Quick Key Facts
- More than 45 million people bird in the U.S., spending around $41 billion a year on their hobby.
- U.S. ornithologist Florence Merriam Bailey published what is largely considered the first modern bird guide in 1889 titled Birds: Through an Opera-Glass.
- Twitching is a type of birding in which participants travel far and wide to see rare species.
- One study found that increasing the number of bird species in a person’s daily life by 10 percent raised their contentment more than increasing their income by 10 percent.
- People who engage in wildlife-based recreation like birding are four to five times more likely to actively promote conservation.
- Bird data posted specifically on eBird now varies from official scientific surveys by only 0.4 percent per year.
- The American Birding Association has crafted a “code of birding ethics” that has three main sections: 1. “Respect and promote birds and their environment;” 2. “Respect and promote the birding community and its individual members;” and 3. “Respect and promote the law and the rights of others.”
- Hummingbirds must drink nectar every 10 to 15 minutes from 1,000 to 2,000 flowers per day.
- One 2013 study found that domestic cats kill 1.3 to four billion birds in the U.S. every year. This makes them likely the leading human-related killer of birds in the country.
- In North America alone. bird populations have declined by 29 percent, or nearly three billion birds, since 1970.
What Is ‘Birding’?
McKinneMike / iStock Editorial / Getty Images Plus
Birding is the act of observing and identifying birds in the wild as a form of recreation. This can range from taking note of all the birds who visit a backyard feeder, or traveling across the country to try to see more U.S. bird species than anyone else in a 12-month period, like the characters played by Jack Black, Owen Wilson and Steve Martin do in The Big Year. Birding is a popular pastime: More than 45 million people bird in the U.S., and they spend around $41 billion a year on equipment like binoculars or trips to see birds. In the UK, more people belong to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds than all of the country’s political parties put together. While it’s historically been associated with older, wealthier, whiter adults, visible interest in the activity is widening alongside awareness of its many benefits for both birders and birds.
In the past, bird lovers would differentiate between birdwatching and birding, with birdwatching seen as a more amateur and passive observation of birds and birding — defined in this case as going out and tracking down different species — as more serious and active. But in recent years there has been a push to make the community more inclusive by leveling the hierarchy and applying the term “birder” to everyone, since it includes people who perceive birds through senses other than their eyes. Birdability coordinator Freya McGregor has proposed a new definition of birding: Simply, “The act of enjoying wild birds.”
A Brief History of Birding
Humans have probably been observing birds since the beginning of our history as a species. One of the images painted on the walls of the Lascaux Cave in France in 15,000 to 10,000 B.C. was a man with the head of a bird, and some prehistoric artists painted owls in other French caves. However, the hobby we recognize today as “birdwatching” or “birding” evolved over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Birding developed as an alternative to the 19th-century trend of collecting stuffed bird specimens for display or scientific study, as Tim Birkhead details in Birds and Us: A 12,000-Year History From Cave Art to Conservation. One early birder, British ornithologist Edmund Selous, converted from stuffing to watching while observing two European nightjars in 1898. “Now that I have watched birds closely, the killing of them seems to me as something monstrous and horrible,” he wrote. In 1901, he published a book called Bird Watching, which is believed to be the first use of that term. Another early proponent of observing over killing was U.S. ornithologist Florence Merriam Bailey, who published what is largely considered the first modern bird guide in 1889 titled Birds: Through an Opera-Glass, which is still in print! She was also distressed by the killing of birds to decorate hats with their plumage and recommended birdwatching as an antidote: “We’ll take the girls afield, and let them get acquainted with the birds,” she said. “Then of inborn necessity, they will wear feathers never more.”
Selous’ and Bailey’s models of compassionate and curious avian engagement took off on both sides of the Atlantic by the early 1900s, aided by improvements to the design of binoculars over the latter half of the 19th century. Birding saw a boost of popularity during and after World War II as well, driven in part by the publication of more field guides, including James Fisher’s Watching Birds, which sold more than a million copies. The hobby’s popularity continued to soar through the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s through to today. Improvements in spotting technology and access to the internet have made it easier to identify birds and share that information with others. Guides have become more extensive, and more birders sharing more information means that people are actually seeing more birds now despite some decreases in populations.
The expansion of air travel and communication technology in the second half of the 20th century has made it easier for people to travel far and wide in search of rare birds. This type of birding has earned its own name: twitching. The term comes from British birder Howard Medhurst, who used to ride on the back of a friend’s motorcycle when their group went to spot birds in the 1950s. When the group reached their destination, he would dismount jerkily and shiver, or twitch, while lighting a cigarette. The rest of the group began to copy his movements and to refer to rare-bird chasing as “to go on a twitch.” Twitchers will often attempt Big Years, in which they try to spot as many different species as they can in a certain area. One innovator of the practice was U.S. businessman Guy Emerson, who spotted 497 species while traveling in North America in 1939. The current international record holder is Arjan Dwarshuis of the Netherlands, who logged 6,852 species in 2016 by traveling to 40 countries on every continent except Antarctica.
In the past several decades, birding has also gotten more diverse. When it first emerged, birdwatching was considered a hobby for the wealthy, especially men. But, as society changed over the 20th century, birding did too, with more women, minorities, and people of all economic classes getting involved. Black Birders Week was launched in 2020 to draw attention to African American bird lovers, and, as of 2023, the leaders of the National Audubon Society and the American Ornithological Society are both women. Molly Adams founded the Feminist Bird Club in 2016 to make birding and the outdoors more accessible to people who might not feel safe accessing it alone and to promote positive change. However, while birding has become more visibly diverse and inclusive in the last decades, if you take McGregor’s definition of “the act of enjoying wild birds,” it’s more likely than not that people of all genders, races, classes, nationalities and identities have been birding under the radar from the beginning. For example, in the early 1800s, rural working class poet John Clare penned detailed descriptions of the nests and habits of birds in the English fenlands based on careful observation. Clare is one of the rare working-class voices to enter the cannon relatively early, but doubtless there were many others whose observations stayed between them and the birds.
What Are the Benefits of Birding?
Birding has many benefits both for the people who do it and what they watch.
Mental and Physical Health
A growing body of research has shown that spending time in nature is good for your mental and physical health, and there is evidence that spending that time birding can be especially healing. One 2022 study found that hearing or seeing birds could boost mood for up to eight hours, both among healthy individuals and individuals with depression. The study controlled for seeing or hearing other natural elements like trees, plants or water and found that noticing birds still made a difference. Another, from 2013, found that participants associated birdsong more than any other natural sound with stress relief and improved attention span. A third, from 2021, found that living near more species of birds was correlated with increased happiness: Upping the number of species by 10 percent raised people’s contentment more than increasing their income by 10 percent. Birding is also good for physical health by encouraging people to spend more time outdoors and to walk or hike to better birding spots. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has even teamed up with doctors in Shetland to prescribe outdoor activities, including birdwatching.
