Overview
Can the entertainment industry be enlisted to advance understanding of climate change science and its implications, while answering to its primary goal of entertaining consumers? What role can documentary film play? How can the advertising and public relations industries be harnessed to engender an appropriate level of public understanding and engagement regarding climate change science? Project Participants are addressing these and other issues to help generate strategies designed to engender better public understanding of the science and implications of climate change.
Participants
Rob Brodsky
Kathy Daniel
William Dugan
David Elisco
David Fenton
Al Franken
Melanie Green
Randall Katz
Deborah Levin
Jennifer McCharen
Vikki Spruill
Ellen Susman
Adam Wolfensohn
5 comments
January 4th, 2007 at 1:55 am
Bob Perkowitz
Most efforts on climate change focus on issues. The eight ‘influential areas’ of this project focus on channels. Ultimately we have to get to people. Better would be to start with people and move them toward awareness, attitude and behaviors to address the challenge.
Enterainment and advertising? Build the base. Try consumer (people) research and marketing.
January 11th, 2007 at 2:30 pm
Jaclyn Brown
I feel that there is a whole group of people we are missing when we communicate climate change. People, lets call them ‘the highbrow’ group, that read newspapers and watch documentaries have been listening to us. How do we reach the people that watch commercial television and don’t watch documentaries etc. I think the entertainment industry is one way to reach them. Make climate change and global warming words that are used in sitcoms. Why can’t someone on CSI die from global warming? There are cases where people have already died from global warming (though maybe not in the US, certainly in Europe and Australia).
January 11th, 2007 at 4:26 pm
Jaclyn Brown
How about this for a way to reach young people: http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200701/s1824850.htm
A whole music festival that is carbon neutral.
April 6th, 2007 at 2:06 pm
Richard Jordan
Nifty cover to the 53-page white paper issued by the UN Intl. School for their 2-day conference on climate change, 1-2 March, shows the earth with a thermometer and the mercury almost at the very top.
Effective, very understandable. Says it all.
Richard Jordan
Chairman, 60th DPI/NGO COnference, UN Headquarters, 5-7 Sept. 2007
March 17th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
Chris O'Brien
I believe that movies can often be more effective than documentaries in getting ideas across to people because the element of human interest in movies helps people relate more deeply to what is happening on the screen. I have come to believe that for people to really care about an issue, they have to be touched by it at an emotional level, and just giving them more information about the issue is simply not enough.
Scaring people is certainly one way to motivate them (and there’s a lot that’s scary about climate change) but I feel that, although fear can motivate, it can also cause hopelessness and even paralysis. Love is the supreme motivator (hey, that sounds familiar!) and that’s what my movie idea is all about. However, it’s a particular kind of love, a love that has deeply motivated our species for a very long time, but recently seems to have been forgotten.
This love arises from an understanding that everything in the universe is interconnected and interdependent. Or, as a professor of mine, John Livingston, once put it, “not only is everything dependent on everything else; everything IS everything else.”
I have an idea for a movie (with lots of human interest and good old-fashioned entertainment!) that is aimed at helping people understand that they are part of something much larger than themselves. It is the story of a man’s journey through time as he struggles to return to the early 22nd century from just after the moment of creation. Along the way he witnesses the unfolding of the cosmos and eventually, the evolution of life on Earth. Needless to say, he (and, I hope, the audience) is profoundly changed by the experience and gains a new perspective on life and existence and our place in the great scheme of things.
I believe that this new (although actually very ancient) perspective will provide people with a much wider context within which to think about things they might never have thought about before. From such thinking will come powerful motivation to come to grips with seemingly overwhelming issues such as climate change and other bio-destruction, as well as poverty, hunger, disease and inequality.
Does this sound interesting to anyone?