Anna Jane Joyner
Anna Jane Joyner champions honest portrayals of climate change and the human experience. She’s a Hollywood climate story consultant and the founder and director of Good Energy. Find her at GoodEnergyStories.com.
Transcript
Anna Jane Joyner:
There has never been a social movement in history that did not incorporate artists and storytellers. Culture, story, is the environment, the literal ecosystem through which political change happens, and you can't just skip the story and culture part to get to successful political and policy change.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Welcome to Good Citizen, a podcast from the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. I'm Ted Roosevelt.
When I wind down at the end of the day, I often relax and watch some good binge-worthy TV or a movie. And what's so fun about these shows is that they allow me to inhabit another person's life for a while. Sometimes it's admittedly fantastical, but largely they reflect back a version of what it's like to live on our planet. But there is one thing that is notably absent: you rarely see the environmental realities of climate change depicted, and that's where our next guest comes in. Anna Jane Joyner noticed this disconnect between the world we live in and the world we see on the screen and founded Good Energy. She was raised in the mountains of North Carolina and is the daughter of an evangelical minister and climate change skeptic, but she uses this background to help screenwriters incorporate authentic climate narratives into mainstream entertainment. Please enjoy this very interesting conversation.
Anna Jane Joyner:
It's funny, I always kind of get that double take in Hollywood when people are like, so where do you live? You live Silver Lake half the time and Alabama half the time? My family's been on our land in Alabama for five generations. It's from my mother's side and I have this kind of romantic idea like I'm going to move to this place that's sacred to my family, that's this very core part of who I am, and that's on the front lines of climate change. And the reality is that even if we stopped all fossil fuel emissions tomorrow, the Gulf Coast is going to look dramatically different. I will probably be one of the last generations who get to experience the magic of that place, at least in anything like we know it today.
Ted Roosevelt V:
You focus in your day job on getting climate stories into media, into movies, into storytelling, and climate is all around us all the time, and it's impacting us in some ways very extreme like the LA wildfires and the floods in Asheville and in some ways less extreme, but it is everywhere and yet it doesn't show up on the screen anywhere. Why is that, do you think?
Anna Jane Joyner:
So Good energy, my organization, does--- we do a lot of qualitative research, so we interview tons of TV and film writers, tons of creative executives. One of the things we first found, we were doing research for our playbook for screenwriting in the age of climate change, and a lot of the writers just didn't have access to these stories. There's--- oftentimes, you just don't have the bandwidth to do the deep research to realize that there's this huge menu of stories and characters out there that could inspire new kinds of climate stories or just different angles. So a big purpose of our playbook of all of our work is just bringing a larger menu of stories and characters to the industry to really open up the kind of creative ideation and possibility of what these stories could look like. I think it does really help me to stay connected to places like the Gulf Coast and the Blue Ridge Mountains so that I have just a wider lens into farmers in Alabama and how these more erratic droughts and then floods---then not to mention the hurricanes---are really affecting their day-to-day lives and just ability to get by and their stories.
Ted Roosevelt V:
About two decades ago, I worked with a climate organization that was focused on the grassroots climate movement. And I remember watching the success around gay marriage and being able to pass legislation, get it--- first, normalizing it, and then getting legislation in our system and thinking, how did they get that done so quickly, so successfully? And people in climate 20 years later are still struggling with this issue?
Anna Jane Joyner:
I think actually the marriage equality movement is an interesting parallel for a lot of reasons. One, like "Will and Grace" and even Hollywood was very much a huge part of shifting American perspectives on marriage equality. Even Joe Biden said that "Will and Grace" was a really big part of shifting his perspective on marriage equality. But two, it really was about showing the humanity of these people whose lived experience felt distant from yours. And I think there's a little bit of parallel with climate maybe that we're---and I haven't ever really tried to articulate this---but it is very much about moving this kind of "issue" away from it being an "issue" and it being about people's real lives. And really this is a human story. This is all of our stories, and we have to reclaim that in order to make progress on it.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I think that is an amazing point, that it's a human story to tell rather than say, a lesson to teach everyone.
Anna Jane Joyner:
I mean, humans have always gone to stories. Going back 30,000 years, we have told stories, we have listened to stories, we have shared stories as a way of finding meaning, of processing the inevitable tragedies of being alive: loss, death, change. And with climate, the communications that we were getting were policy wonks, science that was very hard to decipher. So that's really why I started Good Energy. It was part strategic--- TV and film has real world impact in the way that we, society, shifts. It changes behaviors, changes beliefs and perceptions. We looked at over 37,000 scripts that aired between 2016 and 2020, and only 2.8% even mentioned climate change, let alone had any kind of story about it. And that includes kind of every variation of the word climate change, climate crisis, global warming, but also we studied a bunch of keywords like sea level rise and solar panels. So tried to really look at a holistic kind of vantage point of how this could be showing up in dialogue. And that is a big part of our goal is to just bring that number up so that the world of the stories that we watch and love on screen is the world that we live in.
