On a night featuring some of Hollywood’s brightest stars, the environmental implications of fracking stole the spotlight.
The Environmental Media Association (EMA) Awards, held at Warner Brothers’ Studio last Saturday evening, recognized productions and personalities championing environmental causes. Walking the EMA’s signature “green carpet,” eco-conscious celebrities – Matt Damon, Hayden Panettiere, Lance Bass, and Darren Criss among them – walked onto the WB lot for an open-air, carbon-neutral ceremony framed by exclusively repurposed décor.
Bill McKibben, the prominent environmentalist who founded 350.org in an attempt to marshal public opinion against continued carbon dioxide emissions, provided intellectual heft to the proceedings. Accepting the Lifetime Achievement Award, he warned of the country’s unstinting reliance on fossil fuels and called for substantial action. “It’s good to do things that are fun, like driving cool hybrid cars,” he said, in a thinly veiled push back against the consumer-based trendiness of some environmental strains, “but we need to do things that make us uncomfortable and make others uncomfortable.”
McKibben has risen to national prominence due to his vociferous activism against the Keystone XL pipeline project, and has often been christened the leader of the modern environmental movement. And yet, despite his unparalleled reputation in the community, on Saturday night McKibben rejected the mantle, and even the concept, of movement leader. Rather, he calls for mass action, a pre-requisite for the battle against better-funded and better-connected foes, but an approach that nonetheless echoes the stance of the famously unrooted Occupy Wall Street movement. McKibben issued a parting call to “up your game, push harder, because time is extremely short.”
Movie stars promoting the virtues of recycling and hybrid cars is a predictable, frequently-mocked trope, but a heavy focus was placed on one of the more fundamental environmental issues of our day: fracking. Damon’s Promised Land won for feature film, Gasland Part II picked up the award for documentary, “Mother Fracker” won for television episodic comedy, and the children’s television prize went to “What’s the Deal With Fracking?” In all, more than half of the honorees covered fracking as their central issue, underlining its position as the environmental cause of the moment.
Damon received recognition for his ongoing commitment to environmental causes, and he used the platform to highlight the achievements of Water.org, the organization he co-founded with Gary White. Water.org links up with local partners to enact (what will hopefully be) sustainable solutions to sanitation and water accessibility challenges. “Water isn’t just about saving lives,” he said, “it’s really about dignity and hope.”
Damon recounted his realization that, while drilling individual wells may be gratifying, it’s not scalable. “There’s never going to be enough straight charity to solve this,” he explained, opting instead for a water-based microfinance program that encourages a recipient’s investment of both capital and effort.
“After Bill [McKibben] speaks,” he quipped, “sometimes you want to walk up the hill and jump off the Hollywood sign.” But Damon opted for a happy ending, pointing to the media’s powerful voice in advocating for environmentalism. It’s a cause the entertainment industry is eager to embrace with full earnestness, and whose urgency is only continues to increase.
