By Melina Paris, Editorial Assistant
Over the past three-and-a-half years, we’ve watched the Trump administration bend trusted institutions to its will by rolling back decades of environmental protections for the sake of helping fossil fuel companies hoard profit and power. So much so, people of conscience are starting to believe that the only way forward for ecological and progressive change is to eliminate these institutions. As a result, public-private partnerships are viewed with prejudice. This can be problematic.
Earlier this year, I reviewed two environmental films, Beyond The Brink: California’s Watershed [an educational video] produced by Jim Thebaut, president of The Chronicles Group followed by Planet Of The Humans by director Jeff Gibbs and executive produced by Michael Moore. 
In California’s Watershed, former landscape engineer, Thebaut, presented solutions for dispersing water from California watersheds through the Sierra Nevada forests to supply California’s agriculture and the commons. California’s Watershed asserts that the production of biofuels, produced through selective burning of forest trees, can play a part in providing a sustainable and healthy California watershed.
In building evidence for this solution, the video presented serious environmental and water supply issues in terms of agriculture and posited that forest overgrowth of trees from a century of fire suppression has degraded the ability to store water. But it didn’t connect on an ecological level how producing biofuels would help. Further, biofuels come along with a host of other problems which were not evaluated or quantified in the brief length of this video. However, in a later conversation with Thebaut he discussed more solutions for forest water channels not discussed in the video.
California’s Watershed is connected to a longer film titled Beyond The Brink [www.youtube.com/Beyond-The-Brink]. The full length film posits if forests are restored to a density historical to the 1900s, the hypothesis is that it may be possible to get more run off from the Northern Sierra with restoration of mechanical thinning of forests and controlled fire. The film showed the benefits resulting from the production of biofuels like, opportunities for public private partnerships, utilizing biomass as a carbon resource and converting biofuels into things people need.
Planet Of The Humans has been criticized for presenting outdated information. Gibbs failed to present any dates or timeline in the film on events that he claims are important
Planet concludes that no matter how many green energy options humans create, the problem of resource depletion will never be solved without reducing consumption. The film also posits that renewable energy sources, including biomass energy, wind power and solar energy, are not as renewable as they are portrayed to be. Yet, Gibbs did not present any firm solution to the myriad of issues his film depicted.
However, biofuels is where Planet and Beyond The Brink merged, albeit from different angles. Planet presents it as utter destruction where Beyond The Brink introduces it as a solution, through public private partnerships.
When we sat down, Thebaut mentioned his new project, a book and film for which the working title is Turning Back The Doomsday Clock. It begins on the same premise as Planet but is based on observations different from Gibbs’. It’s based on two sources: Thebaut’s observations, which is filming for the last 50 years around the world and his work as a regional environmental planner. It’s also based on the results of the Global Trend 2035 Study, published by the National Intelligence Council. The project involves research and consultations with people in the United States government and globally to review key trends, their implications over the near and long term and how emerging trends might combine to produce alternative futures.
“They predict horrifying things happening through 2035,” Thebaut said. “Like global conflicts and water and food shortage. They don’t say climate change because of the policy at the Whitehouse but you can confer it.”
Thebaut’s assessment of Planet, in part, was that Gibbs was critical of corporations, the private sector. Thebaut said that the government has to create and establish policy, but that we can’t ignore the capabilities of the private sector in terms of implementing policy. They have creativity, environmental engineering, science. While he’s not a cynic when it comes to these types of people, he said he’s also a realist when it comes to Wall Street and those realities.
“We have to depend on people who understand what’s at stake,” Thebaut said. “It’s in an urgent situation and to get anything done it’s going to require diplomatic strategies and coalitions that will have to be put together by almost every country in the world. We have to change the dialogue and the political landscape. But I’m making the assumption that we can transcend these situations even if Trump is elected.”
I was interested in Thebaut’s take on the assertion in Planet that solar and wind energies are based in coal. He has reservations about coal, saying there are many alternatives for renewable energy.
“There has to be a mix of different sources of power energy,” Thebaut said. “There’s also a lot of study going on in thermal energy and tidal power with oceans. Science has to evolve and we’ll meet demands.”
Thebaut aligns with the use of solar wind and tidal energy, even nuclear power is a clean energy. As a regional environmental planner he created numerous environmental impact statements and planning studies under the national and state environmental policy act. He said we must have the technologies to create mitigating measures and the knowledge on how we can mitigate the impact.
Population Growth
“The other thing Gibbs mentioned but really didn’t get into is we’re going to have 10 billion people on the planet by 2050, projected,” Thebaut said. “Going back to California, and looking at the water system that we have, the Delta and so forth, it was built at a time when we only had 10 to 12 million people in California, approximately. It was projected for 20 million people, approximately. We’re now close to 50 million so obviously the infrastructure that’s required has to catch up to reality.”
