How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can't Change 
[Unspecified text is Josh Fox voiceover. All other dialogue is noted by speaker.]

PROLOGUE

[00:01:30] 
I bet you're wondering why I'm dancing my ass off right here, at the top of this movie. Let me tell you a little story going back a few years. I live along the banks of a stream that's part of the Delaware River watershed, up there near the border of Pennsylvania and New York. So in 2008, the oil and gas industry came to our little corner of the world. They wanted our little river basin. It seems there was oil and gas under it. They proposed to drill and frack tens of thousands of oil and gas wells, all over the place. You know that story. The one where the fossil fuel industry comes to town and basically destroys everything in its path. It's happening all over the world. Everywhere you look. A new community is fighting off mountaintop removal or long wall mining or open pit mining for coal. Or tar sands extraction for oil. Or offshore drilling. And, of course, fracking. Seems like almost every corner of the globe is under siege by new and more and more extreme forms of energy extraction. And all of this at a time when we can get off fossil fuels all together. And so in our little community, people fought back saying, there's a better way. Rallies, protests, the threat of civil disobedience en masse. And on one bright and beautiful day in November of 2011, the River Basin Commission took the Delaware River off the table. No fracking. No drilling. The people won. And in this little corner of the world, for now at least, that is cause for dancing. 

[00:03:15] 
When I woke up the next morning, sore and hung over, it was as if I was breathing new air. For the first time in years, these woods weren't being threatened. If you really allow yourself to let go in nature, something inside of you tries to fight it for a while. But slowly and surely, it takes you over. You lose track of time, of days. Something in you finds a totally different rhythm. I hadn't felt it in such a long time. It's there waiting for you. Something that agrees with you inside. You sit down and find a place to contemplate. Just to think. All I wanted was just to stay here. To stay at home. To be left alone. Just to listen. 

[00:04:44] 
Be thankful. Then all of a sudden, I saw something that broke my meditative trance: my tree was dying. When I was five years old, walking along the dirt road with my father, I saw a little hemlock sapling about my size. It was growing way too close to the road. I said, "Dad, I think that tree is gonna get hit by a car. We should move it. It's not gonna make it there." So we dug up the sapling and moved it to the front yard. 35 years later, it's 40 feet tall. It's more than outgrown me. And what I noticed that day, it was dying. Not of natural causes. Half of the tree was gone. Being eaten by a parasite called the wooly adelgid, which I learned had been advancing up the coast of the US, eating our iconic hemlock forests from Virginia, advancing through Pennsylvania and New York, all the way up to Maine. Climate change is allowing the wooly adelgid to advance north. Not enough frost, not enough cold days. It just doesn’t get cold enough to kill off the bugs any more. Hemlocks are the forest. They're a keystone species, meaning, the rest of the forest depends on them. When I saw the tree, thoughts came rushing in. It dawned on me, that even though we could beat the fossil fuel industry in our own back yard, we might lose everything we love to climate change. 

[00:06:21] 
Just a few months later, New York City was about to get the same wake up call. 

SANDY

[00:07:52] 
New York City was not built to withstand a storm surge like the one resulting from Sandy. The storm surge overwhelmed the coastal areas, depositing yachts in the middle of streets, flooding houses. In Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay, the Atlantic Ocean had swamped everyone’s first floor. With keys to 7 or 8 houses along his block, the flatlands post commander for the American Legion, Mike Rodriguez, was coordinating demolition and rebuilding. 

Josh Fox: 
So this was 7 ft of water?

Mike Rodriguez:
On so many homes you can see the water lines, where the water went up.

JF:
Right.

MR:
Ok?

JF:
Was this an official evacuation area or not?

MR:
Ahh, truthfully no.

JF:
So people stayed here and rode it out…

MR:
People just couldn’t get away quick enough cause it came in so quickly.

[00:08:46] 
Hurricane Sandy was the largest storm ever to hit the east coast of the United States. It hit at high tide at midnight. Dark, cold, furious and wet. And when it blew the transformer in lower Manhattan, hundreds of thousands lost power. 

[radio transmission]

Breezy Point, a neighborhood of firemen and first responders, burned to the ground when Sandy ruptured gas lines. The firemen in that community who had rushed out to help the rest of New York couldn't do anything to stop it. 

JF:
It smells pretty bad huh? What is that sewage?

MR:
Well it’s sewage. In the beginning you could hear all the gurgling coming up from the bowls and sinks and everything. 

JF:
So water was actually coming up through the toilets?

MR:
It was comin’ up through the toilets.

JF:
It’s amazing to see sand like on top of the toilet seat.

MR:
Yeah.

[00:10:00] 
Mike Rodriguez was one of 10s of 1000s of people all across the coast sorting everything they had for the few odd possessions that had survived the floodwaters. 

MR:
This is the ugh… trap door to the basement.

JF:
So the water actually, whoa!

MR:
Pushed it right up.

JF:
What’s the refrigerator doing there? 

MR:
Yeah. I haven’t moved the refrigerator yet because I’m still waiting for the people to come and see it, because I got a warranty still on it. 

[Laughter]

JF:
So it’s warranted for getting thrown across the room like that?

MR:
Today it’s a year old. That’s what the candles are for, it’s birthday.

[00:10:34] 
One of the only things in Mike’s flooded house that somehow managed to escape unscathed was his Santa Claus costume.

MR:
If you look over here where the water line is and then you look at the buttons on the Santa suit… it’s dry. I mean there’s the hat, the ugh…

JF: 
There’s the wig and everything.

MR: 
The wig and everything.

JF:
It looks totally…

MR:
It look like it wasn’t even touched. I just bought that because I needed a new Santa suit to play Santa Claus I do it every year at ugh Saint Finbar’s, OK, for the kids with autism. So ugh, I said it’s one of those little miracles. 

Just after I left Mike’s house, I learned that on their block, water had rushed in so fast that it drowned a woman in her living room. 

Justin Wedes:
Oh the man that I was trying to have you film right there, John… that his wife drowned in that building, in that house.

JF:
Just now?

JW:
During the storm.

JF:
His wife drowned during the storm?

As a journalist, you always have that decision to make. That day I just didn't have the heart to walk up to a man grieving over his drowned wife and say, “Can I get your story on camera?” But the image stuck in my mind. The freezing near-November waters of the Atlantic Ocean rushing in, overtaking your front door, your windows, your furniture, and finally you. 

JF:
So this is not a normal landfill?

JW:
No this is a parking lot, this a beach and this is the parking lot for the beach.

[00:12:19] 
This is what the remains of a pocket of civilization looks like. Mattresses, sides of houses, each small pile representing a person or a family. A tiny sliver of the American dream, left on the scrap heap. In huge disarrayed heaps and every second more and more piled on. And down at the end of the ruined beach house, a tangle of lifeguard chairs that couldn't save a beach from drowning. 

[00:12:55] 
Everyone in this neighborhood told me I had to check in at the Action Center. A place that existed to address the other disaster that was happening in New York City: economic inequality and poverty. Even a month after the storm, lines for aid at the Action Center went around the block. And the calm and the center of both of these storms was Mrs. Aria Doe.

Aria Doe:
We knew if we weren’t here nobody else was coming and in this community 65% live 200?low poverty levels. So you have the inherent disease, you have the inherent drugs, you have the inherent crime that comes with poverty in living in a third world situation in an affluent country. So we knew nobody was coming. It’s typical. 

AD:
We have clothing, warm blankets, over here we have food packs. We must have given out 800 or 900 today I would assume. The response has been so overwhelming. There were Brooklyn moms who heard about the babies in wet diapers, two weeks later in wet beds. Frontline soldiers that are standing in the gaps between the have and have-nots, between the resource and services – and linking them up. We live in the United States and our citizens should not be lacking like this.

Bri Jackson:
Ok they supplied us with some water or food or clothing. But right now, besides that we need love, we need counseling, we need help unconditional. And it’s sad that we have to meet like this. 

JF:
I mean you can see the sand from the beach right here. 

BJ:
Right, look at the sand right there.

JF:
But this now beach-front property right here.

BJ:
Right, exactly!

JF:
There you go, you could charge more.

BJ:
Nice! 

[Laughter]

BJ:
And this right here, what you lookin’ at, this is part of the sand dune that was sittin’ on the beach for the birds, but now it’s in the park.
 
Look what Sandy did…

JF:
It just opened up…

BJ:
Yeah!

[00:14:52] 
Sandy had rearranged the elements of a boardwalk into a cubist abstraction of what a boardwalk would be. Picasso would have been proud. 

JF:
So if you had a message to take to people from here, what would it be?

BJ:
An old saying like Spike Lee, “Wake up.”

That was it for me. That was the moment I realized I couldn't go back home to escape into the woods. 

Gabriel Mayers:
I don’t know what to say. I feel lost and confused. I want someone to love but everyone’s being used. Man, I feel like a mess, like I always feel down. Just leave me alone, but I need someone around. I’m on my last legs, I need some sign of hope. Is it all just a waste? Is my life just a joke? When time and space collide, I hope I’m by your side. When time and space collide, I hope I’m by your side. 

BJ:
You know I met a very interesting guy, his name was Bill. He said we need to stop callin’ it Sandy. We need to call it Exxon and all the other gas companies that’s causing this ruckus right here. 

