On World Environment Day, former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton urged Hollywood to prioritize content about climate change, particularly how it affects children around the world.
While speaking at the Environmental Media Association’s 2024 Impact Summit in Los Angeles, former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called for continued efforts to bring climate storytelling front and center. Following opening remarks from Dr. Dayna Long, Professor of Clinical Pediatrics, University of California, San Francisco Dept of Pediatrics, Clinton told the crowd that the climate impact on children is “an untold story” and the focus of the Clinton Foundation’s Too Small to Fail initiative.
“There’s been a lot of really, really great efforts to convince people about climate change and a lot of really dramatic information and even dramatic movies about the consequences that we are facing,” Clinton said. Proper messaging is key, she said, noting that communication on climate issues has been a challenge, but the hit-them-over-the-head approach doesn’t work. “Saying, ‘For heaven’s sakes, wake up, it’s going to be a disaster if you don’t do something’ is a little bit overwhelming for people, because they’re not quite sure, ‘What am I supposed to do?’ There are things that they can do and that’s where we want stories to show them.”
Clinton was joined on the panel by showrunner Gloria Calderón Kellett and environmental activist Anna Jane Joyner in discussing how to integrate climate awareness into film and television productions. It was one of several discussions during the two-day event at the Pendry Hotel in West Hollywood that focused on climate change’s impact on children. Shailene Woodley led a panel with the youth activist Kalālapaikuanalu Winter and Mat dos Santos, Co-Executive Director and General Counsel of Our Children’s Trust. Dos Santos pointed out that children are at the heart of the environmental movement, just as they have been at the heart of all other social justice movements.
Like other discussions over the two days, Clinton emphasized climate-caused natural disasters and how they will lead to a spike in climate migration over the next 25 years. “With people moving from the South, we’re going to have more disease because insects are going to be able to live at higher and higher latitudes. So these are all things that people are aware of but need to better understand, and especially that everything we worry about has an absolutely greater impact on kids,” she said.
“A lot of the big structural institutional changes have to happen at the global, national, state levels,” Clinton said, “but we want to empower people to have enough information to be able to do things on their own.”
The event, presented by Toyota, featured more than two dozen talks with guests including Ted Danson, Rainn Wilson, Ed Begley Jr., Issa López, Eli Roth, and Natalie Morales.
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