Storytelling and Sustainability: 25 Creative Leaders Who Weave Climate Themes Into Narrative Movies and TV Shows

Part of the culture clash between Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder) includes their differing takes on the climate crisis. In one episode, Deborah and Ava get lost in the woods and have a lengthy conversation about climate change. Besides those intergenerational climate conversations, environmental and sustainability issues have been sprinkled throughout the series by creators Aniello, Downs and Statsky. “This is a topic that would so obviously be on Ava’s mind as a person in her late 20s,” Statsky told the audience at the 2024 Hollywood Climate Summit. “If you’re going to go through all of this to make this show, you really should be saying something worth saying.”

The storyline in “Train Dreams” was rooted in the impact that the rapid social, economic, political and environmental changes of the first 70 years of the 20th century had on one man. Pivotal moments in the life of Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) are driven by wildfire, deforestation and the fin de siècle maturation of what had been the wild Western region of the United States. “We’re going through a time of incredible upheaval and change — and that’s what this man’s story is about. It’s about the pain of holding on when the world keeps shifting,” Bentley told Variety in 2025. Following the success of “Train Dreams,” Bentley and his writing partner Greg Kwedar struck a deal with Netflix to develop features through their Ethos banner.

From its first season, “Abbott Elementary” has woven climate and sustainability references into its storylines, earning the show strong marks from groups like the Environmental Media Association, which recognized Brunson with its EMA Futures Award. The ABC comedy has earned that recognition by demonstrating how its characters carpool to school, highlighting plant-based diets and — perhaps most notably — including a major storyline where Gregory (Tyler James Williams) spruces up a school garden and turns it into a school club activity. Brunson and the “Abbott” writers purposefully sprinkle climate topics into the show’s dialogue and plot points. When the school needs a new air conditioner, for example, that’s not just about that; it’s about the planet warming overall. “It’s important for me to make people aware without spoon-feeding them or preaching to them,” Brunson previously told Getty.

From the first “Terminator” trek to “The Abyss,” to the global heights of the “Avatar” franchise, Cameron has consistently addressed climate themes and issues in his work. As one of the most successful directors of all time, Cameron’s following gives his storytelling enormous reach. It also reflects his significant personal commitment to supporting a range of climate and sustainability focused initiatives. In 2010, the filmmaker established the Avatar Alliance Foundation to tackle climate change, deforestation, indigenous rights, ocean conservation and sustainable agriculture. The two most recent installments of “Avatar” — 2022’s “The Way of Water” and 2025’s “Fire and Ash” — weave environmental allegories into fantasy storytelling in ways impossible to miss. Cameron has also demonstrated uncommon dedication to expanding the understanding of the natural world through exploration, adventures and partnerships with top scientific and academic institutions including National Geographic.

The director and co-writer of Pixar’s “Hoppers” paid his dues in film and TV animation before he got the chance to direct a marquee feature film with “Hoppers.” The film’s hero, 19-year-old Mabel, is on a quest to stop her town’s greedy mayor from bulldozing a woodland area to make way for urban development. Chong’s deft touch with “Hoppers” was preceded by his work as creator and executive producer of the well-loved Cartoon Network series “We Bare Bears” and spinoff “We Baby Bears.” Chong has a track record of sensitivity in his vision for how humans and other creators interact. As Owen Gleiberman, Variety’s Chief Film Critic, observed in his review, “ ‘Hoppers’ never stops surprising you in rudely antic ways, and that’s the essence of its delight.”

The creators and executive producers of HBO’s workplace drama admit that they never set out to make profound statements about the capitalism and its discontents. They simply wrote stories they gathered from young adults working in London’s high-octane financial circles. Season 3 of “Industry” revolved heavily around the promise and the downside of the green technology boom. Bankers at the show’s hard-charging Pierpoint & Co. firm navigated questions of greenwashing, outright fraud and the moral line of doing what is most profitable in the short term at the expense of the environment. “Industry,” which has been renewed for a fifth and final season, had no wiggle room in Season 3 — if the ratings hadn’t finally blossomed the show wouldn’t have made it to Season 4. “We said to each other, let’s just swing as hard as we can for the fences and if it blows up, who cares?” Kay told Variety in 2025.

As the post-apocalyptic drama “Paradise” took shape, creator Fogelman and his writers knew they had to fulfill plot needs — and that included figuring out a realistic end-of-the-world scenario. The show’s team quickly decided that the idea of an asteroid felt stale, which is why they gravitated to climate-related ideas. Among those writers was author and journalist Stephen Markley, whose novel “The Deluge” tackles issues of catastrophic climate change. He and writer Katie French, who had gotten excited about the idea of a dormant super-volcano unleashed by melting ice, brainstormed how such a scenario would play out and pitched the idea to Fogelman. “It often felt like we were barely writing a fictional account, particularly when we had to pause the room as Los Angeles experienced the devastating wildfires of 2025,” Markley says. “Multiple writers had to flee their homes, so that was a week our gallows humor about the state of the planet got extra dark.”