[00:17:40] 
Yeah, I know that guy Bill. 

BILL/ICELAND 

Bill McKibben:
I got to thinking how unfair it is to sort of name these things after harmless girls, you know every girl named Sandy in the New York metropolitan area is gonna spend the next ten years hearing bad jokes. Time to name them for the people who are causing them. We should go right through the alphabet finding every oil and coal and gas company cause it’s these guy’s carbon pouring into the atmosphere that are super charging these hurricanes. Sandy was the lowest barometric pressure ever recorded north of Cape Hatteras. It’s winds stretched further than any storm we’ve ever measured. We should call it what it is – Hurricane Exxon. And that way, the stories in the paper and on the news would sound just right… Exxon is coming ashore along the Jersey coast, destroying houses left and right. Exxon has smashed into lower Manhattan flooding the subway system. That’s how we should be thinking about these things. 


[00:18:38] 
I caught up with Bill at the most well-lit food court in the Capital. 

BM:
Here’s how to understand the basics. When you burn coal and gas and oil you put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and it’s molecular structure traps heat that would otherwise radiate back out to space. We’ve raised the temperature of the Earth one degree so far. That doesn’t sound like so much, 20 years ago we didn’t think it would be enough to really alter things, but we underestimated how finely balanced the planet’s physical systems were. One degree has been plenty to get everything frozen on Earth to start melting. It’s been enough to completely alter the way that water moves around this planet. The atmosphere is now about four percent wetter than it was 30, 40 years ago. That is an enormous change in a basic physical parameter of the planet. Once you’ve evaporated all that water up into the atmosphere, it’s gonna come down. And now it comes down in wet areas in deluge and downpour and flood. That’s probably the single biggest way you can tell that we’ve left behind the Holocene, this ten thousand year period of benign climatic stability that underwrote the rise of human civilization. And now we’re, you know, running into something else. This is a different planet. We’ve made it a different planet and we’re doin’ it really fast and it’s really dangerous. It’s terrible…

Police officer:
Cut the cameras. Cut the cameras. Not in here. Ok guys, you gotta leave. 

BM:
Why not?

Police officer:
You cannot…

BM:
Why not?

Police officer:
No taping here. 

BM:
Why not?

Police officer:
The food court closes. 

JF:
Because it looks like it’s open because all the lights are on…

BM:
We just walked right down without any…

Police officer:
My orders… this is closed.

BM:
So where would you like us to go?

Police officer:
Well, it’s a free country.

BM:
No, no but like down out of the food court…

JF:
It’s a free country except in the food court in the Ronald Reagan building. 

BM:
I spent a lot of time around the world including in places like the Antarctic, in Tibet, on the great lava fields of Iceland, in the places that remind you that we actually live on a planet. I guess I have a stronger sense than I used to of the fragility of the whole operation.

[00:21:18]
At the top of the world, if you get on the right road, it’ll dead end straight into a glacier. Huge amounts of water are stored in glaciers and the warming of the earth is fundamentally changing the way water moves and behaves around the planet. These tiny little rivulets, tiny little streams. The ice melting, running through cracks, making their way down to the edge of the glacier. I guess every tidal wave starts with one drop. You can almost feel the tide building. Because of weather patterns and patterns of pollution, the poles are actually warming faster, and although the global average temperature has been raised by one degree Celsius, Alaska's temperature has increased by more than three degrees in the last half century. Glaciers are melting at staggering rates. Some of them losing up to one kilometer of thickness. Iceland, Greenland, Antarctica, Alaska, the poles of the Earth warming faster than they have in 10,000 years. The arctic ice cap has shrunk to the lowest level ever recorded. And scientists monitoring the meltdown say that acceleration could be catastrophic in terms of sea level rise. And if it doesn't stop, the potential to wreak havoc across the planet starts here, at the top. Where the ice is. 
You wonder, how fast is this happening? How much time do we have left?

OVERWHELMED

[00:23:06]
In Copenhagen, in 2009, the world was supposed to come together and solve the problem at the international climate conference called COP, the Conference of the Parties. But that's not what happened. Talks devolved, nations fought, no one could decide what to do. The one thing that they did decide was that we were going to try as a world to keep climate change to two degrees Celsius. But there was no binding agreement about curtailing emissions. Then I learned something startling. The carbon dioxide that's in the atmosphere now will continue to warm the Earth for the next several decades, no matter what we do. 

Michael Mann:
We’ve already warmed the climate by about a degree Celsius. We probably have another half a degree Celsius in the pipeline already. We’ve put enough heat into the oceans, we’ve put enough greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and if you add that up that’s half a degree that’s committed, plus one degree that’s already happened, that’s one and a half degrees Celsius out of two degrees. 

[00:24:10]
At two degrees warming, sea level will rise between five and nine meters. Most of the world’s populations, most of the world's cities are on coastlines. Here’s what New York City looks like at 7 meters of global sea level rise. We lose the harbor in San Francisco and the Central Valley becomes an inland sea. Here’s Boston. Philadelphia. Washington D.C. Here's Florida. Shanghai. The list goes on and on. An Earth that warms by 2 degrees would force everyone who lives on coastlines to move. Where are all those people going to go?

Lester Brown:
As environmentalists, we’ve been talking for decades now about saving the planet. But as I think about it, the planet’s probably gonna be around for some time. What, what’s at stake now is, is civilization itself. I don’t think civilization can survive the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and the associated rise in sea level. I mean, we’d be looking at hundred of millions of rising sea refugees. The east coast of the United States would be very vulnerable to even a 3 foot rise sea level. But it’s not just the initial rise itself, but the realization that if that happens that’s only the beginning. Greenland and the west Antarctic together, it’s about 39 feet. So we’d have a world where the land base would be shrinking and the population presumably still growing and enormous stresses on systems as millions of rising sea refugees cross national boundaries, creates unimaginable stresses. 

Van Jones:
The big polluters are already putting your bodies on the line. You have a bunch of money interests, who have a big monetary stake in the status quo. They don’t care that the status quo is an airplane pointed straight down and accelerating. It’s their airplane. And they don’t want anybody to bail out of it. The big polluters who are selling you carbon based fuel only want one thing. Everything. 
    
[00:26:34]
I also learned that two degrees is not just a limit, it's an average. 

Petra Tschakert:
It’s an average, right? But it combines the temperature data we have from thousands of stations for a year. Desmond Tutu said for Africa a 2 degree target means 3 degrees warming, 3.5, 4 degrees warming. And he says if you agree to 2 degrees you agree to cooking our continent. In daily temperatures of 45, 48 degrees Celsius agricultural life in a rural community would cease. 

MM:
My worst fear is that we’ve seen the veritable tip of the iceberg. The unprecedented drought we’re seeing in California is likely symptomatic of far worse drought over an exceedingly larger part of the world. We are seeing more intense hurricanes driven by warmer ocean temperatures. Superstorm Sandy is a harbinger of what’s to come. 

[00:27:30]
We'd be looking at increased extreme weather, like the swarms of tornadoes that hit the midwest in 2011. Or the polar vortex, the circle of arctic air that spun out of control in 2014 and 2015 creating record snowfalls in Boston and New York. And these were not the only effects that were happening right now. Coral reefs experienced the worst bleaching incident in history. One step on the way to death. The cause? A warming ocean.

MM:
We’re literally seeing the loss of habitats, the migration of habitats at a rate that these species just can’t keep up with. 

Elizabeth Kolbert:
Species are moving towards the poles or if they live on mountain sides they’re moving up the mountains to try and stay in the envelopes of their thermal tolerance. If you look at endangerment rates… how many mammals are considered endangered it’s about a quarter and if you look at rate in which…

JF:
A quarter of all mammals are considered endangered right now?

EK:
Yes. Yes. 

[00:28:26]
And that Australia has invented new colors for their weather map because it never been that hot before. 

PT:
Lots of projections on crops. We can only imagine food insecurity skyrocketing. 

The failure of the Russian grain harvest, or the failure of the Texas winter wheat harvest, or the worst flooding in history in Pakistan, Australia, Texas, Vermont, Turkey, or the worst droughts in history in the Middle East. Syria experienced its worst drought ever. Five years of no rain. And when farmers protested the uneven distribution of aid, the authoritarian Assad regime put many of them in prison, setting off the Syrian civil war. The world’s first climate change civil war. And now Syrians and mid-east refugees swarming across European boundaries. 

MM:
Four star generals are telling us that climate change is our greatest potential national security threat. 

[00:29:20]
And I learned that in 2011 the US House of Representatives voted 240 to 184, defeating a resolution that simply said, “Climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for public health and welfare.” That's it, just an acknowledgement of the science. And that the fossil fuel giants, the Koch brothers, plan to spend nearly 1 billion dollars in the 2016 presidential election. Maybe that's why every single Republican candidate denies the fossil fuel connection to climate change. And all of this is happening in plain sight. There are thousands of climate scientists and climate analysts, and political analysts who know this beyond a shadow of a doubt. But even today science and politics are at odds. In Paris at COP 21 in 2015, 200 nations came together and signed an unprecedented climate deal. But the emissions targets set in Paris are no where near enough. They still set the world on track to warm by 3.5 degrees. Prompting some scientists and analysts to say that Paris was actually a step backwards from the 2 degree target set in Copenhagen.   Especially dire considering that Lester Brown said: 

LB:
If we want to save the Greenland ice sheet, then you’re looking at an 80% cut by 2020.