Community
Another way that birding can boost your mental health and overall well-being is by introducing you to a larger community that shares your interest. Most local wildlife refuges or parks, local bird groups, or local chapters of national bird groups will host outings that anyone can join and learn how to spot birds in that area. If you prefer to bird alone, you can also interact with other birders through social media or digital platforms like eBird, where you can both log your own sightings and read what birds others have spotted in your area.
Conservation
From its origins as an alternative to specimen collections and a lure away from feathered hats, birdwatching has been closely linked with bird conservation. A 2015 study found that people who engage in wildlife-based recreation activities — including birdwatching — were four to five times more likely to actively participate in conservation activities like donating money, joining environmental groups, working to restore habitat on public lands and lobbying for more wildlife recreation. The three major birding organizations in the U.S. — The National Audubon Society, the American Birding Association (ABA) and the American Ornithological Society — consider conservation a key part of their work and missions. It turns out Bailey was right: When people begin to pay attention to birds, they often become more motivated to protect them and their habitats.
Citizen Science
One important way that birders aid conservation efforts is by providing more information to scientists about birds and their numbers and habits. Determining population trends is essential for conservation, and bird data posted on eBird specifically now varies from official scientific surveys by only 0.4 percent per year. Birders also engage in annual surveys of bird numbers to aid in research. One example is the National Audubon Society’s Christmas Bird Count. This was started by ornithologist Frank M. Chapman on Christmas Day, 1900, as an alternative to the tradition of hunting birds during the holidays. Now, tens of thousands of citizen scientists participate between December 14 and January 5 every year, and the data helps conservationists track the health of bird populations and determine priorities. Other annual surveys include The Big Sit and the Great Backyard Bird Count.
Are There Any Downsides to Birding?
While birding can have many positives for nature and humans, like any activity, it has drawbacks when participants choose to be less than respectful of nature and other humans. None of these problems are necessarily inherent to the act of looking at birds; they are rather things that birders should be mindful to avoid.
Damaging Species and Ecosystems
While birding has many conservation benefits, it can also harm birds and their habitat if done improperly. For example, some birders will play a recording of a bird they are seeking in order to encourage a response in the wild. This practice has been shown to increase the time some birds spend singing, which could harm them by using up energy and distracting them from other activities. In the age of social media, postings of rare or vulnerable birds can draw large crowds that could disturb or harm them. To address situations like these, ABA has crafted a “code of birding ethics” that has three main sections: 1. “Respect and promote birds and their environment;” 2. “Respect and promote the birding community and its individual members;” and 3. “Respect and promote the law and the rights of others.” Section 1 includes minimizing playback, being careful around nests and roosts and reducing habitat disturbance by sticking to paths and trails.
Taking It Too Far
Birding can turn competitive or obsessive, especially among people who attempt Big Years or travel in search of rare birds. People have missed important family events and put serious relationships in jeopardy. As sites like eBird have made it easier to share information, they have also increased the competitiveness, and sometimes people can be rude to birders who, for example, misidentify a bird in a public forum. The ABA code of ethics applies here too, encouraging birders to “respect the interests, rights, and skill levels of fellow birders” and be welcoming to newcomers.
Environmental Injustice
Birding has historically been seen as a hobby for white and well-off people. Sometimes, people of color can even be harassed when they attempt to spend time in nature, such as the infamous incident in 2020 when a woman called the cops on African American birder Christian Cooper when he asked her to leash her dog in a leash-only area of Central Park. For lower-income people, both purchasing binoculars and finding leisure time can be barriers to birding. There is also a legacy of colonialism and racism in early ornithology. John James Audubon — a prominent 19th century bird artist and scientist who gave the National Audubon Society its name — also owned slaves and embraced scientific racism. In recent years, the birding world has made efforts to reconcile with this history and make the hobby more inclusive. The National Audubon Society considered changing its name, but ultimately decided against it. However, local chapters have abandoned the Audubon name. The American Ornithological Society announced in 2023 that it would change all the English names of birds in its jurisdiction named after people, since many of them were named after controversial figures who had a history of racism. “Everyone who loves and cares about birds should be able to enjoy and study them freely — and birds need our help now more than ever,” AOS President Colleen Handel said of the change.
How to Get Started
If you are interested in birding, there are many resources available to help you get started.
Where to Find Birds
You can find birds everywhere, but the best place to start is somewhere near home with either green space, open water or both. Some birds, like gulls, crows or mallards, make their presence obvious. For others, you might have to look a little harder. The National Audubon Society recommends taking a moment to clear your head from other distractions, looking at places where birds might perch such as power lines or trees, scanning the landscape slowly, looking with your eyes before trying binoculars, listening for distinctive bird calls and moving on once you have seen a sizable number of birds in one area.
How to Attract Birds
You don’t even have to leave home to bird. Backyard birding is the act of observing birds from your porch or window by enticing them to come to you. The best way to do this is by planting native plants in your yard. This will draw both birds and insects, which the birds can eat. If you decide to install feeders, smaller tubular feeders filled with thistle seed will attract finches, while a larger feeder filled with nuts, fruit and sunflower seeds will be a hit with cardinals, grackles and blue jays. Place your feeders within 12 feet of another feature the birds can fly to if predators approach. This will make them feel safer visiting your home. The most important times to feed birds are during extreme weather events, migration season and late winter or early spring. During the summer, most species can find plenty of food.
The exceptions are nectar-hungry hummingbirds. There are at least 53 species of North American birds that primarily drink nectar, including hummingbirds and orioles. Hummingbirds in particular must drink nectar every 10 to 15 minutes from 1,000 to 2,000 flowers per day. You can plant hummingbird-friendly flowers, but while you wait for them to grow, fill feeders with a mixture of one part white sugar to three parts water. It’s important to remove feeders if you learn of any avian disease outbreaks in your area that your feeders could spread.
How to Identify Birds
There are many digital and paper resources that will help you identify birds. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Merlin app will give you an ID based on a photograph or audio recording of their song. There are also many field guides to birds in your area. Popular books for U.S. birders include The Sibley Guide to Birds, the Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America, the Golden Guide’s Birds of North America and National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America. It’s better to choose a guide with drawings rather than photographs, as artists make sure to include all identifying features that might be obscured by lighting. When you are trying to match a wild bird to a potential ID, it’s important to consider what group it belongs to, i.e. is it a sparrow or an owl; its shape; its size; its behavior; where you are seeing it; when you are seeing it; any distinctive markings; and its song or call.
