Attention All Earthlings

Elizabeth Hart

For the documentary Earthlings, filmmaker Shaun Monson has compiled a stunning montage of footage that exposes various commonly used methods of killing and torturing animals for food, clothing, entertainment, and experimentation. The images are inherently unpleasant, but unlike most single-issue animal rights campaigns, such as banning fur in fashion or boycotting foie gras, the film eloquently narrates the story of the human race's collective iron fist, held unforgiving over the heads of Earth's non-human inhabitants.

While our species values its ability to speak language, the film points out our characteristic patronization of other species' grand expressions of consciousness.  For instance, is the ability to fly across continents any less magnificent in its complexity? Every species that inhabits the planet is simply a different evolutionary manifestation of life, though we've come to ignore our shared consciousness.  Monson asks his viewers to tune in to the life-force that illuminates all earthlings.

As Allan Watts put it: "Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit – to the 'conquest' of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature." 

You can watch the full-length film here.

Creative Commons Image by aus_chick on Flickr