming down the pipeline, and your positive ratings can help those 1 star reviews not harm our average.
Unfortunately, Don’t Look Up is a (Negligent) Oversimplification of a Complex Issue
Spoiler Alert!
Despite the above title, I genuinely enjoyed the film Don’t Look Up. I thought it was quippy and entertaining, and poked fun at many well-deserving aspects of our culture. There was something touching about the dinner scene at the end, with the character’s gentle acquiescence to the inevitability of death and the awareness of what matters most: togetherness and gratitude. All in all, it was a decent movie to watch, and as the credits rolled, I shared my concerns with Jake about how it would be perceived by the broader public, and wondered how the film’s director, Adam McKay, understood his incredibly oversimplified allegory.
Simply, the film is meant to be taken as a metaphor for humanity’s seeming disinterest in the reality of climate change. The two main characters, played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, are unfortunate Cassandras in a world ending tragic comedy, and we watch the situation become more deranged until we ultimately witness their demise, along with all life on earth.
Seems like a pretty straight-forward analogy, only, it isn’t.
Climate change is not an asteroid that will destroy all life on Earth in one fell swoop. This situation is infinitely more complex, but I will attempt to distill it: What is destroying life is our behavior as human beings within an industrial corporatocratic global civilization. We are committing ecocide with industrial agriculture, the expansion of cities, the polluting and draining of rivers, and increasing mining and industry worldwide for "renewable" or nonrenewable infrastructure, technology, chemicals, consumer goods, etc. In the process, we also commit colonialism, genocide, and the desecration of sacred lands. The asteroid in question for us is not some external force exerting its power upon us – it is us. We are knowingly killing the planet every day.
That’s the problem though, isn’t it? The real story is not so comical and entertaining to tell. It’s a lot simpler to make a story about an asteroid and to use that narrative to make Republicans look like belligerent morons who are denying the obvious, clearly virtue-signaling the Left’s “superiority” for actually being willing to admit that climate change is a thing. That’s a pretty easy movie to make. It’s a lot harder to have the self-awareness to expose how the Left is (generally speaking) as much, if not more, deluded than those who outright deny anthropogenic climate change because they fully ascribe to myopic Scientism and a belief in technological, consumer based solutions to what is a cultural/ecological crisis emboldened by techno-cronyism can resolve this conundrum:
Uncanny how Hollywood wants us to hate each other rather than focus our attention on what really destroys the world. Even in the film, the reason the world is destroyed is because of the government’s relationship with corporate interests. Feeding the culture war will always yield more profits than honesty. Yet, many people will leave this film blaming the demise on the hapless “Don’t Look Up” supporters, an obvious analogue for Trump supporters or climate deniers. Or, people will be reinvigorated in their hatred for Trump himself through Meryl Streep’s character, ignoring the fact that climate change and environmental destruction has been an object of concern for almost 60 years to no avail.
I’m as far from a Trump supporter as anyone can be, but it really is as if people see Trump leaving the Paris Agreement as single-handedly dooming us to climate apocalypse, and that is nonsense.
Look around you in your city tonight and feast your eyes on a human zoo that only exists because of the fossil fuel economy – whether by crude oil or coal, nothing we do is exempt from this fact. You can thank petroleum for essentially every aspect of your existence, from the food you eat to the clothes you wear to the very fact that you exist in an urban or suburban place. The idea that we are going to convert all of this to something “sustainable” in time to lower emissions in any significant way is, unfortunately, a fairytale that we've been told so we don't have to face the overwhelming reality that we are responsible for learning how to live in a warming world, and for healing the ecosystems that sustain us. We want some savior like Elon Musk or Joe Biden or Greta Thunberg to protect us from the reality that we decide every day to be part of an unsustainable civilization that is killing us and the rest of the living community of Earth.
How, one might ask, will it be even remotely possible to turn this industrial global civilization that was built upon cheap and abundant energy into a completely carbon-free society overnight?
It’s pretty simple, actually. You can’t.