[00:30:37]
2020—to stave off the melting of the Greenland ice sheet. How are we going to reduce emissions by 80% when what’s actually happening is we are increasing emissions and the fossil fuel industry right now is expanding? With hundreds of gas fired power plants and thousands of miles of fracked gas pipelines proposed and an expansion of off shore drilling in the United States. Power plants all over the world being built every day that will be burning fossil fuels well into the 2050s. And in fact a 2015 study from the University of Florida tells us based on current CO2 levels in the atmosphere we’re in for a 5 to 9 meter sea level rise no matter what. Overwhelmed. Overwhelmed. Overwhelmed.
And that right now projections indicate…

MM:
We don’t stop at 2 degrees, we sail right past it on our way to 3, 4, 5 degrees Celsius.

EK
It’s often said we are running a global experiment for which we have no control.

PT:
70,000 people died in Europe because of the heat wave under a 0.8 degree warming. 

And we will hit 2 degrees of warming by 2036.

MM:
Yeah.

JF:
I mean how, how do we…

[00:31:47]
And that many analysts say the window to keeping us at two degrees in terms of curtailing emissions closes in 2017. Overwhelmed. Overwhelmed. And it wasn't just fossil fuel emissions. 

MM:
And that’s where things get really tricky…

20-50 percent of climate change causing emissions were coming from the food sector. 

MM:
Methane’s even more potent a heat absorber than we thought before. 

Americans eat 9 ounces of meat per person, per day. That's unprecedented in human history. In other worlds, a major overhaul of every human system: politics, food, energy, transportation, media, and all in the next 3 to 4 years. I don't know about you, but I'm about ready to watch a few cat videos right now.

[Laughter]

MM:
And you have ocean acidification. The same CO2 we’re putting into the atmosphere is seeping into the oceans and acidifying them and literally dissolving creatures like shellfish that make calcium carbonate skeletons.

EK:
The oceans are now 30% more acidic than they were at the start of the industrial revolution. If you talk to marine scientists, the ramifications are potentially, you know, the list is almost endless. 

At two degrees warming, 30 to 50 percent of all the species on the planet would go extinct. 
Overwhelmed. Can't think.
And that right now, the forecast for the forests of the American West and the Grand Tetons in Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Utah, Montana, that we were watching these ecosystems collapse under the weight of climate change. Different invasive species of beetles were overwintering. The American West didn’t have that stretch of cold weather anymore. And that the beetles had chomped 83 million acres. And it was supplying an enormous amount of fuel for the worst wildfires raging in American history that had never been that hot and had never been that dry. 

MM:
Sometimes when I talk about climate change when I give a public lecture, I will show the four horsemen of the apocalypse to the audience and the reason I do that is that each of the horsemen make an appearance in the impact of climate change. War because of increased competition for diminishing resources. Famine, especially in tropical regions. Then you have human health. Increased spread of tropical diseases into higher latitude regions, the absence of a killing frost, umm, will allow many tropical diseases like malaria, dengue, ugh, fever to…

[00:34:30]
That’s when I realized, I was beginning to think it was too late. Too late for the coastlines. Too late for New York City. Just. Too. Late. 

MM:
So, yeah whether its…

JF:
Which horseman is that?

MM:
That’s, that’s, that’s ugh… pestilence and, and, and, and death. Pestilence and death. Yeah.

[00:35:13]    
I just couldn't do it anymore. I just felt like giving up. Walking away. Burying my head in the snow that was falling all around me. It was just too much. I felt like letting it all just float away. Quitting this mission. Becoming just another dot on the landscape. Insignificant. Unable to do anything. Just. Let it. All. Go. All those greenhouse gasses hanging there. Like a century of human regret. I would love for this to be the part of the movie where I say, “Everything's going to be OK.” I can't do that. Here's what we know: the fires, the droughts, the floods, the hurricanes, the tornadoes, they'll get worse. We'll lose our coastal cities. Most of our forests. We'll lose 30-50 percent of the species on the planet. That's a lot of goodbyes. How do you even begin to grieve. I felt like I'd eaten from the tree of knowledge, and there was no going back. But somehow your mind forms a question. Those are all the things that climate change will destroy. What are the things that climate change can't destroy? What are those parts of us that are so deep that no storm can take them away? I needed to find the people who'd found this place. This place of despair, and who'd gotten back up. I needed to find the people who had no choice. What are the things that climate change can’t destroy? The moment you surrender, I really think that’s the moment when you change. But that’s also the moment you find the revolution inside.

AMAZON

[00:39:05]
JF:
Into the jungle. This is like paddling through a corn field. You know, it’s like the Amazon is made of salad, it’s like a salad. Look at that tiny little frog, oh my god. Look at that spider… Oh my god look at the size of that tree! Whoa, look at that tree. Is that a tree? What the fuck is that? Que es esto?

Guide:
Esto es huevo de Churro.

JF:
Huevo de Churro.

Guide:
De Churro.

JF:
Eggs of the Churro. 

Guide:
Ah huh, así pone.

JF:
What’s a Churro?

[bird call/animal sound]

JF:
What is that sound? 
The tree is so weird… It landed right there look at that. Oh wow, that’s a huge cricket. That’s the biggest cricket I’ve ever seen in my life. Biting wasps that don’t let go? Oh… Monkeys? Where? Jungle rat on your back, hmm… 

Miguel:
Not anymore.

JF:
Not anymore, ok, well as long as it’s gone now.

The Amazon River is the longest river in the entire world, running more that 4,000 miles. But the Amazon is not just a river, it's a whole ecosystem. The Amazon Rainforest regulates the climate. It's the lungs of the world. It’s the most biodiverse place on the face of the Earth. Thousands of species of trees that are not found anywhere else. Animals, insects, everything imaginable. It's raw creation. 

We think of the Amazon as the purest place on Earth, but at the headwaters in Peru and Ecuador are hundred of thousands of acres parceled out for oil drilling. With 40 year old pipelines, spills happen all the time. Latin America is also the most dangerous place in the world to be an environmentalist. With hundreds of human rights and environmental defenders being murdered in the past several years. In spite of the dangers, these indigenous environmental monitors were desperate to get the word out.

[00:41:26]
We were investigating two routine spills, not major headline events, things that happen all the time, but devastating none-the-less. We were told that it was an 11 kilometer trek into the jungle just to find the spill. We got up at 4 in the morning, get in canoes, paddled by hand across the Marañon.

Ander Mozombite:
We are in a lake that belongs to the San Pedro community. Lake Carachama. We are going towards the pipeline. Towards where the Norperuano pipeline burst. 

JF:
He seems to know every single little stream and little place to go in, like did he just discover this as a child? Does he have a map of it in his head? How does it work?

AM:
Well, it’s our territory. It’s the same as with people living in big cities. They know their city well and don’t get lost. We, as indigenous people, know our territory very well because it is ours. We don’t need a compass or GPS. We are accustomed to this. It is our space, our world. We are born and raised here. In this jungle we find what you buy at the hardware store. It is our market, our school. 

[00:42:51]
Ander and his team of indigenous environmental monitors work for free. They were offered to be paid by the government but said no because they didn't want the potential influence and corruption that could come of it. They were there to protect their church, their cathedral, their high school, their hardware store, their source of food. 

AM:
They started extracting oil from our territory, from Cucama, and from other indigenous territories like Pastaza, Corrientes, Tigre, and the Marañon, exactly 43 years ago. Companies and the state gave away oil concessions in our territories and in other indigenous territories, always under the banner of oil as development. “With oil, Peru and you will develop.” “Your quality of life will improve.” The state comes in and imposes Western knowledge on us leaving our customs aside. Like our knowledge of medicinal plants and our native tongue. So we wonder where the development that state promised is. Our conditions are worse. Before the oil companies came in our ancestors ate healthy fish. They weren’t at risk of getting sick. Now we eat our fish and get sick. For us, oil means death, destruction of the Amazon, and the squashing of our rights as indigenous peoples. 

[00:44:31]
Going with these guys in hand carved canoes with hand carved paddles 4 or 5 kilometers deep into the jungle just to hit the trailhead, paddling through this mystery, silently, quietly, it’s the stuff that happens to you in your dreams. Watched a guy at age 65 after paddling 6 hours pulling his canoe through the brush in 2 feet of water. These guys do this every day spill after spill and they never seem to get tired. That’s how badly they want the story out. So we got to the trailhead after paddling 5 or 6 hours through this amazing sunken forest. After another hour or two of wading through this soaked underwater trail, we finally emerged at high ground. We were getting close, we saw this ominous sign: a worker's latex uniform on a cross. Ghostly and ghastly. And then of course, as we got nearer to the spill, the smell of petroleum.

AM:
This is all crude oil. It spans about 2 km. It keeps spreading. And if Petroperu continues at this pace the oil will keep spreading. And our brothers in the San Pedro community are the ones affected. All this water leads to their lakes. The lake we went through. They are very big lakes and those fish have been polluted. People go fishing, they eat and they get sick. They get diarrhea, vomiting and stomach aches. You can see they are working without protective gear. Their cloths are stained with oil. They should have protective gear. Because we know it’s bad for skin to be in direct contact with crude oil. However, their cloths are covered in crude oil. 
 