What You Need
Bird enthusiasts participate in the National Audubon Society’s 117th annual Christmas Bird Count in Anne Arundel County, Maryland on Dec. 18, 2016. Will Parson / Chesapeake Bay Program
You do need a limited amount of gear for birding — most importantly, binoculars. The National Audubon Society offers recommendations for specific models based on how much you want to spend. In general, look for a power of seven or eight and lenses on the wider end that are between 30 and 42 millimeters. In addition to binoculars and a field guide, bring whatever outdoor gear you need to safely and comfortably bird your chosen area. You may also want a notebook to compile a life list of all the different species you see. The Merlin app also allows you to keep a digital record.
How to Get Involved
Chances are, there are other birders in your area. The National Audubon Society has a guide to its local chapters here, the ABA has a list of birding clubs and organizations by state here, and the Feminist Bird Club here. Many of these local groups will advertise bird outings on their websites or social media pages in local parks that you can attend to get started or meet other birders. You can also sign up for their email listservs. Many will share opportunities to advocate for birds in your town, city or state as well.
How to Protect Birds (So You Can Keep Watching Them!)
Conservation is so important to birding that the ABA’s ethics code calls on birders to “support the conservation of birds and their habitats” and “Engage in and promote bird-friendly practices whenever possible.”
From Window Strikes
Building strikes killed an estimated median of 599 million birds in the U.S. in 2017. You can prevent birds from crashing into your own home by identifying large windows or windows near feeders and decorating them with vertical markings two inches by two inches apart. Adding screens can also be an effective deterrent. At night, bright lights during migration season can pull birds from their route and make them more likely to crash into the illuminated buildings. In addition to switching off your own lights during peak migration, you can advocate for your city or town to participate in a Lights Out initiative to reduce urban light pollution in spring or fall.
From Cats
One 2013 study found that domestic cats kill 1.3 to four billion birds in the U.S. every year. This makes them likely the leading human-related killer of birds in the country. While most of these deaths are caused by feral cats, there are things pet owners can do to protect birds. The most important thing is keeping your cats indoors. If that’s not possible, make sure your yard has lots of shrubs or bushes where smaller animals can hide. Place feeders or bird baths 10 to 12 feet from where cats could hide and take down your feeders if your cat is killing birds. If you want to get a cat, adopt a shelter animal to prevent it from ending up on the streets, and never abandon cats outside.
From Pesticides
Pesticide poisoning killed a median 72 million U.S. birds in 2017. Anticoagulant rodenticides can harm or kill birds of prey when they eat rats that have ingested them. To avoid this, manage rodents in alternative ways by not leaving out food, dismantling potential nesting spots and using non-lethal trapping methods. Herbicides and insecticides, especially neonicotinoids, can also harm birds. Avoid using pesticides on your own garden, and, when possible, choose organic produce to support pesticide-free agriculture.
From Habitat Loss
While numbers are difficult to ascertain, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service believes that habitat loss is the leading threat to birds. Human activity clears or disturbs forests or converts wild areas to farmland or human developments. In the U.S., 4.8 million acres of wild land were converted to agriculture between 2007 and 2018. This reduces the amount of land available for winter breeding and feeding for migratory birds. You can push back against habitat loss by planting native species; creating habitats like brush piles in your yard; avoiding raking; advocating for the protection or restoration of ecosystems on a local, state and national level; and choosing brands of coffee or beef that are grown in ways that don’t harm birds.
From Climate Change
The National Audubon Society found that rising temperatures caused by the climate crisis put two-thirds of North American bird species at risk of extinction as their ranges shift due to changing conditions. However, limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels would improve the situation of 76 percent of vulnerable species and keep almost 150 species from extinction risk. The only way this will happen is if human societies and governments swiftly phase out fossil fuels and end the destruction of natural carbon sinks like forests. You can advocate for climate action on a global, national, regional and local level and take steps to reduce your own carbon footprint by, for example, reducing car and plane travel and cutting your home’s emissions by taking steps to improve its energy efficiency.
Takeaway
In North America alone, bird populations have declined by 29 percent, or nearly three billion birds, since 1970. The biodiversity and climate crises mean that birds are perhaps more threatened than ever. Yet more and more people are learning to appreciate them. During the Covid-19 pandemic, people turned to birding as an infection-safe activity, and sales of bird seed and feeders took flight. The more people who take up birding, the more people who will grow aware of birds and the threats they face and have a strong personal motivation to protect them. So if you’re thinking of giving birding a try, go ahead and install a feeder or upload Merlin. At the least, you will make your own life more interesting. At the most, you may be inspired to help save the world.
The post Birding 101: Everything You Need to Know appeared first on EcoWatch.
https://www.ecowatch.com/birding-facts-ecowatch.html
Today’s quote comes from Pope John Paul II’s message for the celebration of the World Day of Peace, 1990. He wrote, “Modern society will find no solution to the ecological problem unless it takes a serious look at its lifestyle.”
Earth911 inspirations. Post them, share your desire to help people think of the planet first, every day.
The post Earth911 Inspiration: A Serious Look at Modern Lifestyle appeared first on Earth911.
https://earth911.com/inspire/earth911-inspiration-take-serious-look-lifestyle/
Green Living
Best of Sustainability In Your Ear: Making Billions of Square Feet of Commercial Space Sustainable with CBRE’s Rob Bernard
The built environment, particularly office buildings other urban facilities, are responsible for 39% of the global energy-related emissions, according to the World Green Building Council. About a third of that impact comes from the initial construction of a building and the other two-thirds is produced over the lifetime of a building by heating, cooling, and providing power to the occupants. Our guest today is leading a key battle to reduce the impact of the built environment. Tune in for a wide-ranging conversation with Rob Bernard, Chief Sustainability Officer at CBRE Group Inc., which manages more than $145 billion of commercial buildings, providing logistics, retail, and corporate office services across more than than 100 countries.
Rob cut his sustainability teeth at Microsoft, as its Chief Environmental Strategist for 11 years, as the company was developing its world-leading approach and collaborating with other tech giants to lobby for policy and funding to accelerate progress. He discusses CBRE’s Sustainability Solutions & Services for commercial building owners, as well as the accelerating progress for renewables, carbon tracking, and economic, health, and lifestyle benefits of living lightly on the planet. You can learn more about CBRE and its sustainability services at cbre.com
Take a few minutes to learn more about making construction and building operations more sustainable:
- Earth911 Podcast: Cityzenith’s Michael Jansen Uses Digital Twins to Reinvent Urban Planning
- Earth911 Podcast: Concrete.ai CEO Alex Hall On Mixing Embodied Carbon Out Of the Built Environment
- Best of Earth911 Podcast: Lowering Construction Impacts With Green Badger’s Tommy Linstroth
- Best of Earth911 Podcast: William Ulrich on Learning From Y2K To Design the Circular Economy
- Best of Earth911 Podcast: Autodesk Spacemaker Aides Building Efficiency With AI Insights
- How to Assess Your Business’ Environmental and Social Impacts
- Passive House Design: Changing the Future of New Home Construction
- Subscribe to Sustainability in Your Ear on iTunes and Apple Podcasts.
