Members Screening: How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can’t Change

How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can’t Change
Josh Fox, 2016
105 min, Digital Video

After his 2010 film Gasland helped mobilize public opposition to fracking, filmmaker Josh Fox noticed that his favorite hemlock tree was dying. The cause of its decay was a parasite advancing up the East Coast due to warmer winters—a consequence of human-induced climate change. That observation was the wake-up call that led Fox to travel to 12 countries on six continents to make the film How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can’t Change. Though Fox discovers that it may be too late to stop the worst consequences of climate change, he investigates the effects of continued global warming: rising sea levels, record droughts, superstorms, dying coral reefs, species extinction, food insecurity, and increased conflicts over limited resources. Still, the film presents sources of light, asking, “What is it that climate change can’t destroy? What is so deep within us that no calamity can take it away?”

In an action-packed, music-fueled odyssey, we meet both global leaders and everyday citizens in search of meaning and things worth fighting for. Fox interviews climate scientists, experts, and activists including Lester Brown, founder of Worldwatch Institute; Ella Chou, an expert on energy in both China and the US; and Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction. Fox concludes that courage, innovation, democracy, and community are the ideals that must thrive in order for us to weather the coming challenges. People in Asia, Africa, the Amazon, and across the world are relying on these qualities and basic civic values in their ongoing battles to save the planet and humanity as a whole.

In the director’s own words, “The day the oil and gas industry came to my house was the loneliest day of my life. I have never been so afraid. But that fear, the fear of losing my home, has taken me so far beyond that place to discover the deepest love and community I’ve ever known.”

How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can’t Change courtesy of International WOW Company.