Call it the John Oliver effect. The last few years have seen a surge in satirical web series with their targets set squarely on bad actors in government and the fossil fuel sector. Foremost among them is Climate Town, a YouTube channel run by comedian Rollie Williams, whose long-form takedowns of oil and gas disinformation are deeply researched and addictively hilarious for his nearly 600,000 subscribers.

Williams may be the current reigning king of climate comedy, but his court of jesters is growing rapidly, thanks in part to private donors, non-profits and family foundations using their resources to support comics making jokes about climate change. In October, the Center for Media & Social Impact received US$1 million in new donor funding for its humour programs, including the Climate Comedy Cohort, a nine-month fellowship that puts together comedians with climate scientists.

It’s an auspicious pairing. The U.K.-based series Climate Science Translated garnered nine million views on X alone, by having well-known comedians function as interpreters for researchers. “Climate science is complicated, so we’re translating it into human,” the series claims. When University College London climate scientist Bill McGuire says that there are up to 1.4 trillion tons of methane that could be released from permafrost in Siberia, Welsh comedian Kiri Pritchard-McLean explains, “Evil gases literally exploding out of the ground in Siberia: I’m no David Attenborough, but that shit’s not right, is it?”

Adam McKay is another big name in the climate comedy space. The creator of Don’t Look Up and other blockbuster Hollywood comedies has received philanthropic funding to launch Yellow Dot Studios, a media non-profit that uses comedy, parody and striking visual edits “to raise awareness and mobilize action on the climate emergency.” His collaborators include the SNL alumnus Tim Robinson, the chaotic comedian behind I Think You Should Leave, and Rainn Wilson, who played Dwight in The Office.

But can climate change really be funny? You’d be forgiven for doubting. Here’s the peak of punchlines that you can find on the internet: “Why don’t people take climate change seriously? It’d be a lot cooler if they did.”

We can do without climate jokes, but climate humour is something we really do need, if only to make sense of the jargon, wonkery and greenwashing that permeates the space. “It’s easier to engage when you are laughing,” says Aaron Hagey-MacKay, a comedian and creator of The Goose Media in Canada. “There is some joy to doing comedy in this regard because it’s such a heavy and boring subject. What a boring apocalypse this is! It’s death by graphs.”

Hagey-MacKay creates sarcastic explainers on topics like Canada’s carbon tax, and he’s found plenty of traction online for his climate-focused satire. The Goose currently has more than 11,000 followers on TikTok, and last year he received funding from Montreal’s Trottier Family Foundation – by way of the Small Change Fund – to continue his work. “I won’t lie, it was a bit of a bet,” acknowledges Jean-Patrick Toussaint, senior director of Trottier’s climate program, which generally funds traditional climate action, such as clean energy development. But Toussaint says that with its Comedy for Climate project, the foundation wanted to support efforts to reach an audience the environmental sector as a whole has not traditionally tapped into.

Apart from The Goose, Trottier is funding Lil D’Bunk, a YouTube series that features child actors debunking greenwashing myths like “natural gas”; The Big Oil Alliance, an award-winning series by Artists for Real Climate Action that sends up climate commitments by fossil fuel industry associations; the Webby Award–winning Hot Globe show; and an upcoming series by Sean Devlin, the comedian who created Shit Harper Did, called The Weird Weather Report.

As John Oliver’s brand of blistering and surprisingly informative mockery demonstrates, satire can be a more effective tool for communication. “No one wants to hear about climate right now,” Hagey-MacKay admits. “With creeping fascism, war and affordability issues more top of mind, it’s not even registering.” He’s learned to couch his climate communications in more immediate concerns, he says, like the affordability crisis. “The good news is that climate touches everything, so you can always find a connection point.”

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From hurling maple syrup at an Emily Carr painting, mashed potatoes at a Monet and soup at a van Gogh, to gluing themselves to gallery walls, climate activists have been focusing on powerful cultural symbols to draw attention to their cause. It’s not lost on the activists that many of these artworks were directly inspired by the natural world.

Museum leaders have both condemned and sympathized with the protesters. In November, the International Council of Museums noted that it “wishes for museums to be seen as allies in facing the common threat of climate change.”

Regardless of whether the art protests succeed in creating allies or adversaries, the connection between art and climate has grown increasingly pertinent and powerful in recent years. Well-known artists like Danish-Icelandic installation artist Olafur Eliasson and Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky have created provocative works about the climate emergency. Artists don’t want to be sidelined in conversations about our planet’s future.

Heaven and hell in the anthropocene

This was certainly the case at the COP27 climate summit in Egypt in November, where delegates were treated to some thought-provoking art installations. Turkey’s pavilion, for example, displayed 14 sculptural “portraits” created by Deniz Sağdıç from waste she’d collected. In the children and youth pavilion, Indian artist Shilo Shiv Suleman painted a mural of three female climate activists standing up to the industrial players who are decimating regions in the Global South.

But perhaps the most discussed of these pieces has been Egyptian artist Bahia Shehab’s Heaven and Hell in the Anthropocene. This installation included two rooms that were intended to represent humanity’s potential futures. After choosing which room to enter, visitors would be treated to vastly different temperatures, smells, sights and sounds to simulate either the “hell” of not addressing the climate crisis or the “heaven” of effective climate action.

