An Explosive New Documentary by Julia Branes that Exposes our Illusions of Green Technologies in Stark Detail
“We are members of the most destructive culture that has ever existed. Our assault on the natural world, on indigenous people and other cultures, on women, children, on all of us by the possibility of nuclear suicide or by other means – all of this is unprecedented in its enormity and its ferocity.”
— Derrick Jensen — Listening to the Land
- Shocking exposé revealing the disturbing truth of the movement to green technologies premiered on Earth Day, April 22nd, 2021
- Book ‘Bright Green Lies’ was released on March 16th, 2021
Explosive new environmental documentary, “Bright Green Lies” Trailer: made its worldwide debut to audiences on Earth Day, April 22nd, 2021. The film premiere was followed by a live conversation and Q&A with author-director Julia Barnes and the authors of the book, Max Wilbert, Derrick Jensen and Lierre Keith.
“Over the past several decades, this ‘Bright Green environmentalism’ has become mainstream”
The film, directed by award-winning filmmaker Julia Barnes, dismantles the illusion of Green Technology in breath-taking, comprehensive detail. From the proposed benefits of solar panels and wind turbines, to green consumerism and electric cars, the film takes a bold peak behind the green curtain. In doing so, it reveals the extent of the lies being told by prominent environmentalists and their supporters in-order to perpetuate the myth that out-of-control human consumption can be continued if people just ‘buy green.’
The majority of ‘green technologies’, heralded as solutions to environmental destruction are, in fact, adding to the problem, speeding up our consumption and enabling people to live in the fantasy of “green-washing.”
Bright Green Lies takes an in-depth look at the newest wave of environmentalism and its belief that through 100% renewables, recycling and electric cars, we can have industrial civilisation without destroying the planet.
“Over the past several decades, this ‘Bright Green environmentalism’ has become mainstream,” said Julia Barnes. “There are an incredible number of claims being made about “green” technologies that are frankly untrue. Words like “clean,” “free,” “safe,” and “sustainable” are often thrown around by bright green environmentalists. They act as if solar panels and wind turbines grow on trees.”
Through the film’s examination of the unseen processes involved in making flagship green technologies, a very different picture is revealed. Their mass production requires increased mining, industrial manufacturing, habitat destruction, greenhouse gas emissions, and the creation of toxic waste. Renewable energy does not even deliver on its most basic promise of reducing fossil fuel consumption. On a global scale, the energy produced by ‘green technology’ is simply being stacked on top of what is already being used.
The solutions we are turning to as our saviours are adding to the destruction, accelerating the mass extinction of life on earth, and wasting time we don’t have on false solutions. Tackling the most pressing issues of our time will require us to look beyond the mainstream technological fantasies and ask deeper questions about what needs to change. “We can’t save the world by destroying it,” said Max Wilbert.
Watch Bright Green Lies www.brightgreenlies.com, an in-depth conversation and live Q&A with Julia Barnes, Derrick Jensen, Max Wilbert and Lierre Keith.
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Once, the environmental movement was about protecting the natural world from the insatiable demands of this extractive culture. Some of the movement still is: around the world grassroots activists and their organisations are fighting desperately to save this or that creature they love, this or that plant or fungi, this or that wild place.
If we wish to stop atrocities, we need merely step away from the isolation. There is a whole world waiting for us, ready to welcome us home.
An Open Letter by Derrick Johnson to Reclaim Environmentalism
https://derrickjensen.org/open-letter-to-reclaim-environmentalism/
Contrast this to what some activists are calling the conservation-industrial complex–big green organisations, huge “environmental” foundations, neo-environmentalists, some academics–which has co-opted too much of the movement into “sustainability,” with that word being devalued to mean “keeping this culture going as long as possible.” Instead of fighting to protect our one and only home, they are trying to “sustain” the very culture that is killing the planet. And they are often quite explicit about their priorities.
