'Earth’ Review: Humanity Is Digging Its Own Grave

The day after I watched the documentary “Earth,” I spent time working in my garden, digging, planting, getting my hands dirty. I didn’t grow up gardening and I’m not especially good at it. Even so, when I’m not inadvertently killing plants, I find it satisfying tending the yard. It’s a small pleasure, though given what the domination of nature has wrought, also a paradoxical one. More than 12 million acres have burned in Australia as of this week and, as this movie reminds you, there is no escaping complicity in what the environmentalist Bill McKibben has called “the end of nature.”

A scene from Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s “Earth.”

While gardening, I kept thinking about “Earth,” which offers a look at how humans — by excavating, by tunneling, by fetishizing Carrara marble countertops — are changing material existence. The displacement of earth in the documentary is on a far larger, more dramatic scale than what any casual gardener does, true, but the movie is a stark reminder that someone, at some point, cleared and gouged the land to build that gardener’s house, streets and city. This isn’t news, but it is still sobering to see the planet ruined one backhoe at a time.

Read the story from The New York Times by Manohla ‘Dargis - “‘Earth’ Review: Humanity Is Digging Its Own Grave.”