Shehab’s exhibit – which will be shared via an open licence for others to recreate – tried to trigger a visceral response to climate change. Inspired by a 2011 study that showed that people were less likely to show apathy toward climate change when immersed in higher temperatures, Shehab wanted to help people directly experience the impacts of global heating.

Web of Canadian climate art

Shehab is part of a growing movement of artists worldwide who are testing new models to incite action on climate. This movement is evident in such global organizations as Music Declares Emergency, U.S.-based organizations like the Arts & Climate Initiative and the Climate Museum, and several Canadian groups.

One of these Canadian organizations, SCALE/LeSAUT, links artists from across the country to brainstorm ideas for how the cultural sector can have an impact on high-level policy initiatives. A more grassroots initiative, the Climate Art Web (CAW-WAC), attempts to connect climate artists to create community and discuss best practices. Some of these best practices have included focusing on open resource sharing as well as developing a decolonizing toolkit to support collaborative practices between Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists. CAW-WAC also offers a Climate Art Map to help artists and organizations invested in climate justice find one another across northern Turtle Island. Interestingly, rather than use colonial boundaries (such as provincial and national borders), the map uses ecozones and Indigenous territories to align with CAW-WAC’s decolonizing goals.

CAW-WAC is the brainchild of the climate art collective TRAction, which also recently launched a social media campaign called the 10 Ways Project. This project brings together 10 artists from across the country to tackle a specific theme, in this case “10 Ways to Fix the Planet.” After participating in facilitated sessions with climate experts and activists, the artists – who range from circus performers to spoken word artists to actors and more – each created a one-minute short to be shared on various social media platforms.

The videos range from satirical – as in Kitchener-based comedian Ben Gorodetsky’s Eat the Rich video – to more earnest critiques of our habits. For instance, in Vancouver-based dance artist Kaili Che’s video, she takes on the fast fashion industry by starting in her own closet. From quickly cycling through her outfits to seemingly being drowned by them, Che offers an artistic statement about the volumes of clothing that are overwhelming landfills.

Another of the 10 Ways artists is Sandra Lamouche, a Cree dancer and storyteller now living on the Kainai Nation in southern Alberta. Her work for the 10 Ways Project, called Stewardess of the Land, has spawned a larger project called Just Breathe, Okâwîmâwaskiy, which I am co-creating in collaboration with Lamouche. Concerned about the apathy and general disregard for the climate crisis that we’ve witnessed in southern Alberta, Lamouche and I decided to take a different approach.

When Just Breathe, Okâwîmâwaskiy premieres in Calgary in January 2023, small audiences of 25 people will be led on an immersive journey that both simulates and soothes climate anxiety. Yet, like Bahia Shehab’s work for COP27, the journey is meant to jolt audiences out of complacency and present alternative solutions to our dilemma.

What such efforts demonstrate is that artists are not only drawing attention to the crisis; they are also exploring ways to change our daily responses to it. This does not mean that climate artists are naive about how critical it is for political leaders and the corporate sector to step up. Rather, it shows that artists are aware of how influential people’s behaviours, patterns of consumption and value systems are for achieving significant change. And, importantly, in our heavily polarized society, art and artistic processes might be one of the only ways to keep dialogue about such changes open and amicable.

Melanie Kloetzel is co-director of the climate art collective, TRAction, and a professor of dance at the University of Calgary.

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Even as environmentalists slam soccer’s World Cup for fudging its green credentials, one obscure English team is winning applause far and wide for its eco-friendly practices.

On the very day that Dale Vince took over as owner of the Forest Green Rovers in 2010, he moved to ban the sale of beef burgers at the team’s stadium in Nailsworth, a village in the Cotswolds, the rolling hills of central-southwestern England. Even bigger changes followed, and not all to the liking of local fans.

The stadium menu soon featured only vegan items, and single-use plastics were banned. Fans were told that if they didn’t like what the stadium served, they were welcome to bring their own food. The pitch is now kept green with seaweed and captured rainwater instead of pesticides, and it’s mowed by a solar-powered robot. The team often travels in an electric bus. Charging stations have been installed at the stadium for fans who drive electric vehicles.

Forest Green competes in the lowly third division of the four-tier professional English football league, yet it has won recognition from the United Nations as the world’s first carbon-neutral football club and been honoured with a “momentum for change” climate action award.

The team was close to bankruptcy when Vince arrived, but, as he told Bloomberg earlier this year, “we’ve attracted a lot of sponsors in the last couple of years that other clubs at our level don’t get.”

Vince, 61, has been an ardent environmentalist most of his life. He quit school at 15, becoming a New Age traveller with a windmill mounted on his trailer. He went on to start a wind energy business, set up the U.K.’s first electric-vehicle charging network, and formed a vegan food company.

While his activism initially drove some fans away, many more new ones have arrived. What’s more, Vince says, “Our fans come here. They see what we’ve done. They go home and they start to change the way they live.”

Forest Green is also winning more matches. A local village team for most of its 133-year history, it was promoted to the third tier of the English league earlier this year.

“I just don’t think there has to be a conflict between the environment and economics and ethics,” Vince says. As if to make the point, work is due to start soon on a new stadium for the team, made entirely from timber. It will be named Eco Park.

Zeros: LIV Golf Investments

Serena Williams, Billie Jean King and Colin Kaepernick are among a growing band of brave sports stars who have shown that sport and politics do – and indeed should – mix. Sadly, that message is taking far too long to percolate into the cloistered world of golf.