For example, the recent “An Open Letter to Environmentalists on Nuclear Energy,” signed by a number of academics, some conservation biologists, and other members of the conservation-industrial complex, labels nuclear energy as “sustainable” and argues that because of global warming, nuclear energy plays a “key role” in “global biodiversity conservation.” Their entire argument is based on the presumption that industrial energy usage is, like Dick Cheney said, not negotiable–it is taken as a given. And for what will this energy be used? To continue extraction and drawdown–to convert the last living creatures and their communities into the final dead commodities.
Their letter said we should let “objective evidence” be our guide. One sign of intelligence is the ability to recognize patterns: let’s lay out a pattern and see if we can recognize it in less than 10,000 years. When you think of Iraq, do you think of cedar forests so thick that sunlight never touches the ground? That’s how it was prior to the beginnings of this culture. The Near East was a forest. North Africa was a forest. Greece was a forest. All pulled down to support this culture. Forests precede us, while deserts dog our heels. There were so many whales in the Atlantic they were a hazard to ships. There were so many bison on the Great Plains you could watch for four days as a herd thundered by. There were so many salmon in the Pacific Northwest you could hear them coming for hours before they arrived. The evidence is not just “objective,” it’s overwhelming: this culture exsanguinate the world of water, of soil, of species, and of the process of life itself, until all that is left is dust.
Fossil fuels have accelerated this destruction, but they didn’t cause it, and switching from fossil fuels to nuclear energy (or windmills) won’t stop it. Maybe three generations of humans will experience this level of consumption, but a culture based on drawdown has no future. Of all people, conservation biologists should understand that drawdown cannot last, and should not be taken as a given when designing public policy–let alone a way of life.
It is long past time for those of us whose loyalties lie with wild plants and animals and places to take back our movement from those who use its rhetoric to foster accelerating ecocide. It is long past time we all faced the fact that an extractive way of life has never had a future, and can only end in biotic collapse. Every day this extractive culture continues, two hundred species slip into that longest night of extinction. We have very little time left to stop the destruction and to start the repair. And the repair might yet be done: grasslands, for example, are so good at sequestering carbon that restoring 75 percent of the planet’s prairies could bring atmospheric CO2 to under 330 ppm in fifteen years or less. This would also restore habitat for a near infinite number of creatures. We can make similar arguments about reforestation. Or consider that out of the more than 450 dead zones in the oceans, precisely one has repaired itself. How? The collapse of the Soviet Empire made agriculture unfeasible in the region near the Black Sea: with the destructive activity taken away, the dead zone disappeared, and life returned. It really is that simple.
You’d think that those who claim to care about biodiversity would cherish “objective evidence” like this. But instead the conservation-industrial complex promotes nuclear energy (or windmills). Why? Because restoring prairies and forests and ending empires doesn’t fit with the extractive agenda of the global overlords.
This and other attempts to rationalise increasingly desperate means to fuel this destructive culture are frankly insane. The fundamental problem we face as environmentalists and as human beings isn’t to try to find a way to power the destruction just a little bit longer: it’s to stop the destruction. The scale of this emergency defies meaning. Mountains are falling. The oceans are dying. The climate itself is bleeding out and it’s our children who will find out if it’s beyond hope. The only certainty is that our one and only home, once lush with life and the promise of more, will soon be a bare rock if we do nothing.
We the undersigned are not part of the conservation-industrial complex. Many of us are long-term environmental activists. Some of us are Indigenous people whose cultures have been living truly sustainably and respectfully with all our relations from long before the dominant culture began exploiting the planet. But all of us are human beings who recognize we are animals who like all others need liveable habitat on a living earth. And we love salmon and prairie dogs and black terns and wild nature more than we love this way of life.
Environmentalism is not about insulating this culture from the effects of its world-destroying activities. Nor is it about trying to perpetuate these world-destroying activities. We are reclaiming environmentalism to mean protecting the natural world from this culture.
And more importantly, we are reclaiming this earth that is our only home, reclaiming it from this extractive culture. We love this earth, and we will defend our beloved.
To join others please sign Derricks Open Letter press this link: https://derrickjensen.org/open-letter-to-reclaim-environmentalism/
St. Mary’s Hermitage 