- Follow Sustainability in Your Ear on Spreaker, iHeartRadio, or YouTube.
Editor’s Note: This podcast originally aired on April 15, 2024.
The post Best of Sustainability In Your Ear: Making Billions of Square Feet of Commercial Space Sustainable with CBRE’s Rob Bernard appeared first on Earth911.
https://earth911.com/podcast/earth911-podcast-making-billions-of-square-feet-of-commercial-space-sustainable-with-cbres-rob-bernard/
An average big-budget movie creates about 3,370 metric tons of CO₂, according to the Sustainable Production Alliance’s 2021 report. That’s like driving over 700 gas-powered cars for a year, or about 33 metric tons of CO₂ for each day of filming. A single TV season can have the same impact as 108 cars. With thousands of productions happening every year in North America, Hollywood’s environmental impact is hard to overlook. Zena Harris, founder and president of Green Spark Group, has spent more than ten years helping the industry turn sustainability goals into practical steps that productions can track. On this episode of Sustainability In Your Ear, she shares how to build sustainable practices into film and TV projects from the very start, instead of adding them at the end when most waste has already been created. Zena started Green Spark Group in 2014 after earning a master’s in sustainability and environmental management at Harvard. She pitched Vancouver’s major studios on a simple idea: sustainability can save money. Her first big project, the X-Files reboot, managed to divert 81% of its waste across 40 filming locations. Since then, her certified B Corp consultancy has worked with Disney, NBCUniversal, Amazon, and other major studios, and she founded the Sustainable Production Forum, which is now in its tenth year.
This conversation comes at an important time. Soon, California’s climate disclosure laws will require studios to report emissions from every vendor in their production supply chain, both before and after filming. Zena points out that while studios are getting ready, most of their suppliers—like small companies that rent generators, handle waste, or provide lumber on tight schedules—are not prepared. The Sustainable Entertainment Alliance has released Scope 3 guidance for productions, and updated Scope 1 and 2 guidance came out in August 2025, but there is still no single tool that everyone uses. The real challenge over the next two years will be closing the gap between what studios must report and what their suppliers can provide. Zena also makes a bigger point about culture. After 12 years in the industry, she sees sustainability experts facing the same obstacles again and again because the way content is made hasn’t changed. The day-to-day work is important, but the bigger opportunity is in climate storytelling. Only about 13% of recent top-rated films mention climate change at all. Tracking the carbon footprint of a TV season is important, but what really matters is how a billion viewers see what’s normal on screen. That’s the influence Hollywood hasn’t fully used yet.
To follow Zena’s work, visit greensparkgroup.com. You can also learn more about the conference she started at sustainableproductionforum.com, or listen to her podcast, The Tie-In, which she co-hosts with Mark Rabin.
- Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on iTunes
- Follow Sustainability In Your Ear on Spreaker, iHeartRadio, or YouTube
Interview Transcript
Mitch Ratcliffe 0:00
Hello, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society, and I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation today.
We’re going to talk about film and television, because every film and TV production starts the same way: with a creative vision, a budget, a shooting schedule, and a huge amount of stuff. Generators burn diesel all day and night at shooting locations. Trucks idle as they wait to move between locations. Sets are built from raw materials only to end up in the landfill when filming ends. Craft services rely on single-use items for literally everything that’s placed on the table for the production team.
Now multiply that by the thousands of productions happening in North America each year, and the scale of the problem becomes clear. The average feature film emits 3,370 metric tons of carbon dioxide, which is like driving more than 700 gas-powered cars for a full year. And a single season of a TV show can match the emissions of 108 cars — and that’s not even counting the supply chain, everything that comes onto a set and everything that leaves. Hollywood has promised to be more sustainable many times, and our guest today has spent the last 10 years figuring out what it really takes to make these promises come to life in practice.
Zena Harris is the founder and president of Green Spark Group, a certified B Corp sustainability consultancy that she launched in 2014 with a mission to change the environmental impact of entertainment. She holds a master’s degree from Harvard in sustainability and environmental management, and she came to this work not as an environmentalist, but as a systems thinker — someone who spent her early career in engineering and HR identifying where organizations were leaking efficiency and money. But when she moved to Vancouver and discovered that nobody was focused on sustainability in what had become one of North America’s largest film production hubs, she saw a gap and filled it.
For more than a decade, she’s worked with major studios — including Disney, NBCUniversal, and Amazon — helping them embed sustainable practices in video production projects, and she’s developed measurable goals and built cross-industry collaborations that make lasting change possible.
She also founded the Sustainable Production Forum, which is now in its 10th year and has become the industry’s premier gathering place for turning sustainability talk into coordinated action.
We’ll talk with Zena about what it looks like when a production plans for sustainability from the very beginning, instead of adding it on at the end of the process like we usually do with all of our waste. And she’ll explain her idea of radical collaboration and why making real progress in Hollywood requires everyone — that includes unions, guilds, city governments, power companies, and those top-talent stars — to work together. We’ll also discuss how she uses the circular economy on set, the accountability gap that remains even as California’s new climate disclosure laws start to roll out, and whether the same systems-thinking approach can help business outside the film world.
To find out more about Zena’s work and Green Spark Group, visit greensparkgroup.com — that’s all one word, no space, no dash. Hollywood has the power to change how people think about sustainability, but can it also change how it works behind the scenes? Zena Harris is tackling both challenges at the same time. Let’s see what she’s discovered, right after this brief commercial break.
Mitch Ratcliffe 3:49
Welcome to the show, Zena. How you doing today?
Zena Harris 3:50
Hi. Thanks for having me. I’m doing great. The sun is shining in Tacoma, Washington, and I’m happy to be talking with you.
Mitch Ratcliffe 3:59
Well, I’m so happy to hear that you live in Tacoma. I lived there for almost 50 years. It’s a beautiful place, and I’m glad you’ve inherited it. I really like it. But you started your sustainability career in Vancouver, and you had no entertainment experience, and your first project was helping The X-Files reboot series divert material at 40 shooting locations — and you reduced their waste by 81%. What gave you the confidence to, you know, just call and say, ‘Hey, can I make you more sustainable?’