Ted Roosevelt V:
You've spent the last 15 years focused on climate communications. I'd love to know what called you to that space.
Anna Jane Joyner:
I was raised evangelical and then in the American South. My dad is a pastor of a large church, and so grew up in very kind of a conservative environment. Definitely an environment that highly prioritized story, though. I do think that religion is a set of stories, so you kind of implicitly understand just how much stories influence and move people's lives. So the love of story was there and also the love of nature. We grew up on the Gulf Coast of Alabama, where I live part-time now, and then the rest of the year in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Asheville. But when I was in college--- you know, I had left the church when I was 15 or 16. I was a pretty big heathen. I was in a sorority and I just happened to study abroad in New Zealand when I was a sophomore in college. The class I ended up in was in an ecology course, so I was running around in the most gorgeous place in the world.
And then I was also studying how grasses grow and how birds migrate and just the really intricate and incredible way that life happens on this planet. And I think something I will credit my dad for and my parents was raising me with this belief that we should be living for something bigger than ourselves. And I think since I'd left the church, I hadn't quite found that or even known that I was looking for it, but that experience sort of awakened in me this sense of this is what I want to fight for. I want to fight for this experience and this life really. And then I went back to UNC, I happened to take an environmental communication course and I was like, all right, I found my thing. I've never really done anything else. I joke with my friends that I'm the only one who still uses my college degree. [laughter]
Ted Roosevelt V:
I want to talk a little bit more, because you mentioned your father, and he's Rick Joyner, and just to highlight the upbringing that you had and how different that is from what you spend your life doing right now.
Anna Jane Joyner:
Yeah, my dad is what many would call a megachurch pastor. He does have kind of a little empire, maybe not-so-little empire, in that world of Christianity. He is considered... I mean, a prophet is what a lot of people consider him. So my life as an adult has been dramatically different than my life inside the church and growing up. But I will say knowing that language and knowing that audience really did influence my work in the climate world. I just kind of quickly learned that if you intimately know an audience, if you know what kinds of stories move them, you could craft communications in art and other forms of engaging in a really meaningful and deep way, even with audiences like conservative evangelicals that a lot of people would think are kind of beyond the reach of caring about the earth. That isn't true, if you know how to frame it to them--- although we obviously have a lot of problems in this country when it comes to different political issues.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Well, I bring it up in part because one, as I understand it, he's relatively antagonistic or had been antagonistic to the idea of climate messaging and the language of the church is an extremely powerful way to talk about climate change. I would certainly suggest that there is a love of the earth in that community. There's a love of nature, and yet there's a bridge that's so difficult to cross for them around climate messaging.
Anna Jane Joyner:
Yeah, I mean I think you're very right, a lot of it is a language barrier and--- climate is not a political issue, it's been politicized and it affects all of us no matter what your politics are or what you believe is the root cause of it. But I've also seen it really change in recent years. In my little focus group of my dad and his very, very conservative--- I mean, it was about as far right as you can get, my dad was on President Trump's immigration task force the first round. And I think that as we all experience these just profound impacts that are just--- it's getting to the point where it's just undeniable.
We can't just chalk this up to, "there's always been hurricanes on the Gulf Coast." These hurricanes are not like hurricanes used to be. And so even with my dad, after Hurricane Helene really just devastated Asheville and the surrounding communities, including the mountain my parents live on. And after that, I had a really fascinating conversation with my dad about how truly horrific and just unfathomable that experience was. I just couldn't help myself in this conversation. And I was like, "well, you know, dad---" and I pulled out the data on how much more water was poured onto Georgia and the Carolinas because of climate change. And he was like, well, the Bible says that in the end times these disasters are going to get worse and worse because of sin. And I was like, yeah, dad, this is because of sin. It's because of greed. And then I told him about the Exxon memos that came out in these lawsuits recently where it's their own words---memos that went to their top executives---that have quotes like: "essentially, if we don't stop using these products, we will cause worldwide suffering." And I could tell he was really listening because he wasn't pushing back. And the next day he wrote a whole article about how even if Jesus comes back tomorrow, it is our responsibility as Christians to care for God's creation and clean up the earth. And so I don't know, it feels like the actual conservative right, at least in my circles, has really moved on this in recent years in ways that we are not really seeing show up in the data as much, at least as what I've seen.