Greeengrass, the director known for his signature action sequences, brought the trauma of wildfires in small towns to life in the form of Matthew McConaughey as a father determined to save a school bus full of kids, in “The Lost Bus.” As the story unfolds, Greengrass and screenwriter Brad Ingelsby reveal the local policy choices and the deferred maintenance that has doomed so many communities with limited access and exit roads. “This story is not just about fire — it’s about courage, choices and the instinct to protect,” Greengrass said after the film’s debut in Toronto. He had no idea that the movie would premiere just a few months after the Los Angeles area was ravaged by the Palisades and Eaton blazes. “I’d spent months creating these images onscreen; to see them playing out in a community I know was shocking,” Greengrass says. “But it’s part of our world now.”

Showrunner and author Hawley knows how build worlds and peer into the future with stories rooted in present-day concerns. His adaptation of the “Fargo” franchise was rooted in strong then-and-now parallels. Hawley’s latest tale, “Alien: Earth,” collided directly with the real-world rise of generative AI and the debate over man versus machine. It’s impossible to separate the science fiction from the science fact of today, not to mention the disturbing reality that a small handful of people are reaping enormous profits before anyone fully understands the larger global impact of the revolutionary technology. “All I tried to do,” Hawley told Variety in 2025, “is think one or two steps ahead. Is it realistic to think that billionaires are going to be trillionaires? The planet is heating up, and the seas are going to rise — it’s going to be a hot, wet planet that we live on.”

The filmmaker behind “Poor Things,” “The Favourite” and “Kinds of Kindness” took audiences on a bizarre journey into the world of conspiracy theories and the haves and have-nots in 2025’s “Bugonia.” Jesse Plemons plays a distraught beekeeper who kidnaps a high-flying CEO (Emma Stone) whose company he believes is poisoning the environment. Lanthimos called it a “wake-up call” during a British GQ interview. While some have called the film “bleak and pessimistic,” Lanthimos disagrees. “The ending of the film allows you to have hope, if you can see that. It’s deliberately constructed in order to allow anyone who watches the film to have that mindset.”

Lee has trained his cinematic eye on climate-related storytelling for most of his long career as a multihyphenate writer, director and producer. With HBO’s five-part “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts,” he chronicled Hurricane Katrina’s destruction through the eyes of its most vulnerable residents. Five years later, amid the horrors of the historic Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Lee returned to New Orleans to check on post-Katrina rebuilding and how the Crescent City was adjusting to the devastating oil spill. And last year, the filmmaker teamed with Netflix for the three-part documentary “Katrina: Come Hell or High Water.” Lee has a knack for capturing the human side of an overwhelming tragedy in stories that reinforce what’s at stake in climate change for all of us.

In HBO’s “True Detective: Night Country,” creator and executive producer López masterfully wove together a murder mystery that examined the societal pressure for businesses to generate profits at the expense of environmental protection. The fictional drama was rooted in the historic discrimination that Indigenous peoples have faced when it comes to environmental redlining and social justice. “A story of violence in the Alaskan Northwest just asked for environmental themes,” says López, who wrote, directed and served as showrunner on the series. “I find that the stories I’m curious about, time and again, have those effects as a backdrop.” López never doubted that the topic would be compelling for viewers. “Yes, there’s a certain exhaustion, but a good story can always carry a message and get through. Never more necessary than now.”

“Project Hail Mary” star Ryan Gosling may inspire a generation to pursue the sciences with his performance as a brilliant but misunderstood biologist thrust into the role of saving the sun and the stars from dying. The science itself may be fiction, but the impact of this tale on young minds is real. Lord and Miller, whose resume ranges from “Cocaine Bear” to “Spider-Noir” to “The Lego Movie” to “The Last Man on Earth,” set a lightly comedic tone that allowed Gosling to work opposite a gigantic robotic rock and make it feel natural. Lord had that experience when he read the original Andy Weir novel when they were considering taking on the project. “Why do I care about a rock?” Miller told the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast in March. After seeing the emotional connection that moviegoers had with Gosling and Rocky (voiced by James Ortiz), the pair hope that “Project Hail Mary” becomes the kind of once-a-year watch that has an impact on Gen Alpha and beyond.

In “A Murder at the End of the World,” billionaire tech exec Andy Ronson (Clive Owen) has built an isolated glacial compound in Iceland to escape a global catastrophe, including climate change. The show’s murders — and the mystery of who was behind the deaths — comes after Andy invites a group of intellectuals to the retreat for a brainstorming session on how to solve global issues like the environmental crisis. Ironically, as creators Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij incorporated sustainability into their storylines, the show itself faced extreme weather during production. That included massive snowstorms that interrupted filming in Iceland, followed by flash floods and record temperatures during their shoot in Utah. “We weaved climate crisis into the story because it’s what we were anxious about, what we were thinking about, and then we really experienced it shooting,” Batmanglij said at the Hollywood Climate Summit in 2024. “I just don’t think we can ever tell any stories moving forward that aren’t dealing with the climate crisis because it is the story of our time.”