Thebaut noted that California is the fifth largest economy in the world. It is also part of the mediterranian climate — part of only five regions in the world that have this climate — which are the world’s food baskets.
“That’s really ignored,” Thebaut said. “One of the reasons we have the COVID-19 global pandemic is we have compromised the global ecological system. We need cooperation from China, the European Union and the Middle East, everybody working together to solve these problems. The United Nations is a place for us to sit down together to create diplomacy, partnerships and coalitions. They have development goals that we need to pay attention to.”
Biofuels and Fire
Thebaut addressed the issue raised by Gibbs’ Planet of the Humans, biofuels and their impact on the environment. The effects of this were highlighted in Planet showing the displacement of the Amazon’s indigenous people. Brazillian President Jair Bolsonaro in 2019, annulled a 10-year-old regulation that had banned the expansion of sugar-cane planted in the Amazon in favor of producing non-food crops for corn ethanol, which in addition to rendering people homeless, has created an even larger carbon footprint. Thebaut said this was a compromise of the global ecological system; we must learn how to design within the ecological system and not compromise the integrity of the environment.
“Mother Nature created a wonderful forest, the watershed,” he said. “We had policies that changed all that, like the fire suppression policies to protect the gold miners living in the mountains who didn’t want wildfires affecting their work. That was a compromise of the integrity of the system and now we’re paying the price.”
Thebaut said Native Americans have a history of using fire for land management. Their knowledge can inform the California wildfires. Sonali Kolhatkar of KPFKs Rising Up With Sonali recently interviewed Mechoopda tribal member Ali Meders-Knight about this. Meders-Knight collaborates on environmental education and land management at Chico University. She said using fire for land management coincides with other things that are necessary like controlling insects, lowering insecticides [using smoke to filter insects to plants] and as part of maintenance, regularly using cooling or light fires in already thinned out areas, creating white smoke which is a large-scale fire break. This practice has made plants fire adapted. The New York Times also published a story highlighting an Aboriginal burning program begun seven years ago in Australia which has cut wildfires in half and reduced carbon emissions by 40%.
Thebaut is looking at biomass technologies to see what can be accomplished. He is concerned about using biomass for energy but said there are many other uses for biomass and we need to look at the science in entirety. He posited biomass might be useful with the right kind of technologies to mitigate environmental consequences. Yet he noted that Gibbs’ film Planet made a good argument that the consequences may not be as healthy as they should be.
“There is a science associated with biofuels, he said. “In my film Beyond the Brink, we discuss the potential for biomass, what these wood products can create. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean anything right now because most of the wood that they’re pulling out of the forest, literally thousands of dead trees don’t have much use. They’ve been bombarded by beetles.”
Thebaut’s answer is to harvest those dead trees, remove them and redesign the forest. He realizes that sounds like taking mother nature and turning it around but that’s what has to be done, like creating meadows which he cites as a way to get water.
“These issues transcend political ideology. There are members of the environmental community who don’t even want the dead trees cut down, which shows a lack of understanding of what the problems are.”
He said once we recreate the forest, we’ll be generating new water into the system. Because even the dead trees are absorbing water, and holding a lot of it back. We can remove some of the dams, like on the San Joaquin river and create infrastructure which will be used for groundwater recharging.
Yet, even dead trees, a part of natural recycling, continue to benefit future generations of living things by sheltering animals and improving groundwater. When forest trees fall often their root system comes up, creating holes in the earth which serve as a natural reservoir, trapping rain water until it can seep down into the ground.
Further, a 2015 Geos Institute study revealed that thinning combined with biomass energy production may increase, rather than reduce, greenhouse gas emissions. The study cited a 2010 scientist letter to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and included several signatories of the National Academy of Science. Even with this combined information on trees and greenhouse gas it stands true, as fires blaze throughout the West Coast, we cannot afford to wait. We must solve this crisis. This is where Thebaut’s work can help.
Thebaut said we must help mother nature and redesign the watershed but we need support.
“To do that we need support from the state government, the federal government, the United States Forest Service. Congress needs to understand the reality of the consequences because it’s a national security issue. We’re talking about food security for the nation and the economy of the state. [This is] water that comes from the mountains that supplies one-third of the water supply for Southern California.”
We must find the solution for both the watershed and neutralizing the carbon debt from the production of biofuels, in the U.S. and worldwide. Thebaut presents a part of the solution but as he said it’s an urgent situation and only alongside global coalitions, diplomatic strategies and a combination of different sources of power will the human race reach these goals.
www.chroniclesgroup.org and www.youtube.com/Beyond-The-Brink