Ted Roosevelt V:
The progress in terms of him coming to understand some of the--- seeing the world in a somewhat similar manner to you, must feel very good on some level, but it's also a little bittersweet because of the underlying truth of what's happening here.
Anna Jane Joyner:
I would put it more on the bitter side maybe at this point. It literally took me 20 years of working on this before I could... and not that my dad and I---he does hate coal pollution because of the impact on health, and he also hates plastics because we live on the water, and there are certainly issues related to climate directly where we do have, we've always had a lot of commonality. He even said to me at one point, I consider myself an environmentalist. It's really like climate, just like that kind of issue, was very divisive and triggering because that was intentionally created by the fossil fuel industry and a lot of money into communications and storytelling. But the lived experience, the emotional reality, the horror of having climate disasters destroy big swaths of my home in the Blue Ridge Mountains and big swaths of my home in Los Angeles, or not my actual home, but the surrounding communities and then also just living on the Gulf Coast and every year there's a not small chance that we could lose our home. And it does feel very kind of surround sound. Even the win of getting my dad to agree with me... couldn't quite savor it in the midst of all this because it does feel overwhelming sometimes, for sure.
Ted Roosevelt V:
One thing you've created that I think is really cool, Anna Jane, is the Climate Reality Check, which is a test to see if a film or TV show incorporates climate change into their story. What are the ways you've used this tool and what are the two key questions it asks?
Anna Jane Joyner:
The questions are, does climate change exist in the world of this story and does a character know it? The ways that that primarily shows up is dialogue, but it also---there are visual ways to depict it as well: things like graffiti or art, reading a newspaper article. But some form of acknowledgement that the world of these characters is the world that we're living in and reflects our reality. We applied it to the 250 most popular films of the past decade. Only a little less than 10% actually passed the Climate Reality Check, but there was definitely some progress that we saw. One was that it doubled in the latter half of the decade. So we are seeing the rates increasing, at least in the most popular films. The ones that passed were 10% more profitable at the box office, which we are also consistently finding is that these are very commercially successful. The stories that do acknowledge our climate reality are doing quite well, and also the genres are diversifying. So at the first half of the decade, we saw a lot of superhero stories, but now we really see it across horror, dramedy, like really--- children's media. And so that's really exciting to me as well.
Ted Roosevelt V:
One of the things that in your description of it, you wrote, "the test is about highlighting authentic stories that reflect the reality we're all living in and help us navigate what it means to be human in the age of climate change." And that was a framing that I hadn't seen before. And everybody's having an experience with climate change where they may not even know that they're having an experience with climate change. And it may be fear, it may be optimism, it may be all kinds of different things, but just seeing the human experience, how are other people experiencing this, is a huge unlock for everybody to be able to have that conversation so that people on one side of the spectrum can talk to people on the other side of the spectrum because there's this, it's centered in our humanity, in our experience.
Anna Jane Joyner:
We actually have really moved away from even using terms like "climate story," because this isn't a separate kind of story. This is just telling authentic stories about the world we live in and our lives. And that is really our whole sort of ethic is centered around this idea of just unpacking if your characters were real people, how would they be authentically experiencing climate change that looks different based on where you are, based on your community and your identity based on if your character is set now or set 20, 50 years in the future. But it's the big overarching question of all of us and certainly artists and storytellers is like, what does it mean to be human? And now that means, what it means to be human living in the age of climate change, which is literally all of us.
Ted Roosevelt V:
What is it about climate that makes it just so consistently hard to get more universal support for?
Anna Jane Joyner:
I mean, one is the oil and gas industry. They spend $700 million a year in climate communication. The fossil fuel industry has put so much money into shaping television and film from the inception of Hollywood. LA was an oil town, is to some degree still, and they intentionally use television and film to create the world that we now live in, which is that fossil fuels equal modernity and progress and the good life, and we need fancy cars and yachts and those fancy cars and yachts should not be solar paneled or electric. This is not something that is organic to climate that makes it hard to find solutions. This was intentionally engineered by the wealthiest industry in the world to make it hard to find solutions at scale. And even today, it has been really, really, really difficult to get climate philanthropy, the climate movement to invest in narrative change and to really see this is not a nice to have, but to see it as absolutely imperative. There has never been a social movement in history that did not incorporate artists and storytellers. Culture, story is the environment, the literal ecosystem through which political change happens. And you can't just skip the story and culture part to get to successful political and policy change.
Ted Roosevelt V:
You recently looked at all the Oscar winners with the Climate Reality Check. What is it like trying to assess storytelling in our society through the lens of the awards?