It was not until 2012 that Augusta National, home of the Masters, admitted its first women members. Now, LIV Golf Investments, led by the retired Australian star Greg Norman, is thumbing its nose at human rights activists by launching an international tour in competition with the long-established PGA.

Doling out super-generous contracts and prize money, LIV – the Roman numeral for 54, the number of holes played in its events – has signed up almost a dozen of the world’s top 50 players, among them Phil Mickelson and Dustin Johnson.

LIV might deserve some credit if the new tour was just about ending a long-standing monopoly. However, it likely would not even exist without the backing of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), which has put up US$2 billion of its oil-generated wealth to lure golfers away from the PGA. With assets of US$620 billion, the PIF is the world’s fifth-largest sovereign wealth fund.

Outsiders can only guess at the Saudis’ motivation. Is it their love of golf? A craving for power in the sports world (they also bought control of England’s Newcastle United Football Club in October 2021)? Or part of a wider strategy to flex their muscles on the international stage?

The widely held suspicion is that LIV is above all an egregious case of “sports-washing,” designed to distract from Saudi Arabia’s human rights violations, including the dismemberment of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the war in Yemen, and the repression of Saudi women and the LGBTQ2S+ community.

Referring to Khashoggi’s murder, Norman told Sky Sports News, “We’ve all made mistakes.” The Saudis, he added, “want to change that culture and they are changing that culture, and you know how they’re doing it? Golf.”

We’re not so sure. As recently as August, a Saudi court sentenced Salma al-Shehab, a doctoral student and mother of two, to 45 years in prison for spreading “rumours” and retweeting dissidents.

Not that Canada is in a position to judge. This country exported more than $1.7 billion in arms to Saudi Arabia in 2021, according to Global Affairs Canada. Most of those exports were combat vehicles. No word on whether Canada is also exporting golf carts.

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Since 2019, that slogan has been a rallying cry for the music industry. It’s been amplified by major artists like Billie Eilish, Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker and Thom Yorke of Radiohead, who’ve worn or designed shirts with those apocalyptic words. It’s shown up on the backdrops of arena tours, on award-show red carpets, on album compilations and playlists.

The catchphrase is part of a campaign by the global non-profit organization Music Declares Emergency (MDE), which has gathered big-name musicians across the world to pledge action in the face of the climate crisis.

But as festivals are cancelled because of wildfires, bands are forced to reroute tours because of road floodings, and large outdoor concerts become major risks for heat stroke, the music industry is starting to wake up to urgent omens. More than just a fashion statement, the sector’s eco-enthusiasm has to come with concrete, identifiable actions. They have to do it together – not just the musicians onstage, but also promoters, labels, record manufacturers, merchandisers, concert promoters and record labels. And they have to do it quickly.

Late last year, in the wake of COP26, the U.K.’s Association of Independent Music launched the Music Climate Pact, which was signed by all three major labels – Universal, Warner and Sony – along with large indies like Secretly Group and Ninja Tune. Agreeing to work collectively, the pact includes a commitment from each signatory to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero by 2050 and achieve a 50% reduction by 2030.

For an industry with many interlocking stakeholders, one that relies on vast amounts of energy-intensive manufacturing, streaming and travel, the challenge is figuring out how to meet their agreed-upon targets.

“Being green and sustainable is a shared value for a lot of people in the music industry, but no one really knows how to do it,” says Ben Swanson, co-founder of the Bloomington, Indiana–based record label Secretly Canadian and Secretly Group, which also represents other large American indie labels, including Jagjaguwar, Numero Group and Dead Oceans. “In terms of implementation, it’s still a relatively new concept.”

Swanson and his colleagues at Secretly Canadian have tried various eco-conscious initiatives over the years, including minimizing product packaging and avoiding pressing more CDs and records than they can sell (with some “missteps,” Swanson admits), but always wanted to be more strategic and intentional about it.

So, last year, on the label’s 25th anniversary, they hired climate consultant Jen Cregar of Terra Lumina and published an official Sustainability Plan. In it, they calculated their actual carbon footprint (116 MTCO2e, or metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, in 2021) and pledged to become “carbon negative” by their 30th anniversary in 2026 – a more ambitious goal than the Music Climate Pact that they also signed.

Swanson admits it won’t be a perfect estimate, but keeping track and staying transparent about the numbers will make it easier to improve upon them, both for themselves and for others following in their footsteps.

As an example, he points to Big Time, the 2022 album by singer/songwriter Angel Olsen. Aiming to create a carbon-negative album release, they calculated the “cradle-to-grave” carbon impact of both a CD and vinyl LP from manufacturing to shipping, from its life in a fan’s stereo to its likely afterlife in a landfill 100 years from now. With a quantifiable number, they then built in the price of carbon offsets supporting the Medford Spring Grassland Conservation Project in Bent County, Colorado. Offsetting is an inexact science, Swanson admits, and it’s not as sustainable as avoiding the output in the first place, but it creates a replicable – and improvable – template for future releases for both their label and others.

“Being green is a shared value for a lot of people in the music industry, but no one really knows how to do it.”

—Ben Swanson, Secretly Group

Secretly Group was part of a panel at the Canadian Music Climate Summit in Toronto earlier this fall about labels and sustainability. Organized by the Canadian wing of MDE, the summit was a daylong conference and concert ahead of November’s COP27 in Egypt. With panels about green touring and concerts, the role of artists, funding and diversity, and a keynote by David Suzuki, it was intended to give musicians the tools to take actions in their own practices – something they are often reluctant to do for fear of being labelled hypocrites, given their touring lifestyles.

