In 2005 Matt Damon narrated Journey to Planet Earth on PBS. A year later Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth was released theatrically, opening the door to numerous climate change documentaries, the bulk of which were viewed on television, releasing and often being produced by Discovery, Showtime, National Geographic, Thirteen and Netflix. There is now even the world’s first broadcaster, Climate Change TV, dedicated entirely to climate change issues. Focused on interviewing influential voices in the field, it is produced by Climate Home.
Released by Netflix in the Fall of 2020, is David Attenborough’s stunning A Life On Our Planet. Called a “majestic documentary” by the New York Times, it travels through the life of the planet as it travels through the decades of Attenborough’s own life as a famed naturalist. Now, in his 90’s, he calls it his “witness statement.” Interweaving footage of his own explorations into the wilderness, footage of the planet being eroded and charts memorializing the rising temperatures, the population growth, and the destruction of our forests, he curiously remains upbeat about the possibilities for regrowth.
In the spring of 2023, AppleTV released Extrapolations with a great ensemble cast, including Meryl Streep. It opened to mixed reviews. NYT television critic James Poniewozik and Manuela Andreoni talked about the challenges it encountered and so much of what they said speaks to the difficulty of solving climate change altogether – its abstractness.
And, watch for an HBO Max produced series by VICE creator Adam McKay, called The Uninhabitable Earth, based on the book by David Wallace-Wells. Green lit in January 2020, there is an interesting interview with him by Vanity Fair’s Nick Bilton here.
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Peril and Promise: The Challenge of Climate Change is a public media initiative from WNET in New York reporting on the human impact of climate change, designed to provide context, scientifically sound information, and fact-based journalism to audiences across every platform of public media. It also focuses on stories of exciting new frontiers of scientific innovation in resilience, mitigation, and clean energy. We are partnering with some of public media’s most prestigious programs to use broadcast television, digital video, social media and public radio to tell these stories to the widest possible audience… locally, regionally, and nationally, on-air and online.