[00:46:53]
These guys were trying to pick up thousands of gallons of oil with buckets and rubber gloves day after day, inhaling the volatile organic compounds, getting sick, and then a new group of workers would come in. Doing this in Wellingtons and jeans. That the company cared that little about giving its workers safety equipment, you can imagine how little they cared about destroying the rainforest itself. That a 40 year old pipeline is going to rupture and going to spill, is a foregone conclusion. At that point you can't even really call it a spill. A spill is something that happens by accident. You're reaching for the corn and you knock your glass of milk off over the table. There's a big difference between accidents and negligence.
 
[00:47:50]
Besides oil drilling, another huge threat to the Amazon is deforestation. Companies will come in, buy parcels of land, say that they're going to do something relatively innocuous, and then clearcut the hell out of the forest. Again, we had to come in the back way. 

Ausberto Jaba:
It’s not too far. We’re about 15, 10 minutes away. 

[00:48:21]
Under the canopy of trees, it's cool. The sun doesn't break through, except in small spots. One more time, bushwhacking through the most biodiverse forest on the face of the Earth. A kind of beauty that you can't possibly describe. 

AJ:
This is a road people used to take to collect branches for their houses. They would also take it to go hunting. To eat. Pacas, possums, deer, javelinas, white-lipped peccaries. In a couple minutes we’ll reach the deforested zone. You don’t see animals there anymore. They’ve destroyed our lumber, our medicinal plants, our leaves, wood for our houses. The company destroyed it all. Let’s keep walking. 

[00:49:22]
He said it was a 15 minute walk to the edge of the forest. Of course, an hour and a half later, we got there and sent up the drone.

[00:50:00]
It's beginning to be a habit of mine to go to some of the most beautiful places on Earth, be completely awestruck in their majesty, and then arrive at the location where they're currently being destroyed. Only millennia after millennia could develop this type of richness. And then you arrive at what man is doing. This culture. Which is inevitably to destroy that incredible, intoxicating beauty. 

AJ:
If we let them invade us, the company will take over our land if we don’t reclaim our rights. Because they have enough money to buy the conscience off of the authorities. Not us. We’re of humble means. We’re humble farmers who work and live off the land. 

[00:51:10]
Deforestation accelerates climate change because forests breathe in and contain the carbon that we exhale through our bodies, through our factories, through our cars, and through our industrial processes. The technical term for it is a carbon sink. I think about it as the body of the forest. Carbon makes up the trees. It's a synchronicity and balance that the planet Earth achieved. People and animals exhale carbon dioxide. Trees inhale carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen. When you cut down the forest, you get less oxygen and you get more carbon dioxide. Protecting the Amazon from deforestation and oil drilling has got to be at the top of any climate list. 

JF:
I can’t, I can’t believe how much like home this feels like. It’s really amazing. 

[00:52:28]
The Sarayaku River reminded me so much of the Delaware. An old, winding, brown river that really wasn't all that deep. And just like on the Delaware, the tribes on the Sarayaku had defeated the oil and gas industry. A representative of the next generation in Sarayaku, Nina Gualinga, was becoming internationally recognized as a voice on climate. 

Nina Gualinga:
Sometimes I come here in the night and I lay down and the sky is just full, full, full of stars. 

JF:
This is the town that fought the oil industry and won. 

NG:
Yeah, this is it. I might have been 7 or 8 years old, something like that. And they came here to negotiate with our leaders but especially the women, they said no. When we said no, they backed up the oil companies with military forces. 

JF:
Wow.

NG:
And I think when the government sent the military troops here they thought, like ok so, Sarayaku, the middle of nowhere, nobody knows who they are, they’re just like around a thousand people and nobody will care. But I mean, we were smarter than that. My uncle had his video camera and he taped what was going on and suddenly everybody knew what was going on here. 

Woman’s voice:
What are you doing here? Go and do your work on your own lands, if you have them! You should respect the fact that this is our land! Get out of here!

[00:54:08]
Can you imagine running up to a military helicopter and confronting them, saying, “what are you doing here? We don't want you here.” But that was the strength of the movement in Sarayaku.

Eriberto Gualinga:
I am the person Sarayaku designated to document all the stories, the struggles, the testimonials, the resistance, the message that Sarayaku wants to send to the people in the cities. 

Because I knew how important this was for the struggle of Indigenous peoples. So I took my camera and started to record what was going on. 

JF:
Is that an umbrella?

NG:
That’s for your camera. 

[Laughter]

JF:
Great. Here you go. 

[00:54:57]
Sarayaku is hundreds of miles into the jungle and they have a documentary edit bay and internet hookup run by solar panels. Impressive. 

Press conference:
Good morning everybody and thank you for coming to this press conference. 

We’re going to set out the whole issue of free, prior and informed consent… and that we have the power to say ‘No!’

Franco Gualinga:
We didn’t take arms to defend ourselves. Instead we used the media and the law. That is how we made it into the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and won the case against the Ecuadorian state. This is important for us, because… The fight has to be creative. Fighting with music, culture and dance. 

Press conference:
We’ve come from our distant lands in Sarayaku, from the River of Maize. We’re descended from the jaguar, children of the Amazanga Runa, sons and daughters of the People of the Midday. 

FG:
Our natural territory wasn’t the only one under threat – our spiritual territory was, too. Our cultural, emotional and psychological territory.  

EG:
If we allow ourselves to be consumed by the city we will see the jungle only as a source of income. This tree is money. We have to sell this tree. Or the wood or the animals are just part of the economy. But we see it as part of ourselves, as our life. 


Huayna Kapac:
The plants and trees and the rainforest have spirits. The forest has a soul, and the oil companies would destroy that spirit and soul. 

[00:56:53]
They had the basic spiritual belief that everything alive has a spirit. That everything from the yucca plant to the jaguars to the parrots to the trees to the parasites, everything was to be respected. Everything was to be honored. 

EG:
The oil companies say we are poor. We are poor and we should have other form of development. We should have cars and all the luxuries they have in the city. But for us, territory is enough. I am a poor man with 135,000 acres of land. That land will supply. I can hunt, fish and roam freely. Without stress and worry. With freedom. We think we are rich, at a spiritual level. 

[00:57:51]
The tribes in Sarayku had actually created a new section of international law—an important legal precedent for indigenous people everywhere. 

TIM DeCHRISTOPHER

[00:58:03]
There’s a bold tactic, a tradition really, that people have used in desperate times to make a difference. And although he didn’t plan on it, Tim DeChristopher in Utah felt he had no choice. 

RT News:
The Bush administration’s Bureau of Land Management rushed to do one last favor for their friends in the oil and gas industry. And they held an auction to sell oil and gas drilling rights on thousands of acres of federal land. Now, sights were located in fragile ecosystems near breathtaking scenery like a parcel of land near Arches and Canyonlands National Parks in Utah.

Amy Goodman:
Many environmental groups launched campaigns to oppose the sale of the land. Twenty-seven year old Tim DeChristopher posed as a potential bidder and bid hundreds of thousands of dollars on parcels of the land driving up prices and winning some 22,000 acres to block the sale by disrupting the auction itself.    

[00:58:55]
And although the Obama administration eventually threw out the auction, finding the whole proceedings illegal, they still prosecuted and convicted Tim DeChristopher for violating a federal oil and gas law. 

Tim DeChristopher:
It wasn’t especially premeditated. I got in there and saw the opportunity to make the difference and then realized that, that seeing that opportunity I couldn’t ethically justify not taking it.   

[00:59:20]
He took us to the parcels of land he defended just weeks before his sentencing. 

TD:
This area is all the parcels that I’ve won. 

JF:
You won how many?

TD:
I won 22.

JF:
Oh 22 thousand acres?

TD:
Yeah, 22 thousand acres. 

JF:
And these are still now protected?

TD:
Yeah, I mean as protected as most federal land is, which is not all that protected. 
The shift occurred for me that it wasn’t about environmental issues anymore but it was about where we were headed and what that really meant in human terms. I mean so much of it was often discussed in rather sterile scientific terms and not many people were talking about it in terms of the actual human impact, the social impact of what that looked like for our society, what that looked like when there are cities underwater and millions of refugees streaming inland. And getting to that point where if you’re going to have enough to eat it means someone else not having enough to eat. Survival actually meant surviving at someone else’s expense. 

JF:
In terms of a solution, clearly there is this idea of renewable energy. But that doesn’t take into account any kind of structural approach.

TD:
Solar, wind, geothermal – those can actually produce enough energy to meet our energy needs, but there’s no renewable energy technology, there’s no energy source we’ve ever discovered that can produce enough energy, to produce enough material goods to meet our emotional needs. What I’m trying to say is that you can’t divorce energy from the rest of the system, the rest of the model. Energy production is not separate from social issues, from the way that we seek happiness in our culture. From our economic system. It’s not an isolated issue from our political system, or our corporate structure. When we’re looking at those solutions of renewable energy, ugh, we need to understand that we need more than just a shift in energy, we need a shift in that entire model that’s interconnected. Our old model of trying to meet all of our emotional needs with consumer goods, hasn’t made us happy anyway, it hasn’t worked. There’s a lot of ways in which, umm, a collapse can be a step forward for us – of saying ohh, maybe greed and competition weren’t the best values to be basing our society off of. It can be that opportunity to refocus. Because in this period of being too late to stop climate change we’re going to be navigating through the most intense period of change that humanity has ever seen and it means it’s a bigger fight than before. 
I stopped trying to avoid despair and then I even stopped trying to get through despair and I just picked it up and carried it with me everywhere that I go. And just realized I had to make a place in my heart for despair and keep doing the work. One way of looking at is that carrying around a heavy weight is a burden in tranquil times, but in turbulent and stormy times that heavy weight is an anchor and that big rock that you carry around can be what prevents you from getting swept away. 