Zena Harris 4:31
It was a little more than that. You know, there was a lead-up to it. I had studied the film and TV industry in graduate school — I did my master’s thesis on it — so I had a little bit of a background. And the reason I studied it in grad school: I was in a sustainability master’s program, and I wanted to figure out how to shift culture. The first thing I thought of was, okay, people watch TV, we all love movies — that’s where I should start digging in to see what they’re doing. And they weren’t doing a ton. They were doing a little bit, but not too much.
So I talked to all the studio reps and found out what was going on and created a whole framework, like you do in graduate school, and wrote it all up. And then I pitched it to every studio. I sent out a white paper, essentially, to all the studios, and I was like, ‘Hey, let’s talk about this.’ Flew to LA, met with people in person. And I’m like, ‘I’m in Vancouver. I know it’s a major film hub. Put me to work.’ And one person did. She said, ‘Hey, you know, The X-Files is coming. It’s a big show. We have room in the budget to make this great. Let’s see what we can do.’ And that’s what really got me going.
One of the first people I met in the industry was Kelsey Evans. She is the owner of Keep It Green Recycling, which is a local vendor in Vancouver. Now, I had studied the film and TV industry, I know management practices and sustainability and the science, and she knew — like, really knew — the industry. So we worked together on that production, and we still work together today. She’s a friend of mine. She’s fantastic.
We got a lot of stuff done on that show, and that was my introduction into the film industry in practical terms. Vancouver, because it’s a major film hub, has — let’s just say — 20 shows filming at any given time. Sometimes it’s a lot more. But I knew that the work I was doing on that one show could scale. We needed to do it on all the shows. We needed to engage the industry. We needed to train people. So I started Green Spark Group as a vehicle to do this in the industry more broadly.
I think my past experience — prior to even going to grad school — in HR for a multinational company, and I was also an executive director at an international nonprofit where we had working groups and people from all over the world coming together to solve problems and create programs, all that gave me confidence to step into the film industry, look around, learn from others, apply my skills, and build this momentum locally. The company, locally, ended up — now we work across North America and even in other countries. So it’s been a journey.
Mitch Ratcliffe 7:52
Well, you point out that they said, ‘We’ve got room in the budget to make this great,’ but that isn’t always the case. So what’s the pitch to a new client?
Zena Harris 8:00
Yeah, yeah. Well, those are the magic words: ‘We can save you money.’ That is it. That’s it. I mean, look, this has been a movement over the last, let’s say, 12 years — that’s how long I’ve been working in this space. And it’s rare for folks to say, ‘Yeah, we can figure this out in the budget.’ Sometimes it happens, but most people want to know how they can save money. So if you can show them very clearly that they can save money, that pushes the door open. And then you can talk about lots of other things too.
Mitch Ratcliffe 8:43
So tell us about The Amazing Spider-Man 2. You saved them a lot of money. How’d you do it, and how much did you save them?
Zena Harris 8:48
I did not work on that. A colleague of mine, Emellie O’Brien, worked on that. That was actually one of the first productions publicized for saving a lot of money. I think they saved something like — well, I have the number here — $400,000. The cool thing about what happened with that, and also what happened with The X-Files and some others shortly thereafter, is that the studio recorded behind the scenes. They interviewed crew members to talk about what they had done. Then they published some of the stats in a case study and a video.
People in our industry love watching videos, right? So we did a behind-the-scenes for The X-Files, which caught lightning in a bottle — really created a whole movement in Vancouver. We showed that little five-minute behind-the-scenes video to everyone, and they saw their peers in that video because they were crew members speaking about what they had done. Things like that really sparked action in people and this excitement that, ‘Wow, things I have seen and kind of felt uncomfortable with — like waste, nobody likes seeing waste — people saw solutions in those videos. People saw themselves, saw their peers, and that inspired action, awareness, intrigue — like all the stuff you would want to create a movement. I can’t say enough about those early videos. They really helped kind of put us on a trajectory for more awareness and more action.
Mitch Ratcliffe 10:42
A set is kind of like a microcosm of a city. A lot of stuff comes together and then disperses again. We actually did some consulting a few years ago with Hollywood about recycling the material on site — they use the PCs for the first time and then send them to recycling. It’s amazing how wasteful it could be. Tell us about what happens on a set. What’s the input, and what’s the output?
Zena Harris 11:10
Yeah, you are right. It is definitely akin to a city. I mean, if you think about it, for a large film or TV series, there can be 20 different departments working together to make that project happen. Each of those departments brings in some kind of material, some kind of input. The production office will have lots of office supplies, equipment, office equipment, furniture for the office — that kind of thing. Those things are coming in, and then you use them, and then they go out.
Then you can think of production design and construction. These two departments work really closely together, and they’re the ones creating and then building the sets in the sound stage. You can think about all the materials that might be associated with that. Construction is a big input department, where we’re bringing in lots of wood — and other types of material. It’s not just wood, but essentially we’re building a village inside a sound stage to shoot. And it’s all the wood and any other material that goes into that: wallpaper, paint, all sorts of props, set dressing that will go into that space.
So all that’s coming in, and then we use it for a short period of time, and then we have to do something with it. A lot of times, set walls are kind of standard — they can be reused. These are things that, if we recognize the patterns here, we’re using these things all the time. We’re breaking them down, and then we do something with them. A lot of times the breakdown is fast. You don’t have a ton of opportunity to really think. But if we know that there’s a pattern associated — prep, production, and wrap every single show — we know that we can disrupt that pattern. We can plan for it.
This is where thinking ahead and planning like, ‘Hey, we can reuse these walls. Got a lot of doors here — we’re going to reuse these doors. We’re going to send them to a place that will hold them temporarily, like a reuse center, and then those can be redistributed back into the industry.’ Some productions will store this stuff on their own if they have reshoots they think they might have, or another series they might come along. So all of these are options.
The default historically has been — because this is a dynamic industry, because timelines are short, people need to get out of their stage space — to use it, break it down, put it in the dumpster, get that thing out of here, and move on. So we’re saying there’s another way to do it, and just that alone saves the production a lot of money, because those big dumpsters at the end of it all are expensive to haul away. If we can reduce even a few of those, that is a cost savings, and then that material can be diverted and reused. So everything coming in — food, big material like construction material that people think a lot about, anything coming in — has an opportunity to be diverted, redistributed on the back end. And then that action saves money.
Mitch Ratcliffe 14:59
Well, you describe what’s needed as radical collaboration. I’m wondering if you can explain what that means, because Hollywood’s going through a lot of changes right now, and it sounds like sustainability may be the keystone of some new talent or new careers during the production process. So what are the hardest stakeholders in that radical collaboration to get to move from where they are today?
