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

What can you say about a documentary of the planet, by the planet (its peoples) and for the planet? How can we prevent life perishing from the Earth? Find personal time or even better, a community organized viewing, to take in Josh Fox's wide tour of our planetary address. It also includes a tour of emotions ranging from fear to the realization that we're not giving up. Why? Because, as said in this work, we have the inventions to move beyond burning fossil fuels and it's time to get them working full scale. Two stellar sections (among many) include dialogues with Tim DeChristopher; (while you and I are recycling, he's blockin' illegal oil and gas leases – yeah,) and Ella Chou, a Chinese environmentalist who places the term Moral Imagination right in front. Thank you, Ella Chou. The doc puts it out there;'Hi people, get un-afraid. Work together to protect the ecosystems of our brilliant, one- of-a-kind home called Earth.'

We went to see this documentary in our town this week during its tour and found that the content is motivating. We saw that we must make a commitment to speak out to our government representatives and become a community of people that are willing and able to fight oil and gas industries which have no conscience. This documentary made me get up and dance in tribute to the earth. The documentary tells us that green solutions are attainable; our nation has all the technology to do. This documentary helps us to see we are not alone in the fight against gas, oil, and fracked-gas infrastructure that we do not want or need, that those industries do not care that they are causing our planet great harm, and that we need to unite our nation toward going green. The documentary is long but worth the time spent watching it.

I'll start off by saying Fox's 2011 documentary 'Gasland' was reasonably well made and raised some fair concerns about fraking.

"How to Let Go...' on the other hand, is little more than a hodgepodge of present day leftist mantras with little in the way of supporting evidence. Fox is trying to strike an emotional response from viewers with this material, and his target is really Western Civilization as much as it is actual climate change. We get a glimpse of rainforest destruction in Amazonia, beach erosion in the South Pacific, toxic air pollution in large cities in China,etc. Climate change is of course to blame for all these ills.

The problem here is that beach erosion is a natural process, and Fox never makes the case that climate change caused the specific erosion he shows in the film. Again, the message I get is that we're meant to ignore facts and reason, and to let emotion sweep over us.

The biggest fallacy in this sprawling mess of a documentary comes when Fox attempts to make the case that income and wealth inequality are driving forces in the creation of climate change. He goes on to provide no concrete evidence of this absurd claim.

He ends with this "moral imagination" nonsense. I imagine Chairman Mao and Stalin had tremendous moral imaginations, given Fox's logic.

Its hard to know what the exact takeaway is from such a sloppy, disjointed work. My best guess is that Fox wants Western Civilization to die off, and that humanity go back to primitivism. We should emulate the virtue of primitive Pacific Islanders and Africans living in mud huts.

This is documentary filmmaking at its very worst, its riddled with unsubstantiated claims, logical fallacies and hippy-dippy, contrived feel good moments. This callow, low-minded material is garbage aimed at uninformed millennials, which, unfortunately, there are a lot of...

It's a nicely joined documentary illustrating the recent and not-so-recent progress of global warming and tying it convincingly to carbon emissions.

But it's a sad program too, because the people most in need of this information are the least likely to watch a program like this. Somehow the notion of anthropogenic global warming has been politicized. It shouldn't ever have become a "liberal" position because it's no more partisan than the solar system or Ebola or the Black Plague.

It's sad too because I'm tempted to argue in favor of recognizing AGW, as almost all respectable scientific organizations have, including the American Meteorological Association. I visited the Columbia Ice Fields in Canada as a child in 1953 and again in 1988, and the edge of this miniglacier had retreated the length of about two football fields in that period. It's irritating to feel that an observation like that still needs to be brought up.

It's sad too that America in general is so far behind the curve on the acceptance of scientific evidence, that we seem to be shackled to a faith-based and political perspective. AGW isn't such a critical problem elsewhere, as nations finally bind together in an attempt to dampen the effect.

Nope. The ultimate problem has to do with psychology, not atmospheric physics. How can anyone deny AGW and natural selection, yet believe that inoculations lead to mental retardation? Finding the psychological solution would ease the way for the solution to the atmospheric problem.

I don't understand the hostile reviews about this very powerful documentary or the guy who made it. There is nothing fake about it, as it takes us on a world journey demonstrating the devastating impact that climate change IS HAVING on the planet. The people are real people and the 97% of scientists who have evaluated the data, the facts, concur that the earth's climate is warming at an unprecedented rate but that it is man-made. NASA has published its own statement on this crucial topic and has made a list of all the scientific societies and government agencies that concur with this irrefutable position: "Scientific evidence for warming of the climate system is unequivocal." - Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change See: http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/ People are hostile to this position, not because they have studied the facts, but because they are attached to a way of life driven by corporations (oil industry, meat and dairy industry, consumption) that they selfishly refuse to give up. In the face of the data, it is hard not to lose hope, but this documentary shows that hope remains alive!