When Will our Screens Reflect the Climate Crisis?
A conversation about how TV and movies can help us metabolize our current climate reality
An entire month of over-100-degree days in Arizona. A chain of wildfires still burning across Canada. Flooding in Vermont, a part of the country many people once saw as a climate haven. A slew of hurricanes on the horizon in oceans storing record amounts of heat. Climate crisis has shifted into high gear this summer.
Simultaneously, the writers and actors behind one of our most powerful storytelling engines are striking—and some of them spent last week standing in record-breaking heat made worse by NBCUniversal’s choice to trim the trees that were shading the picket line outside their studios.
I don’t know how things in Hollywood will play out, but I hope that those who do return step back into the writers’ room and onto the set with an emboldened commitment to creating stories that reflect our current climate reality and normalize the kinds of feelings and actions that make sense in response to a global crisis.
This wish is alive in me next to all kinds of dread and fear about the coming role of AI in, well, everything, and the potential devaluing of humans in the telling of stories. But that doesn’t make the wish any less real. And I also know I’m not alone: A number of people have been working to transform Hollywood into a more accurate mirror on the climate crisis for years. They’ve made some headway, but they still have a long way to go.
Journalist Whitney Bauck wrote about how Hollywood is finally depicting climate change a few months back, and we talked shortly after her article came out. Here’s an excerpt from our conversation:
Our shared goal is to find more paths in for average readers to engage with the climate crisis. How does writing about the entertainment world fit into that goal for you?
I'm a writer and a reader; I learn by finding a book or article about something. But I think a lot of people encounter new ideas and new stories through things they watch. So I’ve been on this journey of thinking about how TV and film are shaping our collective imagination. When I interviewed Scott Z. Burns, who was an editor and producer of An Inconvenient Truth and wrote and produced Extrapolations, the recent climate show on Apple TV, he said, “My understanding of the Vietnam War wasn't based on the news, it was based on what I saw on TV.” And Anna Jane Joyner, the founder of Good Energy, said something similar. She said, “How do people understand World War II? It's not through our history books, it's through the films that we've made about it.”
So recognizing that film and TV shape our ideas around what the climate crisis is, what solutions look like, how we solve it and who's going to be the hero of this story, I got really interested in the people who are trying to use film and TV as vehicles for shaping our collective imagination when it comes to the climate.
“Don't Look Up” was written as a satire about climate-change denial. What do you think about that kind of less-direct approach? I saw “Triangle of Sadness” recently, and I felt like it had a lot to say about our potential climate future and how our current class hierarchies may or may not play a role.
There are a lot of different ways of surfacing climate in movies and TV. And I think all the different approaches can help. I talked to folks who were thinking about what happens when you make climate the headline—essentially when you market it as a “climate show”—and what happens when you make it more subtle and you sprinkle mentions or storylines about climate throughout a TV show that already exists. I chatted with a few different people, including social scientists, who are trying to measure the impact of some of these things, to learn what's most effective. But what I'm most interested in is seeing Hollywood, and indie filmmakers, mobilize around the idea that they actually have some agency in this space.
One thing I've been very struck by is how often people I would see as having a lot of power to make decisions that impact a lot of people or ecosystems don't think of themselves as being able to have that big of an impact. Many screenwriters care about climate personally. Many of them are living in LA, they're dealing with the fires, they're dealing with the drought, all of that. And yet they don't see how their work connects to it. They don't really see themselves as having power to [impact the public’s thinking about climate].
But whatever you're doing, whether you're writing an action movie, a drama, or a romcom, you can find a way to integrate climate into that story. And sometimes it's going to be more of a backdrop or more of a mention here or there. But the more you can do that, the more it helps audiences metabolize the reality they're already living in. Because right now film and TV is behind where we are. They're not really reflecting the present, even though more and more of us are experiencing [the climate crisis] directly.
I think it was Richard Powers who said that every story told now is in one way or another a climate story. Climate moves through all of our lives now and it's about time that we reflect that in a new and different way. In your article, you talk about how screenplays are including things like more electric vehicles or more solar panels visible on people’s houses. I wonder how much impact those small things will have?
I think the thing with any work of art is that people's worldviews come through. For instance, there has been this spate of films and TV shows where the billionaire is the bad guy. And it has gotten to the point where there are some people in the film critic world pushing back against that trope, talking about it as “too easy.” But I think even that trend reflects a shift in terms of how people are thinking about some of this—because most people [in Hollywood] weren’t willing to frame the billionaire as a bad guy even five years ago.
