Whoopi Goldberg teams with Extinction Rebellion for movie
Climate action group Extinction Rebellion has been pushing the message that the human race must seize the opportunity to create a greener future
American actress Whoopi Goldberg has leant her voice to an Extinction Rebellion animated film highlighting the precarious state of the planet’s natural environment.
Thethree-minutefilmentitled“giganticchange” was released on Friday to coincide with World Enviroment Day. It is set in 2050 and shows a girl asking her grandmother, voiced by Goldberg, to read a “happy” bedtime story.
After the grandmother chronicles a gloomy planet on the brink of environmental collapse back in 2020, the girl finishes off the tale, switching the narrative to one where the world came together to tackle climate change and protect nature.
While the ending is deliberately ambiguous, the film offers a message of hope. The year 2050 is significant as it is when many nations have committed to becoming carbon neutral.
The film was created by Passion Pictures, the London studio behind the Rang-tan film for British supermarket chain Iceland highlighting the threat of the palm oil industry to orangutans.
With the world slowly emerging from lockdown as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, climate action group Extinction Rebellion has been pushing the message that the human race must seize the opportunity to create a greener future.
The film ends with a caption saying that unless the human race changes course, by the year 2050 one billion people will be displaced and half of all species extinct. Asked about Oscar-winner Goldberg’s involvement, co-director George Lewin said: “We thought her iconic voice would bring a perfect sense of gravitas to the performance. Plus she is outspoken on environmental issues and had the potential to inspire her followers to take action.
Gigantic Change went live on Extinction Rebellion’s Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and Instagram platforms on Friday. The World Health Organisation has said the novel coronavirus probably has its “ecological reservoir” in bats, while scientists say 60 per cent of the infectious human diseases that emerged from 1990 to 2004 came from animals.
The new nature coalition noted that illegal and non-regulated wildlife trade, deforestation and ecosystem destruction can increase the risk of disease transmission from wildlife to people, and urged tighter control.
“This pandemic provides unprecedented and powerful proof that nature and people share the same fate and are far more closely linked than most of us realised,” they said in a statement.
Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told a coalition event that protecting nature was “about security and health”. The COVID-19 crisis was a predictable manifestation of what scientists branded a “planetary emergency” several months before the pandemic began, he added.
World Environment Day should be renamed “human safety day”, he proposed, adding “it’s no longer about nature - it’s all about humans