Tuesday morning actor Leonardo DiCaprio addressed world leaders at the UN Climate Summit. What was this product of hollywood doing in a room full of heads of states? Well, he compared his acting career of “pretending for a living” and “solving fictitious problems” to how humankind is confronting climate change, pretending it is not happening to our planet. I’m sure many of us has seen hollywood “climate-fiction” films such as The Day After Tomorrow, but we must be able to differentiate fact from hollywood’s fiction. Is getting the fictitious world of hollywood involved in the fight against climate change an effective wake up call? How do we get the people to stop pretending and face reality?
Read DiCaprio’s full speech here
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I came across this speech yesterday while searching on news about the UN Climate Summit. I was surprised to see that an actor that famous actually cares. He made some valid points in his speech such as the ones you have mentioned. A point that he made that stood out the most to me was when he said “As an actor, I pretend for a living. I play fictitious characters often solving fictitious problems. I believe mankind has looked at climate change in that same way: as if it were a fiction. As if pretending that climate change wasn’t real would somehow make it go away. But I think we know better than that now.” That was a really good analogy.
I love the title of this post, Briana. I found this speech really interesting… In so many ways actors and other famous people can be great for bringing light, attention and money to a cause. At the same time, they can often take away from a cause too because the focus goes more to them than to the cause itself. I would hope in this case that the involvement of famous people would encourage people to look into climate change and the facts and issues more.
The point Leo made about humankind treating global climate change as a fictitious problem is a very good point to make. But I think the reason that people seem to be ignoring climate change is not so much because they are consciously trying to ignore and not acknowledge it, but because there is a lack of understanding about how bad the problem is. Most people I don’t think realize how dependent our society is on fossil fuels. The phrase “fossil fuels” for most people brings up ideas of cars and factories and maybe electricity. Most people’s general knowledge does not include the huge amount of fossil fuels that go into things such as what we eat, what we wear. Creating fertilizer takes huge amounts of fossil fuels, and most people don’t realize these things. The lay knowledge of climate change seems to be that driving less and using less electricity are the two substantial ways a regular person can combat climate change. While these two things are hugely important, and things everyone should do, the problem goes much deeper than this, and a lot people are not fully aware of this.
Joe, I wholeheartedly agree! That is why education is a great solution, amongst other means, in tackling climate change issues.