And there's a sense that it's not just that we need to put more climate into a show. I don't think awareness is the problem at this point. Some of it is about what are the narratives in these shows even when they are about climate.
For instance, there's this idea that climate is a white-people problem, or that climate films need to have a solo hero, and that person has to undertake this big, dramatic adventure to save the day. So how do we switch from that to having an understanding that the climate crisis isn't going to be solved in one day, and it is going to take collective action. It's going to take a lot of heroes. So it's about shaping how we understand the stories and how action will happen.
I feel like that idea of collective imagination and collective power is missing in a lot of ways right now. There was a moment early in the pandemic when people were thinking about other people. But it can seem harder to come by these days.
Something we run into even as journalists is that it's easier to tell a good story with one central character. And it's not that that framework isn't valid for certain kind of stories, but [we need to figure] out how we shift away from stories where there's one leader to recognizing there's a lot of people who are going to have to pull in the same direction to get this thing moving. How do we reflect that in the stories that we tell?
One movie that I found impressive—although it does feature one heroine— is “Woman at War,” which is about a 50-year-old woman who takes direct action against the aluminum industry in Iceland. Have you seen it?
Yes. I loved it.
My read on “Woman at War” it that it’s about the individual being willing to break with the masses, and that seems to be an important storyline right now.
The thing that was most striking to me about that film was the way that, even though it is about one cisgender white person being the hero, it felt like it was actually trying to engage with questions around activism versus ecoterrorism, and I haven't seen a nuanced conversation about that in film. I've spent a lot of the last year or two watching every climate film that I can—I’m working my way through this massive list—and any time that climate activists come up in any serious way, it always becomes this ecoterrorism thing. They end up doing really serious harm to someone or they killed someone, so that when you come away at the end of the film it's pretty easy to dismiss [the activists] because they caused so much harm. But when you look at actual environmental movements that have existed, even those that get labeled as ecoterrorists, there are so few of them who have ever actually caused harm to a human being.
In “Women at War” there are all these ways [the main character] is destroying infrastructure and breaking the law. But it's in a way that feels more realistic. Murdering someone is a bridge too far for most people. Whereas when you try to keep it more within the bounds of how activists actually tend to operate, you allow the audience to really grapple with questions about whether [certain kinds of direct action] are worth it to try to accomplish some of these ends.
Groups like Extinction Rebellion feature people who are up on bridges or disrupting meetings and capturing themselves on video. Do you think those are in conversation with the entertainment industry at all?
That's a good question. Extinction Rebellion is known for its dramatic, theatrical forms of protests. And it's such a decentralized organization. There are some people connected with the group who have said really bonkers things. And then there are some really great people in other places also organizing under that banner. But I do think the group as a whole is bringing an ethos of creativity. They understand storytelling and they recognize that we live in a very screen-focused society, so they'll get the most eyeballs when they create a compelling image. And I think they're pretty good at doing that. There's a much longer debate to be had about whether their tactics are effective, but they’re capturing people's imaginations.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
I would love to keep having these conversations. Because even if we don’t yet know exactly how [TV and movies] are impacting people’s response to the climate crisis, when it comes to an institution as massive as Hollywood, which is doing so much exporting of ideas to the rest of the world, I don’t think we have time to wait to find out. We have the chance, now, to start being proactive about telling better and more impactful climate stories. And let's also keep pushing for more data to help us understand the impact along the way.
Do you have a list of top climate-related films to recommend?
Picking top films is tough, but here are four I recommend most often:
First Reformed
Beasts of the Southern Wild
Woman At War
The Last Black Man in San Francisco
Climate news you may have missed
Protecting those who can’t get out of the heat
The expectation that everyone will just keep working through this summer’s record-breaking heat waves is inhumane at best, deadly at worst. A 2022 Public Citizen report found that as many as 2,000 workers die of heat exposure in the United States every year—but that number doesn’t take the current heat waves into account.
I keep thinking about the air conditioner repair people who are literally keeping people alive in places like Phoenix, Arizona. Not to mention construction workers and farmworkers. UPS workers were prepared to walk off the job if their demands for protection from extreme heat and other dangerous working conditions are not met (they reached a tentative agreement yesterday), and some McDonald’s workers in Los Angeles walked off the job because it was over 100 degrees in the kitchen.
