Pandora Was Always Supposed to Be Earth

After Avatar came out, there were documented cases of people entering genuine depression because the world of the film was so beautiful and our own felt so irredeemably bleak by comparison. CNN ran a piece on it. Forum threads filled with people describing a kind of grief for a planet that didn’t exist. I find that more interesting than anything in the film itself—the idea that CGI ecology could produce real mourning, that the gap between what the planet is and what it could be is wide enough to fall into.

James Cameron’s documentary series Years of Living Dangerously tried to do something with that gap. Made with a roster of familiar faces—Jessica Alba, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Matt Damon among others—the Showtime series looked at climate change not through data and projections but through the people already living inside its consequences. Farmers losing harvests. Communities displaced. The slow grind of a changing world experienced at human scale rather than satellite view.

The celebrity involvement is easy to be cynical about. Schwarzenegger talking about carbon emissions has a particular texture when you know his personal footprint. But the series was thoughtful enough to earn its running time—moving between scientific context and personal testimony without letting either become wallpaper for the other. It won the Emmy for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series.

Whether it moved any needles is harder to say. Climate communication has a chronic problem where the people most likely to watch a well-made documentary about global warming are exactly the people who already understand it. The audience that needed convincing in 2013 mostly wasn’t tuning in to Showtime on Sunday nights. But maybe that’s the wrong metric. Sometimes you make a document not to change minds but to prove that someone, at a given moment, was paying attention.