[01:02:39]
Just after this interview, Tim was sentenced to two years in federal prison. They took him straight out of the courtroom and locked him up on the day of his sentencing. Didn't even have time to clean up his apartment. 

AUSTRALIA

[01:02:53]
Across the world, Australia had basically committed to taking a chunk out of its continent in the form of coal and shipping it out to Asia to be burned in rapidly developing economies of China and South East Asia. Once burned, the carbon from these mines flooding the atmosphere threatens to warm oceans, raise sea levels and flood dozens of low-lying Pacific Island nations. Places like Vanuatu, Samoa, the Solomon Islands, the Marshall Islands, Fiji, Tuvalu. Some of these nations are atolls, islands only a few meters above sea level. An unprecedented gathering of fighters from 12 Pacific Island nations, the Pacific Climate Warriors were formed. 

Can a person stop a wave? Could you stand on the shore and stop a wave from crashing? Can you imagine growing up on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, blue water, fish, sun, beautiful. Some place that a lot of people would think about as a kind of paradise. But the imagine that one day the waves that used to gently lap at the shoreline started to get more ferocious, creeping up further and further inland ‘til they reached the front of your house. ‘Til they sink the whole of your island paradise. 

Thousands of Pacific Islanders have already had to vacate their home islands due to salt water intrusion and sea level rise. The Pacific Climate Warriors decided to fight back against Australian coal, blockading the largest coal export facility in the world, the Port of Newcastle. Where hundreds of thousands of tons of coal are shipped out every single day. 

Milan Loeak:
The Marshall Islands is barely 3 meters above sea level, yeah. We’re very exposed to climate change and when the floods come, we really don’t have anywhere else to go. It’s much like Tuvalu, Kiribati, the Maldives…

JF:
So you’re worried that you’re going under first?

ML:
Yeah. 

With hand carved traditional canoes, they were set to paddle out into the channel of New Castle to try to blockade and stop coal ships that were the size of the Empire State Building. 

JF:
Have you commanded a boat like this before?

Isso Nihmei:
Yeah, I’m the captain of this, ugh the ugh, we call it a purdu. Which is the ??

JF:
It’s amazing huh? 

IN:
Yeah.

JF:
How many people can fit in it?

IN:
Ugh, yeah 10 people can fit inside, but if you have like skinny, skinny people they can fit like more than 10 people, 15 people…

JF:
Ten but more than 10 if they’re skinny?

IN:
We lost most of the coast areas…

JF:
You lost most of the coast already?

IN:
Yeah, yeah. The coastal erosion is just devastating, just really fast. The Pacific Islanders are for renewable energy and this will really show a clear picture, and a really clear message to Australia, which is our neighboring country. 

Mika Maiava:
We fight for our survival. With what is going on here in the coal industry. Then how can this government or these people say that it’s not real and continue to expand coal industry? You know, that’s just selfish. Our values, our cultural values is one of the reasons we are in this fight. Everybody’s equal, so we care for everybody. Just before I came here, my brother went fishing. Because of the value and our principles he has to bring that fish to the village to be distributed to everybody. So everybody cares for each one. 

Pacific Climate Warriors:
We are not drowning! We are fighting!
We are not drowning! We are fighting!
We are not drowning! We are fighting!

Before I say anything else about this sequence, you should probably know that the downside of what we were about to do was, you know, this is the short list: drowning, arrest, run over by boats, all kinds of sharks, jellyfish, getting punched, sea creatures, drifting away in currents out to the Pacific Ocean, cultural disrespect, big waves, well, you get the idea. I'll just say that this was the closest I've ever been to feeling like I was in that last scene in Star Wars. We didn't know what would happen when a massive coal tanker entered the port to be greeted by seven hand-carved canoes from the Pacific Island nations and by dozens of Australian kayaking protesters flooding the channel. Nothing like this had ever happened before. Tiny canoes like little X-wing Fighters up against the Death Star. Australian police swarming in jet skis intentionally trying to capsize boaters. The first confrontation was upon us. A huge coal ship was leaving port.

JF:
I mean this is amazing… this has actually worked. They’ve actually stopped the coal ship. 

I can't really describe the feeling of watching people in hand-carved canoes threaten to be sucked under by giant tugboats pulling these ships out to sea. It was true bravery. 

Protester:
We are not drowning! We are fighting!

IN:
We are not drowning! We are fighting!
We are not drowning! We are fighting!

This is where the protest tipped out of the symbolic and into something actual. This was the fight. This was how you stop a wave from crashing and destroying your home. Pulling your family out to sea. This was how you do it. 

[Singing]

JF:
This is one hell of a thing to stare down a coal ship like this. Holy moly. Whoa.

This kind of confrontation had never happened before. Of course, the Australian police didn't wait long.

JF:
Oh man they took his canoe in the boat. Unbelievable. The cops are reaching into the boats. That was actually a fight. 

[01:09:49]
When they opened up for Westerns to get into the Vanuatu canoe, the people who jumped on board were me, a 92-year old World War II veteran named Bill, a woman and her dog and a 15-year old Aboriginal girl. I should point out at this moment that my camera is not at all waterproof. A flotilla of 50 or 60 Australia kayaks surrounded one of the police boats, while the Vanuatu canoe that I was on was over to the left. We were being held in place by a big black police skiff. The waves rocking us back and forth. All of a sudden, a few kayakers broke off and tried to make a run for it. They got out pretty far, causing the Australian Coast Guard to loop around and create a monster wake. A big wave. When the wave hit us we tipped side to side. Not a problem. But it caused the police boat to tip as well, coming down on the pontoon side of the Vanuatu canoe. I think everybody on the canoe said, “oh shit,” at the same time. 

Woman’s voice:
Oh shit.

JF:
Oh shit.

For a second I thought, “oh, maybe we don't actually need that pontoon,” because we rocked once and we rocked twice, and we rocked a third time, and I realized, “no, we're going in the drink. We're going where all those many kinds of sharks are under the water.”

[clock ticking]

This is the kind of thing that seems to happen in virtual slow motion. So I can't tell you at what point in time I recognized that there was someone who'd already been arrested on the police boat yelling my name, but it was somewhere between the last rock and the moment I hit the water that I realized I could probably throw my camera to him 15 feet in the air. 'Cause that was really the only choice. So I threw it and then went under. When I looked up, I was kind of amazed to realize that not only had the police's captive actually caught the camera, but was continuing to film as all of us, including the 92-year old World War II veteran named Bill were paddling, trying to catch one floating thing or another. 

Police officer:
Mate! Give us a hand and put the friggin’ camera down!

[01:12:21]
The mothership had broken into two pieces, was filling with water and would have to be towed back onto land by the police while its inhabitants were crying on board. Of course I didn’t see any of this because I had been picked up out of the water by the Greenpeace boat, literally lifted up by my life jacket and pushed on board. This was not our finest hour. Weeping over a broken ship and a coal barge with thousands of tons of coal leaving port. 

MM:
Stay calm and stay strong! Stay calm and stay strong!

But what was amazing was that within about 15 minutes, everyone had stopped crying, got out their screw guns and their ropes, repaired the Vanuatu canoe, and put it back on the water. 

MM:
Put some music on!

[Cheering]

MM:
You need to win from within, so that even if the people look like, look at you like you’re losing.
You are not losing because you already won in your heart. You know, by that hoping that, that message or that energy that you give out will change somebody else’s heart. Like what we are doing here is a statement, is a very powerful statement that we say we stand as Pacific Islands in solidarity.

[Call and response singing] 

No other coal ships left port that day. A huge victory. Ten coal ships decided not to jump into the fray. 578 thousand tons of coal was stopped from leaving port, at least for one day, by the Pacific Climate Warriors, who were not drowning, who were fighting. 

CHINA

[01:14:58]
In Beijing you could stare straight at the sun, a pale thin yellowish disc that bears no threat to your retina. Layer upon layer of particulate matter and smog shielding my eyes from the brightness. I originally thought we were landing in China on a cloudy day. You know, one of those overcast grey days, like it might rain, but then I was told, “no, this isn't weather, this is pollution.”

Local Resident:
This is an okay day.

JF:
This isn’t even a bad day, you’re saying? This is just a regular old day. These are nice buildings it would be nice to be able to see them. So inside the air is filtered? Oh wow. 

Every apartment, every car had an air filter that filtered out something called PM 2.5. Particulate matter that was 2.5 microns. Small enough to be inhaled, passed through your lungs and enter your bloodstream. And in Shanghai, Beijing, and many other places throughout China, people would get up, look at the app on their phone and check the PM 2.5 count. Just like you were checking the weather. 