But, more importantly, it was an attempt to get the “right people in the room,” says organizer and climate activist Kim Fry. “The musicians, for the most part, are on board,” she says. “It’s the labels, the managers, the tour managers, the venues.”

She knows from experience through her daughter, Brighid Fry, one of the co-founders of MDE Canada. Her folk-rock duo, Housewife (formerly Moscow Apartment), has made sustainability an integral part of their practice. But as an emerging act, one led by two 20-year-old women, they don’t have the power to enact big, sweeping change on a structural level. They’re using the power they do have, though, especially when it comes to advocacy. Last year, Brighid co-authored an open letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and this year she’s written a similar one directed at the decision-makers behind the scenes in the music industry, asking them to use their power for climate action.

“I just don’t think there’s really an excuse [not to],” she says. “Because if the people on the public side of the industry want it and the audiences want it, then why isn’t it being followed through behind the scenes?”

As an artist, she can do things like using green riders – asking for sustainable options like refillable water options both front- and backstage and strongly encouraging venues to use renewable energy. She can negotiate a sustainability clause into her record contract. She can work with T-shirt makers that use water-based ink and closed-loop manufacturing. All are recommendations within MDE’s Music Industry Climate Pack, which offers 10 steps for sustainability for artists, venues, merch, labels, touring and fans. But if the venues, promoters, engineers, labels, lawyers, audiences and multinational corporations don’t cooperate, there’s only so much performers can do.

While major pop stars can afford to rent or buy electric tour buses and fight against radius clauses that restrict playing multiple shows in one market, it’s harder and costlier for smaller acts. And those major acts carry a much larger carbon footprint. After being identified as a band with one of the biggest carbon footprints, the members of Coldplay paused touring in 2019 until they could work out how their tour “can not only be sustainable [but] how can it be actively beneficial.” Earlier this year Coldplay announced that its air travel would be powered by green jet fuel but was then accused of greenwashing for partnering with Neste, whose controversial “sustainable aviation fuel” might not be entirely green.

Even if a stadium act takes an electric bus to a concert, they also have to account for the travel of the tens and hundreds of thousands of fans to get there. (Some have encouraged fans with contests, discounts and other initiatives to carpool or take public transit.)

Building on work done by British organization Julie’s Bicycle over the last decade, the Centre for Sustainable Practice in the Arts recently launched Creative Green Tools Canada – a free and user-friendly interface to calculate the carbon footprint of a tour, concert or festival. Devon Hardy, the program’s director, says she hopes it normalizes tracking emissions for music events. “Even just the act of collecting that data can make folks more aware of their behaviours and start changing them,” she writes in an email.

One of the goals of the Toronto Music Climate Summit was to make people aware of tools like these, says Kim Fry. Many in the Canadian music industry don’t look beyond the usual arts funders such as SOCAN to realize there is money available from the federal government for green initiatives. The Ministry of Transportation’s Zero Emission Vehicle Infrastructure Program, for instance, has funding that could be used for tour travel.

In general, Canada is lagging behind other countries like the U.K., Australia and even the U.S. when it comes to sustainability in the music industry, Fry argues. There are a few potential reasons for that. Touring is harder in Canada because it’s so geographically spread out. The industry is small and slow to change. And many of the major events and award shows are sponsored by Canada’s big banks, which are some of the largest investors in carbon-burning oil and gas projects.

“If the music industry thinks it’s immune to the impacts of climate, it’s so naive,” she says. “We want them to understand the severity of the emergency we’re all facing.”

Richard Trapunski is the former associate music editor at Toronto’s NOW Magazine and reports on culture and business for various publications.

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The Big Fix: Seven Practical Steps to Save Our Planet

It’s easy to get bogged down when thinking about what we can do as individuals to help solve a problem as enormous as the climate crisis. Many have tried to do their part by being green consumers who recycle and bike to work. But this by itself won’t be enough, say energy expert Hal Harvey and New York Times reporter Justin Gillis in this new book. Those kinds of actions are important, but we’ll need to go a step further and become green citizens, they say. “The government, all the way from town councils to Congress, exercises enormous influence over the technologies available in the marketplace,” they write. “By inserting themselves into the most important of these decisions, ordinary citizens can help to capture the magic of the learning curve.” The Big Fix offers a guide to doing just that in seven crucial areas: transportation, buildings, land use, electricity, industry, cities and cleantech. Harvey and Gillis hope to arm individuals with their pragmatic optimism and the tools they need to push for action on several public policies that can have a big impact, showing us that not all is lost and that we do have the ability to make a difference.

Beyond Climate Breakdown: Envisioning New Stories of Radical Hope

The stories that humanity tells are central to our understanding of the world. Unfortunately, when it comes to climate change, those stories have become muddled. An otherwise straightforward narrative of destruction has become confusing for many to follow, opening the door to distraction and denial. Journalist and author Peter Friederici argues that the stories we have been telling about climate change and how we tell them haven’t shifted public opinion or policy in a strong enough way. Friederici’s Beyond Climate Breakdown calls for a reimagining of how we tell the story of climate change to embrace complexity. And we need new stories from parts of the world that have long been left out of mainstream storytelling, he says. “What we need, then, is not to discard narrative but to reclaim it from the dominance of the relative handful of narrators whose dead-end story lines have taken us to the brink of catastrophe,” he writes.