Veteran showrunner Craig Mazin brought the story of the most devastating nuclear disaster of the 20th century — the 1986 reactor meltdown in Chernobyl — to HBO in 2019 with such force that it spurred a burst of activity among nuclear safety advocates. “Chernobyl” established Mazin as a storyteller skilled at making complex subjects understandable on essential terms of survival and resilience. With the series “The Last of Us,” Mazin has used the engine of a zombie apocalypse to examine the highs and lows of humanity pushed to the brink by dwindling environmental resources. He thought about the positioning of the show when he was first recruiting the cast. “This is a show about fungus zombies. But not, it’s not,” Mazin told Variety in 2025. “It’s a show about a father and a daughter. It’s a show about loss, it’s a show about community, it’s a show about hope and it’s a show about vengeance.”

McKay is the kind of hard-charging writer-director who can get Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo
DiCaprio to star in a satire about a looming ecological disaster and the establishment’s chaotic attempts to save the world. “Don’t Look Up” (2021) got a lot of attention as McKay as assembled mega stars (Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett, Timothée Chalamet) to deliver a wake-up call to viewers via Netflix (it was mid-pandemic). This year, McKay is a producer on “Just Look Up,” a documentary about the confrontational activist group Climate Defiance. McKay argues that the urgency of the situation demands stronger action. “This is the only time in the four and a half billion year history of Earth that we have seen this rate of warming,” McKay told Variety in June. “It’s a bomb going off.”

Veteran showrunner Miller has spent the past decade on shows that examine the social upheaval that ensues after the U.S. experiences a civil war and an environmental apocalypse. “The Handmaid’s Tale” and sequel series “The Testaments” are grounded in worlds where climate devastation has rendered many women infertile, spurring a desperate fight for the resources to survive. The conservation warning is baked into Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel. The allegory presented in both series is meant to make the audience think about all that is happening to the planet. “Climate is an issue of planetary survival, I don’t think you can ever focus on it too much,” Miller says. “It is a central danger of our time.” “The Testaments” premiered in April and has been renewed for Season 2. “TV has a powerful megaphone to start discussions, and the more shows that include environmental issues the more people will have them at front of mind,” Miller says.

The adaptation of Shelby Van Pelt’s tender novel was a departure for writer-director Olivia Newman. She has directed indie features (“Where the Crawdads Sing”) and series TV (“Chicago Fire”) but the supernatural element of having an octopus character, Marcellus, whose thoughts form the narration for the story, was a challenge. Newman’s instinct was to be as realistic as possible with the depiction of Marcellus, who bonds with Sally Field’s character in a way that helps the lonely woman process her grief while working night shifts as a custodian at an aquarium. “The only thing a little odd and quirky you get to hear his thoughts,” Newman told CBS Los Angeles in March. Otherwise, “it’s absolutely 100% accurate to what an octopus would do.” The heart of “Remarkably Bright Creatures” is its message about the fragility of life, something that was reinforced to Newman after she lost her home in Altadena in the 2025 wildfires.

Much of “The Morning Show” Season 4 dealt with Bradley Jackson’s (Reese Witherspoon) investigation into the massive coverup of a chemical spill and the health crises that followed. Executive producer Stoudt says she was inspired after reading about “Cancer Alley” in Louisiana, a territory where residents are dying of cancer due toxins being released into the air, water and ground. “I read about Cancer Alley in Louisiana — a stretch of territory where residents have been fighting multinational corporations that routinely release toxins into the air, water and ground,” Stoudt says. “Literally these residents are dying of cancer as they seek relief for their communities. It makes my blood boil just thinking about it.” The news broadcast element of “The Morning Show” allowed Stoudt to choose which issues to highlight and tie them to the larger story in the season. But, she warns, “You can’t be didactic; that’s just bad writing. You lead with compelling characters, a compelling story. Everyone knows Erin Brockovich because Julia Roberts played the hell out of a brilliantly written character.”

The prolific film and TV scribe behind Netflix’s “Adolescence” and the “Enola Holmes” franchise and HBO’s “His Dark Materials” has a deft touch in examining how everyday people are adapting — or not — to modern socioeconomic problems. In the limited series “Toxic Town,” Thorne took on the notorious U.K. Corby poisonings incident that left children with birth defects and physical ailments because of pollution from a toxic quarry. The series chronicles how a group of mothers banded together to demand justice. “The time has come for TV to change. To reflect the experience of millions, and to protect — to some degree — these millions through empathy. To do this requires bravery on all our parts,” Thorne said in 2021 in discussing how TV portrays disabled people as he delivered the prestigious MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival.

The late multihyphenate leaves a profound effect across Hollywood and the environmental movement. In honor of Redford’s lifelong devotion to conservation and climate awareness, Film Independent in June established the Robert Redford Environmental Vision Award. It will be added to next year’s Film Independent Spirit Awards competition. The goal is to put a spotlight on movies and TV shows that “engage with environmental issues through innovative and impactful storytelling.”

“At a time when environmental challenges regularly intersect with daily life, independent filmmakers remain vital voices in helping audiences imagine a more resilient future,” said Jill Tidman, executive director of the Redford Center, which was founded in 2005 to support environmental filmmaking.

Robert Redford died in September 2025 at the age of 89.