Doug Allen

Everyone should watch this film because it promotes points of view that need to be reckoned with and not censored, not ignored, not swept under the rug. For environmentalists, the last few minutes are as dramatic and depressing as anything you will ever witness. Director Jeff Gibbs is a disillusioned green activist. He examines green energy and finds "it is not what it seems"- the "good energy to save our planet," but instead just more of the same crony capitalism and industrialization and rape of the planet that "billionaires, bankers, and corporations" promote and market "to enrich themselves." The film's thesis is that "it's not the carbon dioxide molecule that's killing the planet- it's us"- the unsustainable growth in population and consumption, "our human impact on the environment which is now over 100 times greater than what it was only 200 years ago." This film attempts to shock us into understanding that the simplistic conservative and liberal narratives about environmentalism and sustainability are as phony as their big green promoters- those rich, green environmentalists who are filmed, showing their duplicity and deceit. The Jiff Gibbs- Michael Moore thesis is a shocking and agonizing point of view that needs to be part of the conversation whether you agree with it or not. I'm a life long environmentalist, nature photographer, and instructor of courses in climate science.

Chasing Coral documents the bleaching and death of coral, especially during the temperature spike of the recent extremely strong El Nino 2015/16. Coral is to the sea what tropical forests are to the land, where the Earth's greatest biodiversity occurs. The comments about the beautiful cinematography and tragic coral loss are all true. Despite the best of intentions, the film hurts the effort to understand coral and save coral more than it helps. Like most problems, it's complicated. The coral ecosystem has survived for millions of years through long glacial periods and much shorter inter-glacial periods warmer than ours. The film ignores decades of studies and evidence that pollution, particularly agricultural run off and sewage have stressed and killed coral wherever it occurs offshore from large populations. This basic fact is not even mentioned. Nor is the destruction of coral by the common industrial method of trawling. The film shows the stressed out and dying coral of the Great Barrier Reef offshore the state of Queensland, Australia, population 5 million, home to Australia's most popular beaches. Stressed coral succumbs to temperature spikes which occur regularly during El Ninos, which occur as part of a natural oscillation. The film promotes the simplistic and wrong conclusion that the temperature spikes alone are the cause of bleaching whereas healthy coral exists in even warmer waters away from human populations. It's popular to blame warming and CO2 for every environmental problem. That's a convenient excuse for not understanding the complex dynamics and making the required environmental changes, much easier than reducing CO2 levels, to save the coral and create their sustainable future. I teach a course in climate science and find the self-inflicted tragedy of simplistic misunderstanding and blame the main obstacle to the environmental health for Earth and her creatures that we all desire.