LR:
They told me we have 50 today. So that’s actually really good.

JF:
Fifty is good… what’s bad?

LR:
I mean in the United States it’s probably 10 everyday.

JF:
Ten. Ok.

[01:16:28]
The pollution all around us, where did it come from? Burning coal to supply power for factories and construction. Everywhere we went, construction, construction, construction. I've never seen so many cranes in my life. Looked like places they were building entire cities from nothing. And they were. China is building the equivalent of one Philadelphia sized city every month. And for some reason, the Chinese didn’t build individual apartment buildings, they built the same building over and over and over again next to each other. Building complexes of 60 buildings that were all the same. And the same went for trees. Deforested areas in China, replanted as monocrop. One tree in rows, cloned, ad infinitum. And I realized, Beijing was a city of 20 million people and none of them opened their windows. 

JF:
Someone’s back roof. Oh my god what a crazy sight. So, do you do this often? Like, get on top of rooftops? What’s the PM now?

LR:
241.

JF:
241?

LR:
Look here…

JF:
It’s got a little symbol that says don’t fuck with this.

LR:
People are posting comments. Look here, it’s emotions of –

JF:
An emoticon with people with a mask?

LR:
Yeah. People crying. It’s really bad. It’s so bad you can’t open windows. You can only use air conditioners; it’s like a circle. 

JF:
It’s a cycle, yeah. Because the more air conditioning used, the most power you’re using, the more you’re burning coal. The coal is burned, the more you can’t open your window. 

LR:
People don’t use bicycles, right? People drive cars. I go to the supermarket, I drive a car, even though it’s walking distance. I don’t want to be outside, in this air. 

Implications for people's health and children's health were off the charts. Air pollution is killing about 1.6 million people every year in China, or nearly 4,400 people every day. That's ten 747s crashing every single day. 

JF:    
Oh my god. Is this for real?

LR:
No man’s land, that’s why people bury their dead here, right? Next to the power plant. 

JF:
I just can’t believe this. Can you imagine coming to visit your loved ones here in this place? Someone is coming here. There are new flowers. Do you smell that? It smells terrible… 

Something really awful happens to a person in a place where there is this much bad air. If you can't trust the air you breathe, it alters your internal approach to everything. You don't want to touch things, or people. You don't sleep well. You don't feel confident in the words you speak. There's no joy. No enjoyment. No urge to dance, to sing. Joy requires deep breaths. So does laughter. So does singing. There's no freedom possible without a clean environment. That's clear here. Pollution is oppressive in the most basic sense. The air holds you down. So there's part of you perpetually gasping for breath. And the car charges forth to the next interview to the next location. Just past another cooling tower, another smoke stack. Windows never rolled down, no breeze ever in a city that never opens its windows. 

JF:
That’s him?

[01:20:51]
I had heard about WuDi, a renegade artist, presenting the pollution problem in China in shocking an innovative ways. 

WuDi:
All the characters in my photographs are real. That is, the people in the photos and all the characters themselves are real. This is a pregnant mother of 5 months. For the sake of her baby’s health she went out to Xinjiang to deliver her child and up until now, hasn’t come back because of the Beijing air. I do this to try to change China’s ecological policies, and make more regulations. The pollution started since we became industrialized. Actually, it’s the result of consumer behaviors. China has long been known as the co-called factory of the world. 

JF:
Maybe we should take these photographs to Walmart, you know, and make a huge one outside of Walmart. 

WuDi:
That’s a good idea. The purchaser like Walmart and the consumer would know that excessive consumption created this pollution. 

[01:22:00]
A big chunk of China's energy use belongs to the world. Belongs to the consumer. Belongs to the person buying the thing that they bought this year and that they're going to throw away in 6 months. I don't feel like these are Chinese factories. I mean sure, they are, but they're just as much American factories, they just happen to be in China. So it's unfair to say, "Oh look at Chinese emissions," when they're burning all that coal, oil and gas to make products for Americans and Europeans and people all over the world. 

WuDi:
On January 13th, 2013, the particulate matter (PM) 2.5 was 993, the highest level since China started recording the PM 2.5. This little girl was breathing with an oxygen balloon. 

JF:
So she’s breathing in the balloon?

LR:
Yeah. 

[01:22:53]
WuDi became famous overnight for his picture of FeiFei, a young girl in Beijing with pulmonary problems. FeiFei's mom, a former aid worker, who had worked in Tanzania named her FeiFei Memories of Africa. FeiFei was allowed to go out and play when the PM count was under 100. That is, 10 times what a normal day might be in the US. We got lucky. The day we went to see FeiFei, the PM count was 50. 

JF:
What is that?

FeiFei’s Mom:
This is the inhaler. 

JF:
That’s her inhaler. 

FeiFei:
A bit better.

FFM:
In 2012, we found her some problem and we went to the hospital. The doctor told me that we have to be extremely cautious when the air is bad. She is more vulnerable comparing to other kids because of her throat. 

JF:
This week you are going to your grandparents?

FF:
The air is extremely good at my grandmother’s place. The PM 2.5 hasn’t even gone over 40. 

FFM:
Who told you these PM 2.5 figures, huh?

FF:
I – I snuck a peek on my dad’s iPad and saw the air quality. 

JF:
Are you surprised?

[Laughter]

FF:
PM 2.5 is really bad for your health. If you breathe too much then it will probably make you feel uncomfortable… feel sick. 

FFM:
A lot of mothers talk a lot about the air problem here in Beijing and we are all very careful about this. If you go to the hospital you see a lot of kids having this problem. At first, the Chinese people don’t know. I think the government knows, but we don’t know. But we can feel it, we can see it, we can smell it. Then we start to ask the government – I think this kind of gave a very big pressure to the Chinese government because the Chinese people start to ask questions. In China, we, we say every drop of water come together will become a big river or even become a sea. So I think every Chinese people is like a small drop of water but we are going to the same direction and we all say that we are not happy with the current situation. 

[01:25:21]
China consumes 3.8 billion tons of coal per year. The rest of the world, combined, consumes 4.3 billion tons. In China the pollution makes it eminently clear, working on climate change doesn't just mean dealing with the future. It means making the air better right now. It means making public health better right now. It means a whole host of things changing right now. 

60 percent of all the solar panels in the whole world are made in China. No other country is capable of ramping up production of renewable energy at the scale, efficiency and cost of China. Solar thermal heating provides hot water to 700 million Chinese. Renewable energy gives us the option to address the system. 

We think of China as a communist country, but it's not devoid of entrepreneurs like Huang Ming from Hi-Min Solar. 

Huang Ming:
So this is for a middle temperature application. We need to concentrate the light to a small pipe. 

JF:
So did you design this process?

HM:
Yeah. 

JF:
You did?

HM:
Yeah.

JF:
How did you get the money to start?

HM:
There’s market, there’s money.

[01:27:16]
Huang Ming, CEO, made his fortune with an innovation in solar - hot water heaters that go on the roof of your building. So simple and so affordable. As of 2012, Hi-Min Solar installed units for 250 million people, and that's made Huang Ming a very rich man.

HM:
My dream was to make solar everywhere, everything. Solar toys, solar chargers, solar hat, solar heating, solar everything. Solar cooker.

JF:
I love cooking, you know.

HM:
Chicken? Eight minutes.

JF:
Eight minutes for chicken? I get hungry when I’m looking at it…

HM:
Ha ha ha ha good!

[01:27:56]
Some people collect stamps, some people collect Star Wars figures. Huang Ming collects antique solar thermal units. He's built an entire museum of the sun. 

HM:
All the machinery.

JF:
So the museum is not open right now.

HM:
No. 

JF:
Why? Because it…

The museum had been hit by a massive flood. The display panels with words running together like water color paintings. 

JF:
What was the flood from a big storm? 

HM:
Big storm… big rain. 

[01:28:31]
I heard that Huang Ming also has one of the solar panels that Jimmy Carter installed on the White House roof. 

JF:
I says a generation from now this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken…

Jimmy Carter:
Or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people -

JF:
Harnessing the power of the sun to enrich our lives as we move away from our crippling dependence on foreign oil. So it’s a museum piece. 

[01:29:02]
The solar thermal units went on the roof of the White House in 1979. One of Ronald Reagan's first actions when he became president in 1981 was to take them back down again. A piece of American history rotting in the basement. 

JF:
Do you look at this thing sometimes and feel like there’s some kind of magic?

HM:
Yeah. Still in good condition.

JF:
Yeah, would it still work if you put it in?

HM:
Yeah.

JF:
Still works?

HM:
Yup. That’s America. That’s the, that’s true America. Not, not the situation right now. 

[01:30:04]
Suffice it to say, this is about development. 600 million Chinese people were in the course of migrating from a rural agrarian lifestyle where they maybe use one light bulb in their homes, to being modern city-dwellers who use a lot of energy. If China's development continues to be dependent on coal, it'll be disastrous for the Chinese and the climate. Through the development of renewable energy we can work on the bigger problem. The problem that caused all this in the first place - political, social, and economic inequality. 

Ella Chou:
Community solar! I’m a huge supporter for community solar. We have everything we need. We have all the technologies, we have all the human resources, and we have all the natural resources. 

[01:30:51]
Originally from China, Ella Chou is one person who is trying to advise China to go in that direction. An expert in renewable energy, she's advising the Chinese government on community development of solar. 