Although the Biden administration promised to release a new set of federal standards to protect workers from heat two years ago, it has yet to do so. On Monday, over 100 lawmakers sent a letter urging the administration to release the standards, saying, “Urgent action is needed to prevent more deaths.”
Extreme heat also impacts pregnant people
Exposure to high temperatures have been associated with premature birth, stillbirth, and hypertension in pregnant people, so it makes sense that some advocates are working to frame extreme heat as a reproductive justice issue.
More legal roads to climate justice
On the fossil-fuel lawsuit front, The New York Times profiled Missy Sims, a tenacious American attorney working with 16 different municipalities in Puerto Rico on a class action lawsuit against Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Royal Dutch Shell, BP and others. Sims was working on an opioid-related lawsuit when hurricane Maria hit the island, and she has since helped the small cities and towns accuse the fossil fuel companies of violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) when they knowingly chose to keep climate science to themselves. It’s the same legal rationale that took down the tobacco industry, and one that may just stand up in court, to the tune of billions.
While it's good to see Sims’ creative approach and the lawsuit itself get coverage, the choice on the Times’ part to publish a quirky, character-driven profile—with photographs of her Fendi purse and pink suit, and a shot of her applying makeup—is disappointing and a little sexist. The piece also reinforces Whitney’s point about how journalists are still overly focused on solo climate heroes when we need stories about collective efforts.
Less rice from India
India’s summer rice crop was impacted by erratic and heavy monsoon rains, prompting the country’s leaders to ban exports of all its non-basmati rice last week to avoid inflation there ahead of the nation’s general election. This is big, as the country grows 40 percent of the world’s rice and experts are warning that grain prices will likely rise in the coming months. People in Canada and the U.S. have been panic buying the rice currently in South Asian grocery stores.
The case for climate reparations in California
There’s a great deal of talk and concern about sea-level rise, but in places where toxic chemicals are buried underground, groundwater rise could be especially dangerous. In the Bay Area, scientists have identified and mapped areas where this could happen and found 5,200 sites, most of which are inhabited by communities of color. While the California Department of Toxic Substances Control is working to identify known polluters and hold them accountable, some advocates are arguing that the residents of these neighborhoods should be made eligible for climate reparations.
California’s Reparations Task Force recently recommended that the state’s qualifying Black residents who have experienced historical racism be considered eligible for up to $1 million in cash payments. A recent article expands that recommendation, giving voice to advocates who want money directed to residents of the regions that stand to be the most directly impacted by climate change:
"[They] want more measures to support communities that have lived through the health impacts of pollution exposure and the disproportionate experiences of severe weather created by housing policies that forced people of color to America’s most unhealthy areas. Black, Native, and many immigrant populations bear the brunt of the climate crisis, despite contributing the least to it,” writes journalist Adam Mahoney.
On the brighter side
1. After multiple lawsuits, the Department of Homeland Security has agreed to halt construction of the U.S.–Mexico border walls, return hundreds of millions in military funding to Southwestern states, and keep open stormwater gates to allow several endangered species to migrate across the border, including the North American jaguar and Sonoran pronghorn.
2. Wildlife, including kelp (an important climate sink!), is rebounding in marine protected areas (MPAs), according to a recent study of the MPAs along California’s southern coast.
3. According to The Guardian, “Colombia could finally be turning the tide on deforestation in the Amazon,” as rates of rainforest destruction is slowing dramatically nationwide.
4. The Menominee tribe of Wisconsin continues to set an encouraging example of forest management. “In almost 170 years,” says the Yale School of Environment, “the tribe has harvested nearly twice the forest’s former volume of timber, yet it still has 40 percent more standing wood than when they started.”
The visuals
Solar panels in central China's Shanxi province, via the Washington Post. “This year alone,” the piece reads, “China could add more solar power than the cumulative total in place in the United States.”
Nudibranchs replicas by Delaney Voeller.
Jonathan the 190-yr-ols tortoise, via @Debbie_banks30.
Top banner design by Mara Greenaway.
I really appreciate the synthesizing/integrating you're doing with every issue. It feels much different than reading one disconnected article at a time, which had left me consistently overwhelmed. There's a cumulative effect that's helping me experience climate news in a much less hopeless way.