Illustration by Daniel Tatlow.

Global warming, renewable energy, pollution, carbon emissions and a host of other environmental issues have been all over the mainstream news media in the last few weeks. Protesters were arrested in violent clashes with police in Paris; Enda embarrassed the nation by pleading exceptional status for little old Ireland at the COP21 summit; and many other politicians have been seen smiling gravely and making pronouncements about the necessity of urgent action to tackle climate change. This explosion of media attention to environmental issues is unusual. You could say that the tendency to bury our heads in the sand in the face of such a huge and complicated problem as global warming is understandable. But there is another area of mainstream culture where these issues are discussed widely, variously and frequently, although not always explicitly: film.

The film that springs to mind with the words “global warming” is An Inconvenient Truth, which brought the issue to the world’s attention in 2006. Enthusiastically received in Europe, it proved incredibly controversial in the U.S., where the National Science Teachers Association declined 50,000 free copies due to the interests of its corporate sponsors. It, and other recent documentaries such as Cowspiracy (which has spawned many a vegan convert) and Carbon Nation are overtly political, stirring debate and raising awareness, but also courting controversy wherever they’re shown. While fiction films might spring to mind less readily when one considers the environmentalist canon, there is a strong tradition of environmental disaster on screen in big-budget films: Wall-e, The Day After Tomorrow, Blade Runner, Interstellar, and Avatar, just to name a few, all derive inspiration from themes of ecological destruction.

I met up with Dr Pat Brereton, head of the School of Communications at DCU, and author of the newly released book Environmental Ethics and Film, for a chat about this tradition. When it comes to raising awareness of and sympathy for the environmentalist cause, Brereton is keen to point out the potential of mainstream fiction film to do this work. “I tend to look at more mainstream films. I think that minority interest films can push a very particular agenda, whereas with mainstream film, they’re almost covertly rather than overtly promoting an issue. Sometimes documentaries about environmental issues which are preachy are less effective than fictional narratives, which are more subtle and nuanced. People can get messages. They don’t want to be forced into acknowledging an issue.” The tendency of documentary films to provoke reactionary backlash is also an unfortunate occupational hazard of working in the genre. “The documentary is trying to give facts and figures. If you can critique any fact, you can discount the whole documentary. With climate change, 97 percent of scientists agree, but there are always three wackos who don’t, and they can sow seeds of discontent.”

Eco-criticism is familiar in English studies, where notions of the sublime in nature has dominated popular conceptions of poetry since romanticism, and the American landscape has been a strong presence in writing of all kinds from across the pond. This type of investigation is less mainstream in film studies, but Brereton says he and his colleagues are keen to promote it. “Eco-cinema has become quite big in film studies now. We want to make it mainstream but it’s an uphill battle. There’s a preoccupation in film studies with more psychological engagement; gender studies, other sort of esoteric debates. There’s a perception that environmentalism is too romanticised. I would say it’s very central to a lot of film pleasure. Even science fiction spectacles are about the sublime nature. There’s an awful lot of engagement in trying to figure out how nature is represented.”

The political dimensions of climate disaster are often at the forefront of sci-fi films. “There’s a lot of films in the science fiction genre where nature is represented as something that keeps society in control,” Brereton mentions. “Blade Runner is a good example. It’s a post-nuclear society, where people are stratified into clear divisions, and nature has helped to accommodate that. So people who have money can live up away from the ruined earth, where there’s fresh air and real animals. The people who don’t have money, have to put up with artificiality of all types. It’s Dick’s thesis that environmental destruction can be used in a fascistic way to set up a schism between people.”

Brereton remarks that while there are a number of directors, most notably James Cameron (Avatar), that are famous for their investment in the environmental cause, there is a certain irony in green ideas being peddled by an industry that consumes more CO2 than aviation. The film industry was the second biggest polluter in California in 2008. “Ideologically, film is part of the industry,” Brereton says. “The big worry is that we won’t be able to solve the planetary issues, so a techno fix will be posited. Because we can stay as we are then, if we just have the techno fix. Film tends to promote that approach. It conspires in techno-centrism and the conservative approach, very much so.” Interstellar is a recent example of such a film. Undoubtedly entertaining, it is nonetheless frustrating in the glorification of technology it promotes with its “getting away from it all” approach to human-created problems. After we destroy our home, let’s simply employ a few geniuses to take us to the next one.

Despite such tendencies, blockbusters have important potential for bringing environmental issues to the public imagination and stirring, if not activism, then at least a reorientation of values. “The big problem with climate change is that we can’t see it happening, it’s so long-term. Politics is always about what’s immediate, it’s short term. It’s about ‘can I have money in my pocket for tomorrow?’ To try and conceptualise longer than that is very difficult. Art can sow seeds, it can at least get an audience to reconceptualise things.” In terms of presenting long-term issues in digestible ways, Brereton mentions Gravity as a film that fruitfully explores extraterrestrial environmental problems we may have to grapple with some day: “we talk about the tragedy of the commons, but there’s a commons up in space and no one gives a damn about it. They just throw up stuff and it stays there, satellites just floating around. People don’t know that, because they can’t see it. Gravity actually shows that there’s a massive problem up there: Sandra Bullock and George Clooney are hitting off stuff!”

Perhaps the film that has most successfully used its big-budget, high-tech, wide-reaching potential to bring the possible outcomes of societal inaction on climate issues to public attention is Pixar’s Wall-e. An earlier, more tongue-in-cheek version of the Interstellar story, it offers a satirised picture of where our current, hyper-materialist culture might be leading us if we fail to majorly reimagine our values. Despite presenting such a horrifying picture of the aftermath of planetary disaster, Pixar have denied they intended to make an environmental film. “I think their reason would be that they don’t want to be pigeon-holed,” Brereton suggests. “There’s a big American thing that if you’re green you’re just democrat, you’re on the left wing and whatever. I think that’s sad, and they overplay that. We need more hard hitting films that make it clear for audiences: these are the alternatives for us. I’m interested in recuperating the blockbuster, encouraging new films that will become a bible of environmentalism that people can actually connect with. That’s the environmental wet dream.”