EC:
Basically it’s a lot individuals coming together, deciding they need, they want to buy a solar farm that is off site from where they are living. They can be installed, managed, operated, maintained by a utility even.

JF:
So I’m looking at these gigantic coal plants and I’m thinking how is something small like community solar going to compete with this? 

EC:    
By scaling. China has the ability to scale up emerging technologies such as CSP concentrated solar power, such as tidal or wave power or any of the hydro-connected power. That will really move the needle on these technologies own commercialization, make them cheaper for the rest of the world. I’m saying we use climate change as an opportunity to harness the power of the people and to be able to develop the technologies in a way that is beneficial for the economy, the environment, and for all the social benefits that we want to harness out of it. I actually think it’s a very precarious balance right now, with the economic development, with the increasing inequality, with the environmental degradation. 

JF:
Yeah in the same day we were with WuDi we found a construction hut that was 8 RMB a night to rent. No facilities, incredibly dirty, right next to the polluted river. And then we went across town to an 8 million dollar house. So you think inequality is perhaps a greater threat than climate change in China right now?

EC:
The two are compounded right? 

JF:
Right.

EC:
You see the poor are really the ones suffering the real consequences of climate change. The challenge is how to build a core value in a way that is free and that it’s a people’s value. I believe there is something called the moral imagination.

JF:
The moral imagination?

EC:
The moral imagination. So it, I think the moral imagination forces us to get out of our box of thinking about, for instance what is being successful? Society might tell you that you should work for Mackenzie or Goldman Sachs or whatever. You know, as a college graduate you should go find a job, that’s your top priority, you should buy a house. The moral imagination allows us to think outside of this box, having a moral value about what you want as a person, as an individual. What you want out of your own humanity? What do you want to do for the world, for yourself?

[01:33:47]
If there was any idea that could rocket you off into the stratosphere this was it. The moral imagination wrote the Bill of Rights, came up with the idea of democracy, it dreamed up all the core values that were emerging in all these climate warriors around the globe. And all across the Earth a movement was being imagined. The moral imagination designed and built the first solar panels, wind turbines, geothermal power plants. Technology paired with an ethical will. Innovations in renewable energy, tidal power and wave power installed in sea walls that ring our coastlines. The basic truth that renewable energy can provide 100% of the power on the planet. And right now people coming up with carbon negative forms of energy that actually take CO2 out of the air. Microgrids. Permaculture. High yield sustainable farming and nutrition. Composting to create a carbon absorbing layer of top soil. Communities banded together to boycott fossil fuels and a movement of moral investing that had amassed over a trillion dollars in divestment from fossil fuels. There’s no end to human innovation once the moral imagination is invoked. And standing there listening to Ella Chou talk about demand electricity and grid optimization…

EC:
So these are viable technical solutions to a humanitarian problem…

I not only felt totally out of my league, but ashamed that I ever wanted to sit at home and do nothing. 

JF:
I wanted to stay at home and like hang out in my house and not be bothered. So stupid to think that way, in a way, you know? It’s just not possible. What’s required is so much more. 

[01:36:03]
We drove out to Inner Mongolia to see the wind farms. But instead we got a lesson in human rights. 

They told us we’d see wind turbines as far as the eye could see. We were giddy. We had the best meal of our lives. We took in a crazy Disnified Mongolian horseshow and when we got to the hotel, the rude awakening. The war in Iraq was on the TV. Three Americans stood in the lobby staring at the violent explosions that our country was causing half a world away. And that’s the moment the hotel concierge called the cops. Up until this point we had been incredibly lucky. We’d escaped the infamous Chinese political repression of journalism and reporting. This was still the China where human rights and democracy were slaughtered in the streets of Beijing in Tiananmen Square in 1989. We realized that all of our footage was vulnerable. None of the copies we’d sent back to the US had left port in China. If the authorities wanted to they could have taken everything in this segment on China. So when Alex, my camera man came to my door and told me our producer was being detained, I said, “Where are the hard drives?” He said, “I’m hiding them.” It’s really hard to hide anything in a hotel room. It’s either yours or it’s the hotels. And if it’s yours, the authorities can just take it. So I did my best to hide the hard drives the only place I could. At 4:30 in the morning there was a guard outside the door. I’ve never felt like that in my life. I’ve never felt what it was like to have all of your freedom of expression, all of my work, any minute that could be taken away and there was no guarantee that it would ever come back. 

JF:
Even the nicest hotel room can turn into a prison. 

And if the foreign affairs police ran my passport they would see everywhere in the country we had gone, who we had talked to. The jig would’ve been up. We would likely have been arrested and deported and who knows what would have happened to all of this work then. So the next day we woke up after about an hour of sleep, all of our interviews cancelled. Somehow everybody heard. We had nothing left to do. We decided just to pretend that we were tourists. 

[01:38:30]
So the rest of our Mongolian adventure we did with our phones. And with a rickety old tape camera, which garbled and mangled our footage in a haze of digital static. Everywhere we went, we were tailed. A small white car. We couldn't shake them. We even drove a 100 km just to see if they would follow us. They did. And when we got to lunch at a roadside truck stop, there was a guy at the next table glaring at us. I said to our fixer-producer, “What is that guy doing?” He said, “He's trying to intimidate you. Why don't you play the banjo.” So in the middle of the restaurant, I took out the banjo and started to play. And what was so crazy is that the whole time I was playing, I knew the hard drives, the footage which would have incriminated us, was all inside the banjo as I played. Banjo playing always calms me down—it's my fail safe against all the stress. And this time I was playing as if all my work depended on it. People in the restaurant started to get into it. When they applauded, the goon, who was staring at us at the table behind me, got up and walked away. Banjo one, goon zero. 

I could see then that hanging over every interview that we had in China, the political repression was as oppressive or more than the air itself. That human rights is the air that you breathe, that democracy is the environment that you live in. And if you can’t do what you need to do with transparency, openness and freedom, then something fundamental is missing. So this was the lesson and virtue offered to us by these brave Chinese – speak out in spite of the potential consequences.

WuDi:
It is not a good time to talk about democracy. 

Luckily we got through customs without questions. Just take a moment here to take a look out the window with me. I’ve always found it unsettling that the minute you step onto a plane, you are reborn. But this time, it was a relief. We landed in a place that was quite literally giving birth to itself everyday. The island of Tanna not only has the world’s most active volcano…

JF:
Uh oh, umm it’s coming this way!

… but has a thousand year old tradition of indigenous democracy. 

VANUATU

[01:41:09]
Paul Nalau:
When you want to see a government that is open, transparent, and accountable – this is it. This is it. This is as open as it gets. 

Under every tree, in this tiny island nation there was a conversation going on about climate change. Because just three months earlier they’d been hit by the largest cyclone in the history of the Pacific. My friends that had picked up their canoe, that broke in half and put it back together were now picking up the pieces of their entire island nation.

It was the Hurricane Sandy of the Pacific. Hundred year old Banyon Trees knocked over like twigs. Vanuatu found itself at the center of an international conversation on climate change. The island of Tanna is made up of hundreds of small villages, each one governed by their own tribe, each tribe contributing to the conversation, pulling on hundreds of years of traditional knowledge. 

PN:
The global action for climate change has to start with people taking responsibility wherever they are. I respect you, so I will do something to make sure you and I, you know, benefit. 

These conversations happened in a place called the nakamal. The nakamal is about a football-field-sized area in the center of each town. It's the place where the whole town gathers virtually every day, just to talk things through. And at the front of each nakamal, is a massive banyon tree. This island has huge banyon trees everywhere you look. 

JF:
This is your village?

PN:
Yeah, this is my village.

JF:
Wow. So what’s really amazing to me is this is not just a democratic space, this is a nature space, cause you’ve got the tree! 

PN:
Well, the tree is quite important. It’s a structure, a symbolic structure of the council that meets here.

JF:
Do you want to try? 

PN:
You can sit on the mat while we talk. 

Paul’s project was to integrate climate science with traditional democratic knowledge. One man stands up, he says, “hey, I want to tell you the story of the boy who wanted a bow and arrow from his father. The father gave the bow to the boy. The boy shot a small bird with it and brought it to his father. His father knew that the boy would continue to get bigger and bigger birds.” The story ended there. So Paul leans over to me and he says, “this is a story about starting small and getting bigger. The way of all progress.” 

PN:
He is talking about the project that we are working on…

JF:
Ahh I see, the pilot project…

PN:
Yeah, it’s the first project…

So another man gets up and tells a different story. There are thousands of these custom stories that they can invoke at any given moment. Each one is a teaching story. We do this to influence the course of events. So the nakamal is not just a town square, it's a place of debate, a place of decision making, a place of democracy. And then all of a sudden, people flood the square. 

JF:
What’s happening now?

PN:
Yeah they’re starting now, that’s the custom dance. 
JF:
This is the custom dance?

[01:44:28]
Paul says, “just try to follow the men.” 

[singing, clapping]

It was in the middle of that, that I wished that someone was telling strange metaphorical stories and dancing and singing in the Unite States Congress. I felt like it might be a little bit harder to lie if what they had to do was keep time with the rest of the village. A little bit harder to push us down the path of the oil industry if they had to be dancing, stomping and singing the whole time. 

