POLITICS: Can climate change stories save the world?
By Allison Day
“We’re all doomed, you know. The whole, silly, drunken, pathetic lot of us. Doomed by the air we’re about to breathe. We haven’t got a chance!” cried Fred Astaire as Julian Osborne.
“Stop it! I won’t have it, Julian. I won’t! There is hope. There has to be hope. There’s always hope,” shouted the actress Donna Anderson as Mary Holmes.
This scene plays out in the 1959 film On the Beach by Stanley Kramer, about people in Australia waiting to be killed by a cloud of radioactive fallout in the aftermath of a fictional nuclear war that decimated the Northern Hemisphere in the mid-1960s. Sadly, Julian is right. They haven’t got a chance.
On the Beach made waves as an anti-nuclear polemic by bringing the fear of nuclear war into the public discourse in the US and around the world. Indeed, the US government was so nervous that the film would sway public opinion to oppose military spending on nuclear projects that it created guidelines for how to publicly counter the film’s unflattering portrayal of a nuclear apocalypse.
Linus Pauling, who won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954 and a Nobel Peace Prize in 1962, said of the film, “It may be that some years from now we can look back and say that On the Beach is the movie that saved the world.”
On the Beach shows that fictional stories can have a big impact on public perceptions of global and scientific issues. The film was particularly impactful during the Cold War, as many considered nuclear annihilation to be the biggest threat weighing on the mind of the world.
Today, many would consider our current existential threat to be climate change.
But fictional works that deal with climate change in at least a somewhat realistic way are few and far between. A quick Google search for “climate change movies” brings up almost exclusively documentaries and disaster films. Thus far, the environmental movement has not produced this generation’s equivalent of On the Beach.
So why is climate change so hard to talk about in entertainment in a realistic way? And more importantly, can climate change stories simultaneously entertain and inspire actions that are desperately needed to fix the climate crisis?
To get some hints as to what it takes to make climate change entertaining, we can look to climate communicators. Climate communicators can include artists, writers, and performers who are trying to bring climate change into entertainment in a way that encourages people to think and act on it, as well as scientists who specialize in science communication strategies.
Jared Scott, director and writer of The Great Green Wall, is a documentary filmmaker who uses his films to spark social change. Documentaries are one of the more common settings for climate change entertainment, besides disaster flicks. While obviously not fictional, they are a good place to start when looking for strategies to talk about climate change in film.
Scott says that the impact of a narrative in a film is vital to its persuasive ability. “I don't think there’s one magical recipe for [making a climate change film], but I think you’ve got to think about how to tell the best story possible,” Scott said. “People love stories and learning things through stories. That stuff matters no matter what you're doing.”
But within the story, a documentary needs to have facts. “You want to have enough where there’s substance but you can’t overplay that card,” Scott said. “People will tune out.”
In his work, Scott often employs the “spectrum of allies” tool. This tool classifies people as those who are actively trying to make change, those who are passively accepting change, those who are passively opposing change, and those who are actively opposing change.
By putting the audience into these categories, Scott can tailor his work to try to get as many people as possible to take a step in the direction of actively making change, even if not everyone makes it to that ideal end goal.
He does this by telling climate stories through different lenses that will appeal to different audiences. For example, by having four-star generals frame climate change as a national security concern, Scott’s work can appeal to the more politically conservative.
More and more frequently, climate change has also been depicted in media other than documentaries.
David Klass is a professor of film at the Columbia University School of the Arts, screenwriter, and novelist whose recent thriller novel Out of Time centers on an FBI agent’s hunt for an elusive eco-terrorist. His novel blends action and environmental issues in a unique way.
Understanding the science is a crucial part of understanding the gravity of climate change. But unlike a documentary where the audience knows they’re going to be presented with facts, it's difficult to make that science entertaining enough for a fictional story.
“Even in a novel, you can't be didactic. You can’t try to teach or get too deep into just giving information,” Klass said. “Readers don't really buy a novel to be taught or preached at.”
But in Out of Time, Klass still sneaks some educational content in. Before the eco-terrorist in Klass’s novel plans to carry out an attack on a fracking site, he goes to the Library of Congress to study up on fracking.
“That was an excuse for me to kind of look over his shoulder,” Klass said of the scene. By having the character learn about the arguments for and against fracking, the reader also, hopefully, learns something.
Klass was also given the opportunity to adapt his novel to a screenplay for a movie. However, in moving this content from one medium to another, things got lost in translation.
“When I first adapted the novel, I left the Library of Congress scene in a greatly modified version, but it was the first thing that got cut out because it just doesn't work in a movie. Movies are active. Movies are dramatic,” Klass said. “Going to a library to read about fracking isn’t very exciting, as any environmental science student can tell you. So that information which I think is really crucial – what he’s doing, why he’s trying to do it – has to be put in dramatic terms.”
Klass then describes a scene from the screenplay in which the eco-terrorist and his wife argue about fracking. Through that scene, the audience picks up on some of the knowledge from the novel.
Speaking from his experience in screenwriting, Klass sheds light on Hollywood’s thought process when it comes to making movies about climate change.
“I think that every studio and every network in Hollywood is developing projects related to climate change, but the trick is finding a way to present that material in a story that is not completely polarizing and that is entertaining enough so that people are going to want to watch it,” Klass said. “It can’t be about educating. That’s really not why people make movies.”
Klass adds that even though movies can sometimes be used to spread important messages, they are ultimately made to make money. “When people are investing millions of dollars to make a movie, it's partly a commercial vehicle and there's no getting away from that,” Klass said.