The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War: Charting the Rise and Fall of U.S. Military Emissions

It may come as a surprise to some that the U.S. military (and more broadly the American national security apparatus) has been a leader within the American government when it comes to mapping out the strategic implications of climate change. The Pentagon doesn’t typically attract personnel who would consider themselves climate activists. But the climate crisis has destabilizing effects that can fuel armed conflict around the world. In this book, political scientist Neta Crawford reveals how the military has contributed to climate change, not just through its own significant emissions (which it long resisted accounting for), but by influencing the broader economy’s fossil fuel use. “Deep reductions in Pentagon fossil fuel use could have enormous positive implications for the global climate and the U.S. economy, creating a positive feedback loop as powerful as the deep cycle that has amplified global military and military-industrial emissions,” she writes.

The Future Is Now: Solving the Climate Crisis with Today’s Technologies

With the dizzying amount of cleantech in development, it can sometimes seem like the research needed to solve the climate crisis is in its infancy. But in this book, Bob McDonald (the host of CBC’s Quirks & Quarks) reminds us that we already have all the technological tools we need to arrive at a clean-energy future. McDonald takes the reader on a bit of an energy safari – from wind and solar to fusion and tidal power – showing off some of humanity’s impressive achievements and explaining how they’ll all fit together in a green future in the radio host’s trademark style of making science easily digestible. Rather than being another climate wake-up call, the book is packed with optimism. As McDonald makes clear, it’s not a lack of scientific advancement that’s holding us back. We just need the necessary level of financial investment and the political will to get the transition done.

The post Four solution-packed books about climate change you need to read this fall appeared first on Corporate Knights.

If they blow a hole in the backbone
The one that runs cross the muscles of the land
We might get a load of stone for the road
But I don’t know how much longer we can stand…

Harmer grew up near Mount Nemo in north Burlington – a dramatic craggy outcropping on the Niagara Escarpment, which is a UNESCO World Biosphere Reserve. The damage being inflicted on the area’s delicate flora and fauna fired not just her indignation, but also her creative imagination.

For Harmer, opposition to this onslaught of industrial activity became a cause célèbre as she used her guitar, her song-writing skills and her fan base to help marshal supporters and donors to a high-profile 2009 campaign to protect the species and natural heritage threatened by these operations.

Almost a decade later, she’s fighting again, this time an encroachment by developers building on a designated “Area of Natural and Scientific Interest” (ANSI) north of Kingston. The so-called Johnston’s Point recreational properties project, on Loughborough Lake, threatens six endangered species, including the Blanding’s turtle. The developer’s pitch is to create a “benefit” for endangered species elsewhere in the province, a loophole introduced in 2013. “Any attack on our living systems is problematic,” Harmer observes, noting that she’s once again playing numerous benefit concerts to help raise funds and awareness to fight the project. “Everyone has a role. But music takes it up to a different place.”

Harmer, of course, belongs to a long tradition in Canada’s far-flung arts community – creators working in a range of media to draw attention to both the risks facing the environment and the beauty of Canada’s natural heritage. Their ranks include the late novelist Farley Mowat, guitar virtuoso Bruce Cockburn and photographer Edward Burtynsky (“Anthropocene”), as well as Indigenous artists such as Kenojuak Ashevak, the ground-breaking Inuit painter renowned for her iconic depictions of mythic Arctic creatures and landscapes.

With sustained political attacks on policies like carbon taxes and green energy, as well as a general loosening of environmental protections, artists like Harmer have a lot on their plates, both politically and artistically. “Right now,” she says, “it’s an onslaught.”

Herewith, four other creators who are focusing attention on these issues.

The Story-Teller:

Margaret Atwood

The period when Margaret Atwood, arguably Canada’s most popular novelist, emerged as an outspoken environmental activist occurred in the mid-to late 1980s, a time when logging companies were pressing to clear cut one of Ontario’s last remaining old growth forests, north of Lake Temagami.

Atwood, Mowat, former politician Bob Rae and other prominent figures joined forces with local environmental and Indigenous organizations to pressure the Ontario government to intervene, at times blockading a key logging road.

Yet to anyone familiar with Atwood’s writing, Canada’s wild spaces have served as an evocative and occasionally nightmarish backdrop to her fiction for years. The list of references is lengthy, and includes the disturbing short stories in Wilderness Trips, the jungle-like ravines in Cat’s Eye and the ravaged dystopia of The Year of the Flood.

The daughter of an entomologist, Atwood grew up in Canada’s back country; in the way that German fairy tales play out against the ominous backdrop of the Black Forest, Atwood’s fiction is defined in part by the geography of southern Ontario. While her writing often explores our phobias about what she once described as a “malevolent north,” her political stance is one of a staunch defender. “This is wartime,” she wrote in the preface of a 1989 book on how to become a green consumer. “Right now, we’re losing but it’s still a war we can win with some good luck, a lot of goodwill and a great many intelligent choices.”

Those include books. In 2003, Atwood and a handful of Canadian publishers led a high-profile push to persuade printers and publishers to begin using so-called “ancient forest friendly” paper made from 100 per cent post-consumer waste. “We have shown we can create a market,” she told Canadian Press during the Frankfurt book fair that year. Indeed, many publishers have since switched to Forest Stewardship Council-certified paper, which is made from trees harvested in sustainable ways.