Zena Harris 15:22
Yeah. I think, like I said, I’ve been doing this for a really long time, and one of the things that I’ve picked up over the years is that people in the industry have been conditioned to point fingers. There are different stakeholders in the industry. Crew will point to the union or the studio, for example, and say, ‘You know, those folks need to do something so that I can integrate sustainable practices.’ The unions will point to crew or studios. The studios will point to production or unions. And so at the end of the day, that doesn’t get us anywhere. We’re kind of swirling in this finger-pointing. And nobody really knows what to do. They’re waiting for something. So progress is slow when you do that.
In order to move the needle, I think one of the things we need to do is actually work together in ways that might seem unconventional or radical. I keep reminding myself of the saying, ‘What got us here won’t take us forward.’ So we have to get over ourselves and do something differently. We know that there’s no single organization that’s going to solve all the problems or change the existing system. We need a different approach, a different narrative around all of this — not just kind of deferring to another stakeholder.
This is what I call radical collaboration, because it’s different. Collaboration between crew and unions and studios and creatives and suppliers and industry organizations — in ways that have been different than we’ve tried before, that really haven’t worked so well, or not to the degree we wanted them to work. So instead of reinventing the wheel on that, we need a whole different tack. I think that in order to see success, we need positive reinforcement for people. We need to actually say, ‘Yes, this worked,’ and in increments too — not just the big things. When people see that positive reinforcement, they actually lean in. They actually have more confidence in what they’re doing. And then this increases momentum. That’s kind of my view of radical collaboration and what I think is needed to keep the ball rolling.
Mitch Ratcliffe 18:07
Well, you’re making a really interesting point, which is that people don’t dislike change. They may be a little afraid of it, but they want to see that the extra effort involved in making the change actually is paying off. As the orchestrator of the sustainability activities on set, how do you communicate that to them so that the Teamsters and the members of the Screen Actors Guild all say, ‘Oh, I’m in’?
Zena Harris 18:37
Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, it’s interesting. You mentioned a couple of different positions there — Teamsters and actors and these sorts of things. Everybody is coming to the production with a different perspective, a different viewpoint, kind of a different mandate within their department. Like, their job is to do this. So everybody sees sustainability in a slightly different way.
One of the things we really strive to do — and I would say this is kind of a standard practice, but what we’re trying to do as a team at Green Spark Group — is go beyond surface-level conversations. Not just say, ‘Here are a few things you could do,’ but really try to have a deeper conversation with people in each of these departments and ask them what they see, what they need to be successful in doing any one of the things that they might want to do differently, and really help them get there. If they’re afraid to talk to someone, well, we’ll help them do that. We will have their back. We will go with them and be a backstop for anything they may not know or feel confident talking about. If it is finding a vendor and they don’t have time to look around, we’ll help them do that.
You know, people say, ‘Meet you where you are.’ But it’s really going beyond surface-level conversations. It’s really tapping into people’s wants, needs, level of confidence, and helping them grow that and helping them shine in their role — whatever it is. I think that sort of human-centric approach is really helpful, and what really moves the needle, or actually builds trust. Because at the end of the day, we can go in there and talk about all sorts of gear. There’s a lot of gear out there. There’s a lot of batteries out there that are going to save emissions. But I have seen multiple times where batteries have been rented, they sit in the gear truck, and people are afraid to use them. Why is that? Let’s talk about that. Let’s really unpack it, and let’s find a safe space to do it. Maybe it’s that lightweight one over there, and we want to just test it out. Totally cool. Let’s make that happen. What’s it going to take to get there?
Mitch Ratcliffe 21:24
This very meta moment — talking about telling stories to storytellers to get them to change their behavior — is a great place to take a quick commercial break. Folks, we’re going to be right back to continue this really interesting conversation.
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Let’s get back to my conversation with Zena Harris, founder and president of the Hollywood sustainability consultancy — although Vancouver, too — Green Spark Group. Zena, your mission is to change the climate of entertainment, and that has a double meaning that clearly was deliberate. But I’m wondering, in the current environment and thinking about the stories we tell about why we do things, with all the whiplashing political winds of the last couple of years, how has that changed your message and your perception of what Hollywood’s trying to accomplish?
Zena Harris 22:16
Yeah, I mean, I’ve said this a few times. We have a lot of momentum. Right now, in 2026, there are more organizations, there are more people thinking about sustainability, there are more tools out there for people to use. There’s a lot of momentum in the industry. So for us at Green Spark Group, we are on a mission to change the climate of entertainment, and it’s incremental, year over year, year over year — and so we’re still working on it. It’s very relevant for us today.
We have had a hand in changing a lot in the entertainment industry over the last 12 years. We started programs, we’ve created strategic plans for industry organizations and training in the C-suite, and started the industry’s first conference. We’re uplifting people and trying to give a platform to people to collaborate and share their ideas. But there’s a lot of opportunity out there. There are still a lot of people who are new to sustainability, and they need someone to help them make sense of it all. It’s taking all this wonderful information that’s been created by various organizations — and we’ve contributed as well — and distilling it and helping them make sense of it all, make decisions that are in line with their values, and implement the things that they want to implement. Save the money that they can save, that they know they can, when they start doing the math.
Mitch Ratcliffe 24:11
Is the money the key thing right now? Is it the sustainable savings, or is it still a commitment to the climate, in the context of, again, all the backlash against the idea of environmentalism?
Zena Harris 24:24
Yeah, I mean, the idea of environmentalism, I think, is kind of in the broader ethos. I think when you get down to talking to people one on one, they want solutions to things — waste they’ve seen, or emissions they’ve encountered on production, or food waste, or whatever it is. Whether they call themselves an environmentalist or they just are a caring and concerned person, everybody wants a positive working experience. And they don’t want that tension internally between, ‘I’m doing this great, creative, wonderful thing in my job, and then I look over here and some negative thing is happening environmentally or whatever.’ People want a holistic, positive work experience. So I think that’s core at the end of the day — to tap into that, and, like I said, just go beyond surface-level conversations and really help people figure that out.
Mitch Ratcliffe 25:35
Let me ask about the other side of that equation, about changing the climate of entertainment. Hollywood has enormous cultural reach, but we did a little research and found that only about 10%, 13% was the number we came up with, of recent top-rated films even acknowledge the idea of climate change on screen. Do you hear creatives on the content side talking about climate? Do they ask you? Do they say, ‘You know, this is interesting, I’d like to learn more, and I might tell a story about it someday’?
Zena Harris 26:05
Yeah. I mean, this idea that the industry reach is certainly enormous — the cultural influence of the industry, wherever you’re interacting with it, whether you love a character on screen, whether you follow an actor in real life and kind of just like what they do, whether you follow — like, I’m an operations kind of person, I like looking at how things work and trying to improve that. But this idea of climate storytelling, a lot of people are thinking about it right now. It’s a huge lever. You will hear that batted around a lot. A lot of industry organizations are doing research on it and trying to get into writers’ rooms and in film schools.