One of the rarer forms of climate communication aiming to engage audiences is climate comedy.
Rollie Williams is a student in the Climate and Society master’s program at Columbia University and one of New York’s only climate comedians. Before the pandemic, Williams starred in An Inconvenient Talk Show at the Caveat Theater, where he played Al Gore going on what Williams calls an “apology accepted tour” for being ahead of the game on climate action. In the show, Williams would bring in headliner comedians from shows such as Saturday Night Live, as well as climate experts from institutions like NASA.
An issue that’s often brought up when discussing how to make climate science more accessible is that scientists are not always great communicators. Williams disagrees with this and presents a different theory.
“Scientists’ whole thing is doing science and discovering stuff, but I feel like they’re also expected to then take all that information and know all the tricks of the packaging trade to get it to go viral on Reddit, for example. I feel like it’s asking so much of this group that we’re already asking so much of,” Williams said.
Despite the difficulties scientists face when it comes to communication, Williams believes that putting science in a comedic setting can be a useful tool for creating awareness. In addition to his talk show, Williams also creates short, funny videos that cover different environmental issues for his web series, Climate Town. Similar to how Klass sneaked fracking facts into his novel and screenplay, Williams sees his Climate Town videos as “a vehicle you can Trojan horse the information in on.”
From a scientist’s perspective, Dr. Lisa Dale sees one of the main challenges to climate communication in general as being the politicization surrounding the issue. Dale teaches in the Undergraduate Program on Sustainable Development at Columbia University and her research focuses on climate adaptation policy.
“I think people who don’t have a background in climate change science believe it to be a politicized issue so they bring to the conversation all of their political values and beliefs. These beliefs interfere with their ability to hear scientific information as factual and objective data,” she says.
Beyond the difficulties of starting the conversation about climate change, there are challenges with how the conversation may be perceived by the audience.
“I think it's very difficult to explain a scientific concept to a non-scientific audience as a starting point, but when you add in these self-imposed layers of politicization, people perceive the speaker to have ulterior motives or other political goals. That can make it really difficult to talk about science.”
While disaster films can bring up these environmental issues, Dale personally doesn’t think they are very helpful for having a productive conversation on what to do about climate change. To her, these movies make climate change into “so terrifying of a force that the conclusion in my mind is that there's nothing we can do about this. It’s so massive that it makes me passive in my response.”
However, Dale thinks these movies can play a role in keeping climate in peoples’ thoughts. “[Climate disaster movies] serve to alert people that [climate change] is happening, it’s out there, and this is one possible scenario of how this plays out,” she adds. “If that drives that person to have climate change in the back of their mind, for example, when they make voting decisions, maybe it's a good thing.”
Dr. Benjamin Orlove, a professor at Columbia University deeply involved in climate science and climate communication, as well as a lead author on two Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, is generally more optimistic about the usefulness of climate disaster films.
Orlove believes disaster films “are not outside the climate agenda. They’re part of it. They're part of the public conversation.”
He sees climate fiction, or “cli-fi,” as helpful for getting people in touch with their feelings about climate change. “People want to be able to imagine and experience different threats,” Orlove explains, “and so it seems when you watch a movie, you're actually experiencing something. Your feelings, your immediate reactions come forward.”
By presenting fictional climate futures that may not be entirely accurate, audiences can still have an opportunity to recognize their feelings around climate change. “Then they can think of how they feel when they read about the wildfires in California,” Orlove says. “Fictional climate futures do open up a kind of discussion.”
However, not all climate communicators are optimistic that entertainment and the arts can engage people in meaningful discussions or actions surrounding climate change.
David Finnigan, writer of the satirical comedy Kill Climate Deniers, is a playwright from Australia whose body of work features many environmental topics. Finnigan originally began writing pieces about climate change in the 2000s as a way to try to engage audiences who did not already grasp the climate crisis.
“I kind of landed on the notion that there was this undecided mass of people who were ready to be activated into climate action and they just needed to be talked to in the right way,” Finnigan recalls. There was only one problem – the work wasn’t being seen by the target audience of climate skeptics. It was being seen by already climate-motivated progressives.
After years of trying to carefully craft his language so that he wasn’t just preaching to the choir, Finnigan became disillusioned with the idea that his work could influence the climate skeptic audience. Now, when he writes pieces that address climate change, he does so for himself because the topic genuinely interests him, instead of doing it to inspire political climate action.
While Linus Pauling, the Nobel Prize winner, believed that On the Beach would be seen as influential on the path to nuclear disarmament, Finnigan does not share that belief that climate art has the ability to influence the world.
“I think it's probably a sign of our desperation that we try to load up art with this hope that it could affect political change,” he says.
To Finnigan, it's not just that someone hasn’t yet figured out how to make art to ignite real change. He simply thinks art fundamentally doesn’t have that capacity.
“Because art is a very visible and present thing for us, we tend to look back and ascribe great power to the art that was made in a particular era,” Finnigan adds. “We’ll look back at the music of the civil rights era and say that the protest songs of the sixties were a part of the driving force. I think the reality is that they were not. They were what we remember, and therefore we ascribe them power.”
“I think actually what drives change are the actions of all of the protesters and political activists who are kind of forcing the dial,” he says.
Perhaps to use climate entertainment as a force for change, it will only be a matter of connecting with those who already understand its severity. Then again, such climate communication might also need to reach across the aisle so that everyone is involved in ending this crisis.
Either way, it seems as though we do not yet have the On the Beach-type story about climate change that will save the world.
But despite the scarcity of cli-fi entertainment, it's heartening to know creative people are working on the problem.