Could A Green Oscar Category Save The Planet From The Climate Crisis?

Hollywood has been a powerful force driving global consumption patterns over the past half century.  US movie and television productions have pushed the vision of ‘The American Dream’ around the world, built around a middle class, suburban existence and Western houses, cars, food, fashion, holidays, toys, conveniences.

However, this dream is no longer sustainable.  If the world’s population lived US lifestyles, we would need four times our planetary resources.

The world needs a radically new and aspirational vision for the next generation and emerging middle classes around the world, that can harness our most influential communication technologies and keep these dreams’ footprints within our planet’s boundaries.

The American Dream

The big and small screens continue to define an aspirational lifestyle consisting of large suburban houses, gas-guzzling cars, long commutes from expansive city designs, large air-conditioned offices, school car runs, large mod-con equipped kitchens, beef-based meals, fast-fashion consumption.  Yet for the next generation of American and European millennials as well as the rapidly emerging middle classes of China, India, South East Asia, Latin America, Africa, this is neither a realistic nor desirable future.

We have now moved to a state where over half the world is defined as middle class, and as the world plateaus at a population just over 10 billion by the end of the century, we expect to see the addition of 3 billion additional middle class households over the next 20 years, and their associated consumption which will account for over $60 trillion (double today’s middle-class consumption). This is unprecedented and a success in many regards.

Planetary Boundaries

However, our planet has reached its boundaries with today’s consumption patterns. 

Of the 9 planetary boundaries the Earth needs to remain at a stable level to support human life, we have exceeded four, and two we do not even know the limits for. 

Climate Change and the amount of carbon in our atmosphere is just one of these boundaries.  We also need radically new ways to produce food, significantly reducing the amount of nitrogen fertilizer used in agriculture; we need new ways to lower the amount of aerosol particulates in the atmosphere, ensure sufficient land and ocean are set aside to allow nature and wildlife to flourish and evolve, and more effectively manage our freshwater supplies to avoid a water crisis in many regions of the world.

A new Green Dream

We need a new, aspirational Green Dream, one that keeps us within our planet’s boundaries.

This is a dream that would consist of new products with lower footprints (e.g., alternative proteins, eco-friendly homes, algae-based materials for clothes, products that are part of a Circular Economy), new ways of doing today’s activities (e.g., traveling via electric vehicles, cycling or walking, deriving energy from smart microgrids, greater recycling shown on screen), new jobs and activities in areas that were not needed or recognized in the past to restore and regenerate our planet’s health (e.g., coral growing efforts, beach cleanups, working in new industries of negative carbon emission technologies, developing natural climate solutions).

Such products and activities can both inspire a new generation of innovators and entrepreneurs, as well as help shift the consumption patterns of billions around the world.  We’ve seen in the past how movies have driven the consumption of cigarettes, fast cars, fashion and glamorous tourist destinations through film productions such as the James Bond franchise. 

Indeed, many of the solutions to keep the next cohort of middle class households within our planetary boundaries, already exist and need to rapidly move from laboratories to the real world within the next decade.

Hollywood as a driver of change

Current sustainability initiatives in Hollywood are insufficient and insular.  To date, efforts have focused on several activist actors and actresses speaking out on environmental issues, internal efforts to reduce the environment footprint of each production set, and disaster movies (e.g., The Day After Tomorrow, An Inconvenient Truth, Geostorm, Snowpiercer). 

Whilst many lead actors and actresses speak out in favor of environmental causes, if an assessment was ever conducted on their characters’ carbon and environmental footprints - in addition to their characters’ finances - it would not be sustainable for fans to follow such lifestyles.

It is not unprecedented for Hollywood to inspire a new generation of technological innovation, a case of life imitating art. A version of the Health Tricorder from the 1970s Star Trek has now been developed via a Qualcomm X-Prize; flying cars from Back to the Future and the Jetsons are finally close to launch among several Silicon Valley companies; several futuristic technologies shown in Stephen Spielberg’s 2002 movie Minority Report, have already been released.

A new category of Green Oscars?

Could a Green Oscar be the right path to both reflect and shift the world’s consumption patterns? It is not unprecedented for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – who are responsible for the Oscars – to introduce or retire awards to ensure movie making remains relevant to the issues audiences and filmmakers care about.  Today, there are 24 categories of film-making, with 7 categories having been retired over the past 92 years, and discussion in 2018 around a new category for the most ‘Outstanding Popular Film.’

A new category for a ‘Green Oscar’ could motivate the ingenuity and creativity of the same Hollywood scriptwriters and imagineers who gave us such innovations as Back to the Future’s Flux Capacitor, the MCU’s Infinity Stones, and Harry Potter’s wands, spells and potions to develop aspirational new ways to frame solutions to our climate and planetary crisis. Climate solutions should be inspiring, not tedious.

With viewership at the latest Academy Awards at its lowest, could a Green Oscar category, raise its relevance among a newer, younger generation who are more environmentally minded, and who wish to see a more realistic depiction of the futures they are likely to experience, in the face of an impending Planetary Environment Crisis.

Sure, a new oscar category may not be a solution in itself, but could trigger a much larger force for change as Hollywood has repeatedly shown it is capable of over a century adapting to challenges and inventions of sound, color, TV, multiplexes, VHS tapes, online piracy, streaming and shifting value systems over this time.

We urgently need to glamorize the more sustainable lifestyles of the future, for our sakes and the planets.