There’s a lot of momentum in that space. We have been engaged a few times in that effort, and it’s proven beneficial. So I would say that 13% — there’s a lot of momentum around this subject, and I can see that number increasing over time. People want stories that reflect the current reality they’re feeling in real life. There are a lot of people working in environmental jobs, or in some shape or form, and I think those kinds of professions will be reflected on screen a lot more in the future. So, yeah, I think there’s a lot of momentum in that space.
Mitch Ratcliffe 27:52
I can see a film about a ranger saving a family from a fire.
Zena Harris 27:57
You can think it, they can do it.
Mitch Ratcliffe 28:00
Let’s turn back to the operational question, as you pointed out you focus on that. One of the common problems that production has, along with every other business, is trying to fully measure what’s going on. Like we were talking about, this set is this midpoint in a very complex supply chain where stuff has flowed in, now it needs to go somewhere in order to either be reused or appropriately recycled, but we can’t fully measure all that. What’s still in the invisible category of information? In the same sense that Scope 3 emissions are hard for a typical corporation to measure, is there a comparable issue with production sustainability?
Zena Harris 28:36
Oh yeah, 100%. Look, there are always more things to measure. As an industry, we have focused a lot on carbon emissions from things like utilities, fuel, air travel, and accommodations. We have a really good handle on that. But those are, like, four categories, right? And, as you said earlier, materials are coming onto production — food, wood, office supplies, you name it, it comes onto production. So those are the things we don’t have a solid handle on. There’s embedded carbon and all that stuff.
There are also lots of industry tools, industry carbon calculators out there — some measure more than others.
Mitch Ratcliffe (interjects)
Are any of them any good?
Zena Harris (continues)
Yeah, yeah, they’re good. But some have more inputs than others. Some will only measure those four categories that I mentioned. For years, for example, everybody in the industry wants to know the waste diversion rate, right? But nobody focuses on the carbon emissions associated with that material. We just get a diversion rate, and we call it good. So you have to choose: if you want to know all of that, you have to choose a tool that will allow you to input more of that information. And we don’t have a standard tool yet in the industry that everybody uses, so we can compare apples to apples.
We have guidance in the industry, and that’s really helpful. The Sustainable Entertainment Alliance, which is an industry consortium, has put out guidance on Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3. Their Scope 3 guidance is the most recent, and with new information, new methodology, a lot of people don’t really know what to do with that, and maybe aren’t sure which tool to use to capture some of that stuff. So there’s a lot of uncertainty even around the guidance that’s out there. That’s where you can seek out professionals to help you understand all that stuff.
Mitch Ratcliffe 31:11
One of the characteristics of the change we’re undergoing right now is the recognition of externalities. And in Hollywood production generally — I have some friends who are in the industry — it seems to me that they focused almost entirely on who was in front of the camera and who was behind the camera, and only now are starting to recognize that they’re part of this deeper supply chain. And now California’s new climate disclosure laws are going to require studios to report indirect, upstream and downstream emissions from every vendor by this year. How’s that going to change? And is the industry actually getting the traction on trying to respond to that requirement?
Zena Harris 31:47
The studios are very aware of this. They’ve been preparing for this. The suppliers upstream, downstream are not as [prepared].
Mitch Ratcliffe 31:58
So how are they not prepared? What do we need to do?
Zena Harris 32:00
Well, they haven’t been tracking.
Mitch Ratcliffe 32:10
So they’re the typical company.
Zena Harris 32:13
They are a typical company. These are small companies servicing these projects, these productions. And we’ve been so focused in the industry on pre-production and production — that piece of the content creation process. So if you think of a book that has 10 chapters, we’ve been essentially focusing on one chapter. So you’ve got all of the other ones, and all of the service companies and suppliers and all of that that still incorporates the book, and all of those are contributing in some way.
Now we’ve been collecting data from waste haulers. We’ve been collecting data from people who supply equipment, and even those folks are still trying to get organized with their data. So you can imagine, like every other company, they all have their own operations. So that’s one thing. You can incorporate sustainability into your own company operations, and then you can provide data associated with the product or service that you are providing. And that’s going to matter. Those things roll up into this production reporting, and that production reporting rolls up into the larger studio, who’s going to have to incorporate that into their corporate reporting.
Mitch Ratcliffe 33:54
So do you see this regulation as catalyzing the potential for sustainability at scale in entertainment production?
Zena Harris 34:05
Yeah. I mean, I think it provides people a solid talking point to go up and shake the tree a little bit and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to have to be doing this.’ Look, they’re not going to have all the information they need, probably, in year one. So they’re going to take what they do have, and they’re going to estimate probably across their slate. And then they’re going to work really hard to make that better, more accurate in the coming years. So if you’re not asked in year one as a supplier for certain information, you might be in year two and three. It would be wise, I think, to kind of get your house in order and be able to start reporting on these things, even if you’re never asked. It’s good for you as a company, because you start to understand where your waste is, where your emissions lie, and then you can start making changes accordingly. And yes, that stuff saves money. So it’s good for everyone to be thinking about this, whether you’re asked by a studio or not.
Mitch Ratcliffe 35:16
Well, that’s really the key — that it’s also rewarding to make that kind of additional positive impact, as well as save some money and make more profit in the long run. I mean, that’s what’s rewarding about progress in general.
Zena Harris 35:30
Totally, totally. It’s a ripple effect, right? And then we just get better as an industry, and then an industry that contributes to broader society.
Mitch Ratcliffe 35:40
So after 10 years, how far has the industry come toward the vision that you had when you started Green Spark Group?
Zena Harris 35:50
Oh, gosh. Well, there’s a lot that has happened over these years. Like I said, more people are aware, more people are engaged. But I think that we are swirling within the existing system. Sustainability practitioners that started working on production like I did years ago — we just entered this existing content creation system. And what I’m noticing now is that we’re swirling within the same system. We’re all running up against similar challenges around the world with regard to implementing sustainable practices. So we’re coming up against consistent hurdles, barriers within this system.
For me, that’s an opportunity to look a little bit bigger and say, ‘Okay, well, if we keep running into the same barriers, what if the system shifted? What if the entire system shifted? What are the incentives involved in the system to keep it the way it is?’ And there’s a lot — that’s a whole separate podcast — but all to say, this is where we need to be thinking: how we shift the system, how we have that radical collaboration, how we shift the needle on what suppliers are doing and reporting, and these sorts of things. And that’s what’s going to take us to the next level. We’re going to get over the hump.
