“A film not about climate change itself, but about how to deal with it.”

“Even though it’s not possible for me to see the end of it, I can start it.”

Contrary to what the current US administration would like you to believe, climate change is a reality. The question has now become one of mitigation; it’s no longer about ‘when’, but about ‘how’. How are we going to tackle the largest issue humanity has probably ever faced? Some would choose to look for ways to reverse or at least halt the process. Others see more reason in accepting reality and adapting to it. This is the focus of Tomáš Krupa’s globe-spanning documentary We Have to Survive, a film not about climate change itself, but about how to deal with it. Through personal stories Krupa highlights not just the problems we are dealing with, but also the resilience of humanity. Whether we should fully rely on that resilience is open for debate, but one can’t fault the people portrayed for their resourcefulness.

On the East Coast of the United States a battle between man and nature is ongoing, and nature inevitably wins. Rodanthe, probably best known for Nicholas Sparks’ 2002 novel Nights in Rodanthe and its subsequent movie adaptation, is a small community in North Carolina where people like to live close to the beach. Perhaps a little too close. Every once in a while the ocean claims one of the homes on stilts, with rising sea levels and more frequent storms causing the water to take back the land. A large amount of money is spent on a process called ‘beach nourishment’, which basically means a lot of sand is pumped onto Rodanthe’s beach to extend it. Since this is the US, God gets involved too, but Krupa’s main focus is a local commissioner who tries to be as positive as possible about a losing cause. ‘Nourishing’ the beach and moving homes, both costly operations, can only get you so far – but day by day, year by year, Rodanthe is adapting to the effects of global warming. Krupa adds visual flourish to this segment, filming the doomed homes rising up from the fog as if in some bleak horror film, and likens the beach restoration to a ballet, choreographing the movements of heavy machinery to the sound of a symphony.

Greenland is not that far from North Carolina, all things considered, and the Inuit people living there also notice the effects of a changing climate. Dog sleds, the traditional mode of transport, are hardly used anymore because the ice is thinning and the snow is melting. The cod are also moving, so the father of a family that is part of the film’s focus has to move his fishing territory. Elsewhere, a Danish gardener has moved to Greenland to teach the local youth about farming and how to produce vegetables in an environment that used to be too harsh for them. That he can deliver locally grown cauliflower to a restaurant is a novelty, but the fact that he can grow it in the first place shows the effects of climate change, and how people are adapting to it. Nevertheless, this episode is perhaps the least interesting, because while the people Krupa puts in front of his camera are definitely adjusting, they lack the charisma of some individuals portrayed in the other segments, and Krupa’s shots of Greenland’s undeniably majestic landscapes are gorgeous but lack poignancy outside of an overhead drone shot of a lone whale swimming in between the ice.

The film fares better in Coober Pedy, Southern Australia, the ‘opal capital of the world’. But gemstones are not the reason to look into a town suffering in the sweltering heat. It’s the people living underground in so-called ‘dugouts’, caves hollowed into the hillsides, in order to escape the rising temperatures. It’s the wrong country, but the thought of Hobbits comes up. Homes, offices, stores, and even churches are meticulously carved out of the sandstone of the Stuart Range. The inhabitants themselves liken it to living on Mars, but living in caves is far from a novelty in the history of our planet; one need only look at Jordan’s historical site of Petra to realize this. In modern times, however, it is regarded as a reversal of fortune, a step back in evolution. Yet it is one of the more resourceful ways to, on a small scale, come up with solutions that work around the effects of global warming. And the people doing it add a little rough-edged Australian colour to the film, even if they are the biggest climate-change deniers in it. Paradoxically, they are the biggest users of renewable energy sources as well.

Krupa’s final portrayal is different from the others in the sense that the people at its heart try to reverse the effects of climate change. A grandfather in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert has a wild dream: plant a million trees to prevent the desert from further encroachment on their land. It seems like a crazy plan, but the patriarch of the family truly believes he can bring back the rain if he just creates a forest. Sadly he never got the chance to see the results, as he died during filming, but his grandson and pregnant granddaughter-in-law continue the dream. And lo and behold, it works: by the end of the film it rains, and the grandson can bring his wife a homegrown pumpkin in hospital (a subtle connection to Greenland’s new cauliflowers), just as she is about to deliver the next generation. A generation that is born into a world adapted by its ancestors. It’s a small but hopeful story about how chasing your dream can lead to results, no matter how unlikely they may be.

Krupa intertwines these stories, to the benefit of the Greenland and Mongolia strands as they have the least to hold onto. North Carolina features the morbid excitement of seeing homes being completely destroyed by the relentless water, and Coober Pedy shows the colorful characters in their Hobbit holes. These two stories could have stood on their own, but the other two wouldn’t work alone. The continuous switching makes it harder to get back into the groove of each story, especially because of the differences in style, with some being more fly-on-the-wall than others. But Krupa’s patience in letting these stories unfold combined with some sumptuous visuals courtesy of cinematographers Martin Čech and Ondřej Szollos strongly underline the beauty of our planet even when it tries to swallow us whole. One person in the film says that “nature won’t adapt to us.” For too long we have thought we could dominate it, and in one way we have forced it to adapt: we changed the planet’s climate, even if we have no control over it. But if nature doesn’t adapt, then we should. Because if anything, we have to survive indeed, and Tomáš Krupa’s film shows that there is a lot still worth surviving for.