Perhaps the most interesting detail of Atwood’s activism was her invention of the so-called “long pen,” an electronic device that allowed her to autograph her books remotely, thereby avoiding air travel and all the associated carbon emissions. The device was unveiled during the publicity for The Year of the Flood, which details the lives of a small group of people, “God’s Gardeners,” who survive a devastating global pandemic created by out-of-control science – genetically engineered plants, cloning, etc. – promoted by avaricious corporations. Their leader espouses the need for a “waterless flood” that will sweep away the corruption of near-future humanity and restore the natural environment.

“Science is a tool, like a hammer,” Atwood, ever the scientist’s daughter, observed in one interview. “You can use it for good or ill… Some of the technology in the book is quite handy. It’s not science you have to look at, but the human beings that use it.”

The Actor:

Rachel McAdams

While it’s hardly uncommon for Hollywood stars to promote signature charities, Rachel McAdams seems to have come by her environmentalism, well, organically. The London, Ontario-born actor, who graduated from York University and shot to international celebrity after her role in Mean Girls (2004), has long made a point of steering clear of Hollywood, living a low-carbon, low-profile lifestyle in a west-end Toronto neighbourhood.

Away from film and TV sets, she rode a bike whenever possible, didn’t own a car (until she got knocked off her bike), wore clothes made out of edamame (soy), and cultivated a habit of unplugging all the appliances in her home to save energy (which she buys from Bullfrog Power). McAdams once even enthused about a new eco-friendly funeral method: “I don’t want to have a tombstone,” she told World Entertainment News. “You can now be made into a reef! I was reading that they can make your remains into a reef and put you in the ocean and the fish can feed off you! I want to go back into the earth the same way I came.”

In an interview with The Independent, McAdams related how she discovered her passion for the planet while backpacking across Australia while in university. In her career, she chose to leverage her public profile to advance both environmental causes as well as low-carbon lifestyle choices. In 2007, she and two friends launched an eco-lifestyle consumer products website, Greenissexy.org, which they ran together for five years – an unusual side-gig for an A-list actress.

More recently, McAdams has put her name to high-profile advocacy campaigns, including Naomi Klein’s 2015 Leap Manifesto, which called on the Canadian government to take a social-justice based approach to climate change. McAdams has also used film to advance her environmental interests, narrating two documentaries, Take me to the River and Sonic Sea, which both address ecological issues.

Sonic Sea shines a disturbing light on the unheard impact of shipping-related noise pollution on sea mammals like whales and dolphins. “There is a direct physical correlation between the amount of ship noise and the physiology and stress levels of these animals,” she explains in the film. “We’re putting the ocean at risk; and when you put the ocean at risk you’re putting all of us at risk.”

The Performance Artist:

Rebecca Belmore

In a dramatic and startling video mounted at the Venice Biennale in 2005, Anishinaabekwe performance artist Rebecca Belmore wades labouriously out of the Pacific Ocean, and eventually moves towards the camera filming her. Suddenly, she hurls a bucket of water at the camera, but the liquid it contains is blood, which streams down the lens.

“The bottom line,” Belmore explained in an interview conducted during the prestigious art exhibit, “is that as human beings, we all need water. The future of water is something we should all think about, as a planet of human beings.” As she has pointed out, “We war over oil. What is going to happen when it comes to water?”

Belmore, who was born in 1960 in Upsala, northwest of Thunder Bay, is one of Canada’s most accomplished Indigenous artists, and her work has received national and international acclaim, including the inclusion of “Fountain” in Canada’s Biennale pavilion, a first for Indigenous artists.

Her themes go far beyond water and the natural environment per se. Belmore’s multi-media work explores the harsh legacy of colonization, violence and dispossession on Indigenous women and their bodies. But the suggestive presence of the despoiled natural environment always hovers around works such as “The Great Water,” a canoe tipped on its side and shrouded in a sprawling black canvas.

In some cases, she has directly addressed herself to contentious political issues, such as the Oka crisis of the late 1980s, when a builder sought to expand a golf course into a former Mohawk burial site. With a dramatic installation entitled, “Speaking to Mother” (1991), which is a giant birch-bark and wood megaphone, “the speaker’s voice is meant to reverberate throughout the land, reminding Aboriginals of their heritage and connection to the land,” critic Mia Guttmann observed in Art Toronto.

Belmore took the megaphone to numerous First Nations communities, both on reserves and in more urban settings. As she explains, “I was particularly interested in locating the Aboriginal voice on the land. Asking people to address the land directly was an attempt to hear political protest and poetic action.”

The Enabler:

Jeff Skoll

Silicon Valley billionaire Jeff Skoll, the Montreal-born, University of Toronto educated engineer who was eBay’s first employee, tells a story about how he first encountered Al Gore’s famous climate change slide presentation. In the early 2000s, in the days before TED Talks, Gore was crisscrossing the U.S. armed with a data-dense PowerPoint presentation showing the insidious advance of climate change.

In 2005, Skoll happened to be in the audience for one of Gore’s talks. “Even with all the presentations Al was making, his message would not reach enough people before it was too late,” he wrote in Variety a decade later. After the talk. Skoll, who had launched Participant Media, a film production studio for socially progressive topics, invited Gore to talk to a small group of his co-creators about turning the lecture into a film.