[singing, clapping]

PN:
It’s a system that we all move together, as a… we are holding hands and moving as a team.

JF:
Do people see that kind of relationship with the developed world in terms of climate?

PN:
Well that’s the thing, it’s like umm… people take ownership. We’re here, we’re far away. We don’t have any factories, but we’re not blaming anyone for climate change. We’re blaming ourselves. Maybe we’re not playing our part right.


All of these virtues, we have separate words for them, but they are not really separate things. Generosity, community, story-telling, dance, taking care of each other. But it does seem like even though this is one of the poorest places on Earth, a place that we might consider, quote-unquote, under developed, that in the developed world, we were the ones who were underdeveloped. Underdeveloped in democracy, in generosity, and taking care of your fellow man. Underdeveloped in the link between metaphor, story, dance and governance. Underdeveloped in the ways that matter. 


ZAMBIA

[01:46:46]
In the developing world there is a constant pressure to use fossil fuels to get out of poverty, but in this part of Zambia they’d found another way. We were driving through the night to one of the poorest districts of the country of Zambia in Africa. The Shangombo district has no electricity. No power plants, no power lines. No electric light, no computers. Schools had no light. Hospitals had no light. Homes had no light. But something was happening in this dark corner of Africa. Solar panels had begun to crop up all over the area. Suddenly people could have light in their homes, possibly basic refrigeration. Could the answer be as simple as the sun coming up every day?

Joe Mwitumwa:
This is enough light for all the kids sitting from where that lady is and here where I am. So if you put one here, one there, one there, one there…

Joe, an Induna, or tribal leader, a member of the royal family, was on a mission. He was driving all over the district in his vintage Land Rover to bring solar lights to schools so the students could study at night. 

JM:
It is the action. It is the action, that I do. I do something the way I feel I should do it. We work with the community, we do what the community asks us to do. First we will introduce it in schools, the next it will be introduce in villages. You can not beat solar. It has come to stay. 

JF:
What if someone came and said ok we’re going to drill a huge oil well or a big coal mine and take up a huge area here and then we’ll give you electricity. 

JM:
No, that’s not a good idea. They’re forgetting that the next second, the person is dead. What happened to your grandchildren? (???) Like our grandparents left, we should also leave it for our grandchildren. That’s why we are doing things which are permanently – yes, because we look into the future of someone, not in a short-term period. That way when we give the solar lights, we want the kids, for their education. Which one of the kids, will be one of the people who is going to be in a factory that makes the solar panel. 

JF:
So you want to see the solar panels being made here?

JM:
Being made here. This will be an example for the whole world. 


JF:
Doing your homework?

Student:
Yeah.

JF:
You guys are up late.

Student:
Yeah.

JF:
You’re studying the effects of water pollution?

Student:
Yeah.

JF:
Is everybody studying about water pollution? 

Student:
Yes.

[01:50:24]
Sometimes, you find the most astounding things written in the margin of a kid's notebook in junior high school. Right there: freedom is meaningless if there’s poverty. 

JI:
The next thing that we will go for is food. That’s what the people need. What are they going to eat? So if we take the same solar to give us water to irrigate…


This district in Zambia can only farm two months out of the year during the rainy season, and the diet in this region is something they call nashima, corn meal, three meals a day. No fruit, no vegetables. Basic nutrition which would help fend off all sorts of diseases and improve the health of the district didn't exist. Yet the Zambezi River runs parallel to most of these towns. So what Joe wants to build next: solar irrigation pumps. As a women's empowerment project. The women of the Shangombo district would create small vegetable gardens and small community supported farms, and they could sell their vegetables at the market. Joe's hope was that this would decrease the number of women forced into prostitution by poverty, and that this in turn would decrease the staggering AIDS rate in the district. The storms of poverty, like the storms of the climate – the same path to shelter from both. A dream that development could actually benefit the climate and the people. 


SAMOA

[01:52:07]
There was just one place left I had to go. There was a story about a tree that I just couldn’t get out of my mind.

MM:
When you are born the first thing that comes out of, of the hospital room, it’s the placenta. And they dig the ground, and put it in there and they plant a coconut tree on top of it. And when that plant is growing, like, it’s like a pride to you, like that’s my pute, that’s your pute. That’s my umbilical cord. And I guess growing up we realized that that’s actually our connection to the land. So your connection to the land is never lost. Some governments have no respect to that. And with the impact of climate change, it’s threatening of us losing that. You know? And that’s exactly what’s going on, and that’s where I draw my energy from.

MM:
Wah-La. I give you… Samoa!
Ahh here’s the windmill. Tick. Tick. Tick. 

JF:
You’re the Jack Black of climate change. 

Mika’s wife was nine and a half months pregnant.

MM:
This is a future climate warrior. 
Mika’s wife:
He’s very, he’s already very active in my stomach… constant, very…

JF:
Like, like this guy?

Mika’s wife:
Yeah. 

[01:53:49]
I asked Mika if he would show us where his placenta was buried. He said, "I can't, it's too far away, but let's go to where my father's placenta is buried, on the next island." I really wanted to see this tree. I felt like if I could see it, I might have some deeper understanding of all of our connections to the planet. Mika hadn’t been there since he was a child. It took us awhile to find the spot and when we got there, it wasn’t there anymore. The ocean had already taken it. 

Mika Maiava:
I didn’t even know this, I just knew this today. 

JF:
And this is where the placentas were buried and now it’s…

MM:
Yeah, now it’s nothing. It’s quite sad.

It was all under water. The land wasn't there any more. Sea level rise, coastal erosion, had overtaken it. 

MM:
This must be how it feels like, what’s going to happen to us. I don’t want in the future to be showing like this, like that’s where I used to live. 

JF:
That’s the first time I’ve heard you stop laughing.

MM:
It’s, it’s very emotional. It’s… just standing here and looking at it and… we are always taking about that we’re going to drown and the sea level rising and everything, but just looking at this one it’s… I mean just… this is what’s going to happen if we’re not going to do anything about climate change. And just knowing that my family used to live here, it’s probably the same feeling that you will feel when your home is going under water, it’s…

MM:
Yeah.

JF:
I’m sorry.

JF:
You don’t seem depressed.

MM:
No, no. Because the thing is that, we, we feel more like warriors. We’re not depressed because we can do something about it. You see? There’s a difference between, like, have no choice and having a choice. We have a choice.

JF:
I came to meet you because I wanted to meet people who had no choice.

[Laughter]

MM:
We have the biggest choice there is, is actually to fight and keep the things that, that we have. You can’t just sit there and say “we’re gonna drown, we’re gonna drown, we’re gonna drown.”

JF:
Right because it makes you paralyzed in a way. 

MM:
Yeah, yeah, it… well you’re not doing yourself a favor. 
[Laughter]

COMMUNITY IS STRONGER THAN THE STORM

[01:57:46]
JF:
You guys became close during Hurricane Sandy?

Raven and Tatiana:
Yes.

T:
And Sandy happened, and the boardwalk went through the school.

JF:
The boardwalk went through the school?

R&T:
Yes. 

T:
Yes, flooded it out, boardwalk was in the school. And Raven was like, “You should come to my school.” And I was like, I should…

R:
Trying to help out, see what you can give to the people who have been affected. And my mom was saying, you know, well our home is always open no matter if you’re a friend, you know, family, everybody is welcomed and I just let her in. She was like my little…

T:
We were sisters…

R:
Like the sister I never had…

T:
And they were all nice and welcoming to me…

R:
It’s okay.

Aria Doe:
It’s amazing what’s going on here. Do we have the resources we need still? No. Do we have to concern ourselves with that at certain points? Yes. But the amazing thing is, we’re stronger now than we were before the storm. We’re stronger because internally we know we can face the music together and we can get the job done. We know that what ever hits us, we can rise above it. And not only rise above it as individuals, but rise above it collectively as a community. One of the tenants of what we do is to make the community feel safe, secure and love. And if you feel safe, secure and love – you dance! What else are you gonna do? If you’re happy, you dance! You know?

Climate change is about all of us. It is about the baby who is now eating lead paint because the hurricane came and washed away the other paint that was covering it and his parents can’t afford to move. It is about the grandmother who was looking forward to her retirement but now gets up and cries every day because her job, her retirement, everything that she was looking forward to, her family is scattered to the wind. It is about people and until people understand that it’s not even just about people, but that it’s about you and it’s about me… then we’ll continue to have these disasters. It is about not giving up. Even though you have a hand pushing you down, you still offering a hand to pull other people up. 

FALLING IN LOVE

[02:00:32]
When you know what you have to do in this fight, well, it's like falling in love. You know it's going to turn your whole world upside down. And it won't be an easy ride. It'll be full of twists and turns. They'll be times when you feel like your heart is about to break and explode. But you have no choice. To turn away from it is a kind of death. Looking out the window, these atolls looked like god's doodles on the surface of the ocean. And we could rise the tide and just erase them all. We're all in the same boat. We say, “I don't know how to save the world. Yet, I must save the world. I don't know how to save myself. Yet, I must save myself. I don't know where my soul resides, yet, I must discover my soul because I live within it.” This is the only planet, as far as we know, that has love songs. This is the only planet, as far as we know, that has poetry. And it's time to celebrate life and love. The world is saved and lost every day, not all at once.