This outlines the structural problem with our ontological worldview today: we honestly view the world as mechanistic as this. We honestly believe that this is a mathematical science equation that needs to be solved, and we’ll be home-free.
But wait, we have the science! We have it! What a relief.
The problem is, the solutions Adam McKay offers will actually require an extraterrestrial amount of mining, unless we want to blow up the entire world so we can run our grids off of solar panels and have Teslas*.
But that’s the price of “saving the world,” isn’t it? The cost is the living world itself, upon which we depend entirely.
There is also the uncomfortable fact that carbon capture technology might actually be a carbon additive, but regardless, many people are waking up to the reality that this “energy transition” is too little too late and means very little as far as, for example, putting the genie which is the Thwaites Glacier back in its bottle. And despite the earnest intentions, a bunch of Westerners getting electrics and putting solar panels on their roofs won’t stop those waters from rising.
For some strange reason, this fact seems easier for young people to accept than those of McKay’s generation, who have the benefit of having been alive twice as long but clearly learning very little about ecology and finite systems. Perhaps many of these people had more, better years which allowed their brains to warp into believing that things are always getting better. Young people, across the board, have hardly had that luxury.
But this is also why this film is so interesting to me, because despite McKay’s tweets, the film is aware of the finitude of Earth as well as the limitations of technology. The film pokes fun at the idea of churning the asteroid into a profit-making machine, yet that is exactly what is happening when one looks at the corporate capture at global events such as the IUCN, COP-26, or the UNFSS. “Sustainability” has become a marketing scheme, and these megalithic corporations are profiting off of the crisis rather than preparing people for the crisis. Obviously, the same goes for the media (ahem, propaganda machine), just like in the film. Like the 2-dimensional extras in the film, pacifying themselves with their smartphones as a planet-killing asteroid hurtles toward Earth, we are sitting around and waiting for governments (who we don’t even trust at the best of times) and corporations (who we never trust) to do something about this nebulous enemy called climate change rather than having minds of our own and taking responsibility for ourselves.
To put it frankly, none of the plans proposed by these groups are actually about saving the world. Duh. I think we all intuitively know that, whether or not we want to admit it. They’re about saving our “world” – our way of life, which, turns out, really only benefits the very few. When the solution to coral bleaching is producing more cars, we start to get the sense that something is amiss. Somehow, they’ve convinced us to not be skeptical of them, perhaps because it’s so easy to manipulate a population that is bombarded by fear and doom. They are also more than willing to prey upon our most noble, compassionate attributes. We honestly worry about those reefs. We want to do our part to help them, so we are taken to believing simple, false solutions.
Turning climate change into one, singular enemy, as McKay did in Don’t Look Up is a recipe for confusion. It’s an oversimplification of a really complex problem, one which has local, context based actions that actually work to heal and regenerate ecosystems. The most disappointing thing about this film, by far, is the apathy it may breed in certain people who are already feeling that the issue of climate change is utterly hopeless. We don’t need to sit around the dinner table, making small talk, waiting to die.
One thing is true, however. We must accept our fate: climate change is here. We can’t put this genie back in the bottle. What we can do, however, is work toward learning how to live with it. If our industrial civilization is what is destroying the world, not an asteroid, we very likely will need to learn to live without that, probably sooner rather than later.
While Leonardo DiCaprio plays his own co-opted character in real life, investing in the highly industrial production of lab grown meat, ranchers are rotationally grazing sheep to heal lands that were destroyed by fires. Dams are coming down in California after years and years of protest by the Yurok people, hopefully in time to save the salmon populations that have been destroyed there. The Native Conservancy is successfully regenerating and protecting the ocean which was devastated by the Valdez oil spill. There is incredible work being done: tangible, real work. All of this work has the added benefit of profoundly meaningful lives for the people who participate.