Despite initial skepticism from established Hollywood producers, the result, An Inconvenient Truth, went on to break documentary film records and, more important, shift the global conversation around climate change. “Environmental organizations and teachers embraced the picture in droves,” Skoll noted. “It was adopted as part of the standard curriculum for a number of countries and remains one of the largest-grossing documentaries to this day.”

After retiring from his gig as president of eBay with a $2 billion windfall, Skoll set up a $1 billion foundation dedicated to social impact investing as well as Participant Media, which has, in the past 14 years, racked up an impressive string of critically acclaimed, progressive-minded films, including Spotlight, a sequel to An Inconvenient Truth and Fast Food Nation. Prominent among the company’s output are feature films and documentaries that probe environmental themes, including a drama about the catastrophic Deepwater Horizon oil spill and Last Call at the Oasis, a 2012 film about the global water crisis.

Skoll’s strategy has also been to pair the films with advocacy campaigns – Last Call raised a huge amount to help restore water levels in the Colorado River – and other initiatives run through the foundation, such as the China-based Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, which promotes green technologies and also tracks air pollution in Chinese cities.

Given the latest predictions of rapidly accelerating climate change, Skoll’s creative and advocacy work seems doubly crucial, although he remains an optimist in the face of the abundance of troubling environmental news. “Solutions are now within reach,” he wrote two years ago. “But more than ever, there is no time to waste. We must bring these solutions to every corner of the globe.”

John Lorinc is a Toronto-based journalist and author specializing in urban issues, business, and culture.

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Green living is now par for the course for much of Hollywood (aside from the jet setting and 10,000-square-foot homes), with some of the biggest names in show business championing climate action, wildlife conservation and marine protection. The Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, for example, is “dedicated to protecting earth’s last wild places,” while Avengers star Mark Ruffalo actively lobbies for renewable energy and protests fracking. Woody Harrelson, meanwhile, co-founded a company that makes paper out of straw waste.

But when the curtain is pulled back, how green is the industry behind the actors?

Pinning down the impacts of a business as transient as last summer’s box office bomb can be a challenge. Shoot locations can change daily or weekly, sets are thrown up and torn down, swarms of extras needing to be fed and watered come and go.

One of the most comprehensive environmental assessments conducted on the biz comes out of Green Screen Toronto, and the numbers unearthed were pretty alarming.

• A single mid-sized TV series can consume up to 57,000 water bottles and 810,000 sheets of paper per season.
• A large show’s trucks, trailers and generators can burn through up to 175,000 litres of gasoline and 17,000 litres of diesel (which helps explain how UCLA estimated California’s film and TV sector releases nearly a quarter of the air pollutants that the state’s petroleum refineries do).
• Once you’re at the blockbuster movie level, you’re talking a staggering 200,000 water bottles and up to 1,000 tonnes of set construction waste for every film.

Splice it all together and you’ve got one Godzilla-sized environmental footprint.

And that doesn’t include the climate-changing carbon embedded in it all. The best figures on the sector’s greenhouse gases come out of the United Kingdom, where the British Academy of Film and Television Arts leads industry-wide carbon footprint reduction programs. In a 2014 report, it concluded that for every hour of on-screen TV, the industry chokes out 9.4 tonnes of CO2 – more than the average European produces in an entire year. This is where the audience gasps and questions whether Hollywood’s clean, green hero image is all smoke and mirrors.

So what are the protagonists doing about it? More and more studios, producers, directors and, yes, actors are working on rewriting the script with a happier, planet-friendly ending. Stars like Brad Pitt and Ben Affleck are opting to chill in trailers with biodiesel generators, solar panels and recycled countertops, as is the entire cast of American Horror Story and the Fantastic Four.

Sony Pictures’ The Amazing Spider-Man 2 managed to divert 52 per cent of its waste, donating nearly 6,000 meals (leftovers from crew lunches) to local shelters, not to mention the 193,000 water bottles they avoided by rolling out reusable water canisters and water filling stations on set. And when Fox brought the popular show 24 back last spring for a revival season, it managed to keep even more waste out of landfills, diverting an impressive 98 per cent of waste. It also relied on 100 per cent Forest Stewardship Council certified wood for its sets.

50 Shades of Green

These days, all the major Hollywood studios – Warner Bros, DreamWorks, Disney, NBCUniversal, Paramount, Sony, Fox – actively promote green production practices. Many have zero-waste diversion targets on studio lots. A couple have carbon emission reduction targets for films and shows.

But that wasn’t always the case, says Debbie Levin, president of the Beverly Hills-based Environmental Media Association. Since 1989, EMA has focused mostly on influencing the influencers, getting celebs to go green and seeding environmental content in scripts and on camera.

In 2003, when Levin was delivering recycling bins and canvas shopping bags for use as sitcom props, she was shocked to notice the show itself wasn’t recycling. “Our mission was all about messaging and role modeling, but nobody was really paying attention at all to what was going on behind the scenes.”

Levin’s board decided to launch the industry’s first green certification program for films and television programs. The EMA Green Seal has now been stamped on over 500 productions, including awards shows and films such as 50 Shades of Grey, Annie and Gone Girl.