Mitch Ratcliffe 37:34
So, given that, imagine that you are Zena, goddess of sustainability, and can put your finger on one thing and change it. What would it be, in order to drive much more rapid transition to a more sustainable production environment?
Zena Harris 37:51
I mean, I think it all comes down to the people — the people in the system that are either allowing or not allowing, either making excuses or open to possibility. It all comes down to that. There are some core elements associated with people, behavior change, these sorts of things. I think mindset is core, absolutely core. I think courage — even to talk about this stuff within your small team or your department, or even in a larger conversation — is pretty critical, to voice some things you’re noticing, or what ideas you have for doing things differently. I think that collective confidence — once you do that, people get on board. They come together. Confidence is critical as well. If you don’t have it, you’re not going to take the next step, right? So there are fundamental human elements that need to be developed, to be encouraged, to be demonstrated. And I think that is going to shift the needle.
Mitch Ratcliffe 39:08
It’s a storytelling challenge in a lot of ways. There’s some carrot, there’s some stick, there’s a lot of nuance to that tale that we need to really make embedded into everybody’s approach to thinking about the work. Zena, thanks so much for your time today. How can folks follow both Green Spark Group and the work you’ve done with the Sustainable Production Forum?
Zena Harris 39:28
Sure. You’re always welcome to check out our website, greensparkgroup.com. We post insights there monthly and have a lot of great information for folks. Also on social media at @greensparkgroup — pick a platform, we’re probably on it. And then the Sustainable Production Forum is online as well, sustainableproductionforum.com, and from there you can get to all of their content, videos, anything you want to know is there too.
And I’ll also just give a quick plug for my podcast that I co-host with my longtime friend Mark Rabin. It’s called The Tie-In, and so folks can also check out stories from crew members, from people doing amazing work behind the scenes. We talk to them all there.
Mitch Ratcliffe 40:21
Zena, thanks so much. It’s been a fascinating conversation. Really enjoyed it.
Zena Harris
Thank you.
Mitch Ratcliffe 40:31
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Zena Harris, founder and president of Green Spark Group, the certified B Corp sustainability consultancy she launched in 2014 to change the climate of entertainment. You can find Zena and her team’s work at greensparkgroup.com — that’s all one word, no space, no dash. And check out their conference, the Sustainable Production Forum, now in its 10th year, at sustainableproductionforum.com, also all one word, no space, no dash.
I think the headline from Zena’s work is a pitch, not a principle: ‘We can save you money.’ That’s how she opens a conversation with a studio, and it’s why The Amazing Spider-Man 2 became an early case study, based on the work of a colleague of hers at Green Spark who helped that production save roughly $400,000 through sustainable practices. The implications of these savings are clear when you stand next to the dumpster at the end of a chute and watch a village’s worth of lumber, furniture, wallpaper, and props get hauled away to a landfill because the stage needs to be empty by Monday.
The sustainability opportunity in film and TV isn’t a values problem — the industry’s values are already stated on the record. It’s an operational capacity problem, and Zena’s work is translating aspiration into line items a production accountant can track. And that’s to the benefit of the environment, even if it’s not visible on the bottom line.
California’s new climate disclosure laws are about to change the equation, too. Beginning this year, studios will have to report upstream and downstream emissions from every vendor in their production supply chain. That’s the chapter of the book, as Zena put it, that the industry has never actually opened. The studios knew that this is coming, and they’ve been preparing for it. Their suppliers — the small companies servicing productions on short timelines — mostly haven’t. That gap is the real story over the next 24 months in the entertainment sustainability business.
Zena’s advice to suppliers is the same advice my recent guest Steve Wilhite, who leads Schneider Electric’s power management division, offered corporate energy buyers just a few weeks ago: get your house in order now, because even if you’re not asked for data today, you will be in two or three years. The companies that can report cleanly will win work, while those that can’t will become a balance sheet burden to the studios.
A digital nervous system is arriving now in Hollywood, and every waste hauler, every generator rental company, every lumber supplier is becoming a data-producing node in a network that didn’t exist just one or two production cycles ago. California’s environmental policy is forcing that network into being, and once it exists, it will not unbuild itself, because people are going to see the benefits. They’re going to see the savings that we’ve been talking about throughout this conversation.
And after 12 years in the business, I think Zena’s comment near the end of our conversation — that sustainability practitioners in entertainment are ‘swirling within the existing system’ — is important to note. The hurdles they hit on one production look identical to the hurdles they hit on the next, because the content creation system itself hasn’t changed. That’s the green living myth problem I discussed recently with author Michael Maniates, but with a Hollywood accent: individual actors are doing the right thing inside a structure that continues to produce the same outputs by default. And that can easily become disenchanting. On-set greening is necessary and it’s real, but the industry’s deepest cultural lever is the one that we discussed in passing.
Only about 13% of recent top-rated films even acknowledge climate change on screen. The carbon accounting for a single TV season matters, but the cultural accounting — for what a billion viewers see, what they feel is normal, and what film and television characters drive and eat and care about — that’s the lever that this industry hasn’t yet pulled. Production sustainability builds the operational muscle and the credibility, but climate storytelling is where that credibility will be built at scale, because it will spread these ideas, changing not only Hollywood’s practices, but the practices of an entire world. One without the other leaves the most influential narrative engine on the planet running on the old script, and it’s time for a change.
So stay tuned. We’re going to keep talking with people rewriting what’s possible on set and on screen. And could you take a moment to help spread the word about the sustainable future we can build together? You are the amplifier that can spread more ideas to create less waste. So please take a look at any of the more than 550 episodes of Sustainability In Your Ear in our archives. Writing a review on your favorite podcast platform will help your neighbors find us. So please tell your friends, family, and co-workers they can find Sustainability In Your Ear on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or whatever purveyor of podcast goodness they prefer.
Thank you, folks, for your support. I’m Mitch Ratcliffe. This is Sustainability In Your Ear, and we will be back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, take care of yourself, take care of one another, and let’s all take care of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a green day.
The post Sustainability In Your Ear: Zena Harris Brings a Green Spark to Hollywood appeared first on Earth911.
https://earth911.com/podcast/sustainability-in-your-ear-zena-harris-brings-a-green-spark-to-hollywood/
-
Climate Change9 months ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
-
Greenhouse Gases9 months ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
-
Greenhouse Gases2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
-
Climate Change2 years ago
Bill Discounting Climate Change in Florida’s Energy Policy Awaits DeSantis’ Approval
-
Climate Change2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
-
Renewable Energy6 months agoSending Progressive Philanthropist George Soros to Prison?
-
Carbon Footprint2 years agoUS SEC’s Climate Disclosure Rules Spur Renewed Interest in Carbon Credits
-
Renewable Energy2 years ago
GAF Energy Completes Construction of Second Manufacturing Facility