The feeble cries for “Manhattan Project” technological/industrial action are, frankly, uninspiring, and also slightly tone-deaf. Do we really want to model our regeneration efforts off of the technological project that has left humanity in a near perpetual state of anxiety that we could all be, at any time, subsumed by nuclear fallout? Anyway, the fixation on the mechanistic metric of carbon denies the complexity of the whole, and leaves people feeling utterly helpless to do anything other than purchase products that are supposedly “sustainable” or “carbon-neutral”. Any solution to the crises caused by climate change must be local and context based. If the Thwaites Glacier is going to cause Bangladesh (or Miami) to be underwater in 50 years time, we need to prepare for the physical ramifications of that. Creating a renewable grid in the Global North is just a distraction. The top-down “solutions” proposed by billionaires, governments, corporations, and Big NGOs are little more than lies formulated to keep us spending money and remaining ignorant to the realities of the world.
I think we were all moved by the ending montage and Leonardo DiCaprio’s words, “We really had it all, didn’t we?” We live on an incredible world: the only world our species has ever known. Every day, this industrial civilization churns the living world into more capital, more dead commodities, more useless trash that we discard without reverence. This is not an indictment** on us, just a call to attention. We’ve all been brought up in a culture that tells us the world is little more than a machine, and we are little more than automatons built and conditioned to be cogs in it. We’ve been made to believe that the world is an endlessly exploitable resource of dead matter that can be made into billions of tons of stuff. The truth is that the fecundity of the Earth, and its arrays of life and wonder still exist outside of our concrete cities. The stars still exist even though we can’t see them through all of the light pollution. There is still wonder and awe to be had. There is more than this human zoo we’ve constructed. There is still a world worth fighting for.
But we don’t fight for the world with more mining, more extraction, more consumerism, more pollution, more colonialism. The fact that so many of us have been co-opted by a narrative which says we must get carbon out of the atmosphere at all costs is proof that we are experiencing the endpoint of a machine worldview. Entire ecosystems are left out of that accounting. People are left out of that accounting, particularly those who are the most marginalized among us. The living Earth itself is left out of that accounting.
The very notion that the problem of climate change is more or less a math problem, and that once we eliminate carbon from the atmosphere, everything will be fine, is a delusion borne of a machine worldview. The earth is alive, and we could pull all of the carbon out of the atmosphere and still completely destroy ourselves at the same time. We could still lose all biodiversity. We could still turn the world into a giant monoculture. We could still ravage every mountain, and every last refuge for wildlife in the pursuit of that goal. When something must be achieved at all costs, the risk of losing ourselves into an authoritarian, genocidal culture is omnipresent. That is what I fear we are headed towards. I see glimpses of this horrible, nightmare situation all the time.
It’s up to us to not let it happen.
* This might be the most ironic bit about the whole film: Mark Rylance’s character, who is a sort of hybrid of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg, is exactly the type of person who is being conscripted by our civilization to be the godhead’s of sustainability, particularly Elon Musk, although Jeff Bezos was notably lauded as a delegate at COP-26. Mind-blowingly, the film doesn’t seem aware of this manifestation in actual reality at all. Bill Gates, who literally owns 4 private jets, a Cessna, 23 cars, and a helicopter, had the audacity to write a book about what the average person needs to be doing about climate change, including eating that industrial fake meat that Leo loves. I’m not really a “carbon footprint” person, but why exactly are we taking advice on sustainability from this guy?
** One of the main critiques I’ve seen of this film are essentially people griping with how much the film brutally criticizes the masses. I think it’s worthwhile for people to have this side of the collective shadow exposed to us, however, I felt the film took easy punches and lacked a lot of self-reflection. Everyone who made that film is as responsible for these crises as anyone else, and yet, shame and guilt aren’t going to get us anywhere.
Steven Donziger’s Last Day Before Prison
For this particular Substack, I need to be short as I have been working on a bit of writing that I thought would be easier but has subsequently turned into a real research rabbit hole, and on top of that I am scripting and editing the film while also editing together client work. So, I have been juggling many things at any given moment. But that being said I do have a few things I would like to share.