Nonetheless, critics point out that while most of the studios encourage “best practices,” there’s not enough in the way of mandatory greening on set. At 20th Century Fox and Sony’s Columbia Pictures, every production is asked to do carbon footprinting, while NBCUniversal’s corporate sustainability executives regularly touch base with production teams to advise on greening sets. But instituting enviro practices is still largely optional on most sets, and really depends on the mix of cast and crew behind the scenes.

A bigger name actor on a successful show might have some sway, says Levin, who is currently working with an actress from ABC’s Scandal to replace on-set water bottles with filtrated taps. But on the greenest films, insiders say, it generally takes an environmentally committed producer to take things beyond the status quo.

The Producers Guild of America has been fostering just that since it released its Green Production Guide in 2010. The guide lays out best practices, a carbon calculator and a handy app that connects users to over 2,000 green film-friendly vendors across North America.

Gale Ann Hurd, chief executive officer of Valhalla Entertainment, is one high-profile producer prioritizing those practices on her films and television shows. Her 2008 blockbuster The Incredible Hulk, shot in Toronto, was considered to be one of the most sustainable big budget films to date. (Greening on that set was also egged on by Oscar-winning sustainability buff Ed Norton and the newly formed Green Screen Toronto program.)

More recently, Hurd’s popular TV series The Walking Dead has gone paperless, dishware is either reusable or biodegradable, cast are encouraged to drive hybrids and everyone’s nudged to refill water canisters at refill stations. When asked if they’ve tried to outlaw water bottles altogether, Hurd doesn’t skip a bit. “Actually, it’s almost impossible.”

Which touches on one of the big ecological sticking points on sets: most productions are still doling out thousands of disposable plastic water bottles and basic recycling can be an uphill battle. Says Hurd, “Literally every day I see people, when it’s just as easy to recycle, throwing something into the trash. It’s disheartening.”

Production manager Ted Miller knows the situation well. “Let’s put it this way,” he says. “I have four bins here and they all have the same things in them.” But it’s not a lost cause, he adds, explaining that the key to changing behaviour is education on a daily basis. “That’s what we did on [NBCUniversal’s] Warehouse 13. By the second year, everyone was in that pattern.”

Still, Miller admits, a certain amount of fatigue can set in both for the people doing the reminding and for those being reminded to recycle and turn off their engines. By the third season of Warehouse 13, drivers were slipping and started idling again, despite a no idling policy. “For it to work it has to be grassroots,” he says.

To help entrench buy-in from crews, all the film and television unions need to make greening a priority, not just the producers union, argues Hurd. As it stands, North America’s biggest such union, IATSE (the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees), has no system-wide programs for weaving sustainability into the job.

Eco-Crew for hire

Emellie O’Brien, founder of the New York-based green production consultancy Earth Angel, says it’s unfair to place the burden on tired, overworked crew. What productions really need, if they’re truly serious about keeping sustainability initiatives going, is a dedicated eco-crew member.

Earth Angel was hired by director Darren Aronofsky to ensure his environmental blockbuster about a biblical flood, Noah, was as green as possible. It was also behind the greening of Annie and The Amazing Spider-Man 2. These days, O’Brien is actively lobbying the studios to create a line item in budgets reserved for the hiring of an on-set green crewmember. The job, she argues, will pay for itself through cost savings.

Case in point: Sony Pictures has proudly promoted the fact that the sustainability practices in place on The Amazing Spider-Man 2 saved the studio an estimated $400,000. Disney has already caught on, mandating at least one full-time environmental steward on set on all its feature films, such as 2015’s Tomorrowland, shot in Vancouver and starring George Clooney.

Which brings us to the next leg up for aspiring green films: location, location, location.

Lisa Day, director of energy initiatives at 20th Century Fox, says it’s a lot easier to green your film if you’re shooting in L.A. or New York City than, say, in South Africa or Budapest or other places where green vendors and infrastructure are less likely to exist.

As a rule of thumb, shooting anywhere on location tends to have a much bigger footprint than filming on permanent lots with energy-efficient studios and nearby warehouses filled with borrowable sets. Possibly the greenest production location in North America is in British Columbia, says Day, explaining that most of the grid power comes from emission-free hydroelectric plants and Vancouver crew are deeply engaged on the issue. “Your carbon footprint goes way down,” she says.

Industry trends are also helping – but not always. The mass movement to digital format means the processing pollutants involved in old-fashioned film reels are long gone. More and more productions are using hyper-efficient LED lights, which in some cases can be plugged into a wall without having to rely on giant diesel-burning generators.

On the other hand, the rise of green screen and CGI animation means a much bigger power draw on computer and data centres. Filmmaker James Cameron is trying to rectify the situation for his Avatar sequels by hoisting 960 kilowatts of solar energy onto studio rooftops.

Said Cameron when the panels went up in 2012, “I didn’t want people coming up to me afterward saying, ‘oh yeah, you’re the big environmentalist making this movie about how we should all behave and yet you guys are using all this power for your computers.” He heard that criticism after the first film, so he added, “we did something about it.”

Despite high profile cases like Avatar, such deep greening remains patchy, says O’Brien, mostly because of the lack of universal, industry-wide regulations and standards. Unlike the United Kingdom, where BAFTA spearheads carbon footprint reductions – and reminds its members that CO2 emissions “must be reduced by 80 per cent by 2050 in line government targets for the UK” – North America’s Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has kept quiet on the issue.

Without a centralized push, it’s tough to shift on-set greening from a nice-have to a necessity.

Luckily for Hollywood, there’s always room for a new script.

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