During the first episode of Variety‘s Sustainability in Hollywood event presented by Toyota, “The Office” star Rainn Wilson gave insight into his YouTube series “An Idiot’s Guide to Climate…
During the first episode of Variety‘s Sustainability in Hollywood event presented by Toyota, “The Office” star Rainn Wilson gave insight into his YouTube series “An Idiot’s Guide to Climate Change,” and a roundtable of industry executives discussed how they are working to make sets more eco-friendly.
In the six-episode series, from his digital media company SoulPancake, Wilson experiences the effects of climate change firsthand in Greenland and explains them in a way to help educate the average person.
“Climate change is something that I have been passionate about for years… but the extent of my activism around climate change was an occasional angry tweet. And I realized like ‘Listen, Rainn, you have to get off your butt and actually do something more if you want to make a difference, however small,'” Wilson said. “So this show was kind of the first step. It was me, ‘the idiot,’ learning about climate change, taking the audience, also maybe idiots, on the journey to learn a little bit more about it in a fun, accessible, funny, kind of a low-key DIY way.”
Wilson’s conversation was followed by a sustainability roundtable featuring Shannon Bart, sustainability director at NBC Universal; John Rego, vice president of sustainability at Sony Pictures Entertainment; Heidi Kindberg, director of sustainability at HBO and Colleen Bell, executive director at the California Film Commission.
Together, they talked about why it’s so important for the film and television industry to have more sustainable practices, and what their respective companies are doing to further the charge.
“For more than 10 years, the major studios have been collaborating to accelerate the adoption of sustainable production best practices. We’re known as the Sustainable Production Alliance because our group has grown tremendously,” Bart said. “We now include the streamers and smaller production companies and through a partnership with the Producers Guild of America, we created greenproductionguide.com, which is a free resource to help productions measure and reduce their environmental impacts.”
Watch the full video above.