If you haven’t seen it already, Steven Donziger recently released a video I filmed and edited about the day he went to prison. We have mentioned it on the podcast previously, but on October 27th Steven Donziger was ordered to turn himself into prison.
By some weird chance and events Maren and I have found ourselves involved in the crazy story of Steven Donziger and his fight for the peoples of the Ecuadorian Amazon. What started out as a brief interview in Steven’s apartment about his house arrest and the current state of affairs of his fight against Chevron has turned into a very lucky chance to be involved and participate in the fight. At the time, and to this day, Steven was talking with all of the biggest new outlets in the world, his story was being talked about by everyone and we felt immensely out of place and lucky to have a brief moment of his time to collect an interesting story for our film.
After our initial interview with him, we swiftly became friends with Steven. We have had dinner with him and his family on a number of occasions, and have attended multiple rallies in his defense and were even able to watch his trial from an overflow room as Judge Loretta Preksa read a newspaper during the proceedings.
I feel comfortable calling Steven a friend and have a deep desire for the justice he seeks for the Ecuadorians. Flash-forward a few months, and Maren and I reached out to catch up with Steven. We had recently found out through social media that Judge Preska had found him guilty of contempt of court and that he must serve a 6 month prison sentence. Sometime around the 24th of October Maren and I had a call with Steven to catch up and figure out what the deal is and when he had to go to prison. I felt a strong desire to be there in that moment as those moments are fleeting. Steven informed us that Judge Preska had the option to tell him at any moment in the coming months that he had 24 hours to turn himself into prison. He was convinced at the time that she would probably let him marinate in house arrest for as long as possible before demanding the 24 hour turn in. So Maren and I relaxed, thinking that we were not on call for the time being and were glad that Steven wasn’t in prison.
On the 27th, just a few days later, Maren and I had just gotten home from seeing ‘Dune’ in theaters around 9 pm. At that moment, Maren logged into Twitter and found out that Preska had taken the first opportunity to demand he turn himself in. The next day. Immediately we asked Steven if there was a spot in the car taking him to prison and quickly looked for the first flight to New York City. There was one left. The red eye. The only flight that would get me to Steven on time would take off in and hour and a half. I threw all my camera equipment in a bag, my tooth brush, change of clothes and rushed to the airport. We bought my ticket at the counter and before I knew it I was in the air.
I landed and by the time I arrived at Stevens place it was about 10 am, Steven had to turn himself into prison at the latest 4 pm. I tried my best to inhabit the role of the documentarian: a fly on the wall. My adrenaline was as high as the stakes of all that was playing out before me. Maybe one day I can share the intensity of that day and all that transpired, but it was a very personal and private day for Steven and his family making sense of the situation and trying their best to ensure Stevens safety. It was an honor and privilege and one of the strangest days of my life.
Here is a video of a quick edit I did of that day. It is a teaser to a larger story that we hope to tell in the film, Death in The Garden.
Norway: The Planet’s Last Bastion of Sanity?
This video encapsulates very elegantly a complex discussion about proper land usage, geographical production of food, and how animals are vital for certain food systems being self-reliant and sovereign. I’ve spent a lot of time in Scandinavia, and I know how deep rooted the industrial plant-based narrative is seeded in these cultures that are hyper-progressive and “green-minded,” so to see a video like this with its nuance and creativity really gave me hope that this conversation can be had with a wider audience.
Definitely check this video out.
Sustainable Dish Podcast!
We were honored to have been interviewed by James Connolly, our amazing producer, on the Sustainable Dish Podcast. Go check it out! Also, it’s James’ birthday today, so go send him some love!
We talked about so much: we detailed our pasts and how we got to this point in our journey, the progression from essentially making a low-budget, animal-based Kiss the Ground to a story that is attempting to break down all of the narratives that are holding us hostage in global industrial civilization, and so much more.
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Thanks for reading!
Somehow, I missed this until now. You guys are really good writers, in addition to your obvious skills with/in front of the camera. Honored to be on the same team.