“It’s really exciting when storytelling can resonate with the greatest issue of our time. There can be no greater focus than saving our home.”
—Laura Dern, Variety, “Is Hollywood Doing Enough to Fight the Climate Crisis?”
By now there should be no doubt that the climate crisis is urgent and dire. So why aren’t we rising up and demanding action?
In part, because we’re telling ourselves the wrong stories about climate. That it’s not urgent or even real. That we have plenty of time. That it’s too expensive or too big to fix. That it’s already too late. And other fairy tales that invite complacency.
We need a new climate narrative. A narrative that will help us face reality, confront our fear and grief, imagine possible futures, and inspire us to action. We need Hollywood to help us rewrite the future.
Click the video to watch NRDC’s virtual panel at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Beyond Apocalypse: Alternative Climate Futures in Film and TV brought together filmmakers and climate leaders to discuss how entertainment stories can help us see, feel, and build the climate future we want.
Social scientists tell us that entertainment can be a more effective way to change people’s attitudes and behavior than factual communication.
Entertainment reaches across demographics and national borders, and when a good story carries us away, we effortlessly absorb new information; identify with characters who may be very different from us; drop our defenses and identity group biases; and open our minds and hearts to new ways of thinking and living.
Over the decades, the entertainment community has focused its creative power on other social problems—the Vietnam War, racism, women in the workplace, the AIDS epidemic, marriage equality—and helped bring about cultural transformations. But Hollywood hasn’t told many stories about climate change.
Yes, there have been barriers to climate storytelling in the past, but they’re falling now. The climate crisis is no longer abstract and remote—it is at our door. The power that network advertisers once had to influence content is waning with the rapid growth of subscription-based entertainment. Climate stories needn’t be preachy, boring, or politically divisive, and the narrative possibilities go far beyond the clichés of disaster and apocalypse.
NRDC’s Rewrite the Future initiative aims to enlist the power of storytelling to help us turn the climate crisis around. We offer a range of support to encourage more, varied, and compelling climate stories in entertainment, including industry dialogue and networking, climate story consultation, and help with project development.
Storytellers have a vital role to play in shaping our cultural narrative about climate. And a new narrative is necessary if we’re going to meet the challenges ahead. Together, Hollywood’s storytellers can help save the world.
The climate crisis and its solutions offer endless story opportunities across genres, from comedy to drama, recent history to speculative futures, and everything in between.
Daniel Hinerfeld
Cheryl Slean
RewriteTheFuture@nrdc.org(310) 434-2303