The fracking campaign succeeded in blocking fracking in the Delaware River watershed, Fox’s focal point, and ultimately led to a ban in New York State in 2014. But this method of extracting gas and oil has become so widespread that the United States Department of Energy recently stopped describing it as “unconventional.”
Now he’s tackling global warming, but in a fresh and engaging way.*
In an interview at The Times last week, Fox said his focus on human-driven climate change emerged as he grappled, after that small fracking success, with the unrelenting demand for fossil fuels and emerging impacts of warming temperatures, made emblematic by Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
The film’s sprawling title — “How to Let Go of the World and Love All The Things Climate Can’t Change” — reflects the sweep of the documentary itself, which takes viewers on Fox’s world-spanning learning journey examining how local campaigns and individual innovators can tweak troubling environmental trajectories toward progress.
The documentary has its HBO debut tonight at 9 p.m. and in “house party” viewings around the country.
Here’s a portion of our interview, with more to come when I have time to edit the video:
Sometimes in person, sometimes online, Fox and I sharply differed on natural gas and fracking. But count me a fan of “Let Go of the World” (My proposed shorthand). The film has heaps of dark notes and a solid dose of finger pointing, but it doesn’t focus on the stale heroes-and-villains framing that has long been a bad fit for global warming. (Who’s the villain, the companies extracting fossil fuels or the societies living better lives because of all that cheap energy?)
His personal journey almost founders as he runs into a wall of despair conveyed by analysts warning of mass extinction, forced migration and more. He illustrates his emotional nadir by using a drone-lofted camera to show himself as a shrinking dot sprawled in a snowy field, paralyzed.
But from that point forward, the film does something rare — laying out a philosophy for sustained engagement on environmental solutions while acknowledging the enormous scope of humanity’s interwoven climate and energy challenges. (For one thing, centuries of climate change and coastal retreats are essentially baked in already based on the greenhouse gases that have already been released.)
Yes, there’s likely some confirmation bias in my thumbs-up, given that I’ve long argued that “urgency and patience” must somehow be meshed in pursuing climate progress. So be it!
The film also valuably focuses on examining one’s own values, choices and actions, with Fox doing so by positioning himself as the central character. In his trademark deadpan narration, Fox describes what he was seeking: “What are the things climate change can’t destroy? What parts of us are so deep that no storm can take them away?”
In our chat, he explained the importance of examining your internal climate this way:
A lot of people ask you, ‘Oh my God, climate change; where to I have to move?’ Well you have to move six inches inside your brain, inside your heart, to figure out what, emotionally, you’re going to do.
Over and over (perhaps a few too many times), from the Peruvian Amazon to the South Pacific, he finds instances in which community action aims to save the day, if not the climate. His examples often don’t end up with a clear victory — instead finding the victory in the effort itself.
There was one big missed opportunity. He didn’t examine evidence that people who might forever debate the dangers posed by climate change are often surprisingly in synch on sensible clean-energy choices, even the merits of a carbon tax.
It would have been great, for example, if Fox had traveled to Woodward, Okla., which one survey found is the most skeptical county in America when it comes to views on global warming, but where the CNN video journalist John Sutter found an oil-company executive pursuing solar-powered independence from the grid.
But that just means there’s room for a sequel.
Here’s the trailer:
I hope you’ll watch the film and perhaps even host a viewing party to discuss its many meanings.
Postscript | I’d intended to include a link to Heidi Hutner’s post about the film and videotaped interview with Josh Fox. Hutner directs the sustainability studies program at Stony Brook University.
Update, July 5 | For a very different reaction, read Randy Olson‘s “boring” review (it’s not the review that’s boring) and Robyn Purchia in CleanTechnica.