Climate change activism goes Hollywood

This story was originally covered by PRI’s Living on Earth. For more, listen to the audio above.

Hollywood producer Marshall Herskovitz has a history of making audiences pay attention. He’s best known for TV shows like “thirtysomething” and “My So Called Life,” and films including “Blood Diamond” and “I am Sam.” About 10 years ago, Herskovitz had a revelation. He told Living on Earth that he said to himself:

Gee, you know, I’m in a business where we make a movie, no one has heard of it. We then have a marketing department that spends $30 or $40 million, and then, a few weeks later, 80 percent of America knows about the film and some large percentage of those people want to go see it. That’s a very well established craft. Why are we not applying that to climate change?

Movie stars like Leonardo DiCaprio and films like “An Inconvenient Truth” have tried to get people interested in climate change before. Herskovitz doesn’t think it’s worked as well as it should. “It’s pretty damn hard to move America on this,” he says, “and there’s still a need for a campaign and so I’m still working on it.”

“We’re talking about what may be the largest campaign ever mounted,” Herskovitz told Living on Earth. He said he’s not at liberty to talk about all of the details, but he says, “it’s not just about climate change — it’s about the idea of an energy revolution.”

The campaign will be based around the idea that solving climate change “would actually solve four or five or six other intractable societal problems we have in the United States,” including “unemployment, the deficit, our trade deficit, health, national security.” Herskovitz believes this approach could help convince people, whether or not they believe in climate change at all.

“We need people to act right now, and we need people to act in a huge manner,” Herskovitz told Living on Earth. “It’s very hard to get across to people the scale at which we have to act.” He continues:

People think that if they change their light bulbs, or if they buy a car that gets 32 miles-per-gallon, that they’re contributing to the solution of the problem. But that’s not going to stop climate change. We need a revolution.

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Hosted by Steve Curwood, “Living on Earth” is an award-winning environmental news program that delves into the leading issues affecting the world we inhabit. More about “Living on Earth.”