Anna Jane Joyner:
Yeah, I mean, I am a movie lover even though only one of the movies, Wild Robot---NBC Universal, one of the absolutely gorgeous story---actually passed the Climate Reality Check this year. I was really pleased with that story. If you didn't see it, everybody should go see it. It was a gorgeous film about a robot and a bunch of animals who have to overcome their differences and their fears and learn to work together to navigate their climate reality. Our climate reality and climate is very much in the story, but it's subtly woven through it. And Flow, another movie this year that actually won the best animated feature, it was one of my favorite movies of the entire award season, and it was also about that. It didn't pass the Climate Reality Check, because---we went back and forth because we were like, is this a fantasy universe?
Is this set on earth? It's unclear what time period it is. There's a biblical flood and it's unclear whether it's climate change or a tsunami or some other cause. But certainly it's very clearly a parable about climate change. But oh my God, what an insanely gorgeous story. And I'm really glad we're starting to see those stories show up more because that's what happened in Asheville and Black Mountain. It's what happened in LA after these horrible catastrophes, is the communities came together across political differences, across class and all of these different kind of ways. And I even hate the word silver lining because I don't like the idea of trying to find some sort of good in the midst of these overwhelming tragedies that aren't even just tragedies--- they're crimes, they were caused by the fossil fuel industry--- doesn't sit well with me, but certainly if there is one, that is it, right, is there's this beauty of seeing communities come together and help each other get through these really, really hard experiences.
Ted Roosevelt V:
You must've seen A Real Pain.
Anna Jane Joyner:
I did. That was one of my favorites.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I love that movie and like all good movies, I kept processing it for days. And I'm realizing in this conversation that one of the ideas explored in that movie is the experience of being in a room when something emotionally significant is being ignored or maybe even actively avoided by the people in the room. I mean, humans can be phenomenally good at doing this. Kieran Caulkin's character, Benji, gets very frustrated throughout the movie that nobody else is willing to acknowledge the emotional weight of this Holocaust tour of Poland that they're on. And it feels very much like an allegory for climate change as well, and what you're doing.
Anna Jane Joyner:
Yeah, I hadn't really drawn that parallel either, but I think you're right. There's certainly, in working in climate, I think you do often have that sort of sense of unreality.
It's interesting---we work with this climate psychologist named Dr. Britt Wray, who's an expert on mental health and climate change, and just one of my favorite writers and thinkers and experts on climate in general, but climate and mental health specifically, she's at Stanford. And I remember the first time that she told me just like, these feelings are normal. The fact that you're feeling even despair, uncertainty, anger, sadness, grief--- these are really normal feelings when you're looking at this crisis. It would actually be bad if you weren't feeling these feelings. Dr. Britt Wray kind of walked me through the sort of psychology of that. So it makes a lot of sense that when people first wake up to the severity and reality of climate change, that they oftentimes tend to jump straight from, "oh, I'm not really paying attention. Hopefully somebody else has this taken care of.
This is something in the future, but I can't worry about it too much today." And you wake up and you're like--- you go straight to doom. You just go straight--- It is easier psychologically to believe that we're doomed than it is to sit in the weird and very uncomfortable in-between of uncertainty. And we need stories that help us befriend uncertainty. And of course, that's always been the human experience, right? It's never been this binary of hope versus despair. And so I think that stories are really good at helping us to hold those variety of emotional experiences and still wake up and find courage to keep going.
Ted Roosevelt V:
The name of the podcast is Good Citizen, and so we ask everybody---and I think you're exemplifying this in many ways, but---what do you think it is to be a good citizen?
Anna Jane Joyner:
That's a big question, and a particularly complicated one at the moment. One of my first mentors, Lenny Kohm, who really helped found the movement to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and then in mountaintop removal coal mining, which is where I met him, that was the first climate campaign that I worked on. He had this, we called them "Lennyisms," and one of them was: "you just show up and you do it in a good way." And that came from a conversation he had had with a Gwich'in elder after they'd won a big fight on the arctic. Lenny was trying to get strategic advice as a campaigner, how did you do this? What was the mechanism, the levers of power? And this Gwich'in elder just kept responding, you just show up and you do it in a good way. And Lenny would ask a different--- kind of frame it in a different way, and he would just say, "you just show up and you do it in a good way."
And so I think that that has just always been a mantra for me is---starting a new organization to support screenwriters in incorporating climate, that hadn't been done before. And a lot of my career has been doing things that there was not a clear roadmap for. And so just that mantra of, you just show up and you do it in a good way. And I think that that is, to me, what being a good citizen is, whether or not that is showing up in your community, to volunteer in places where whole towns and neighborhoods have lost their homes, whether or not it's showing up at a school board meeting or calling your senator and harassing them every day or in whatever way you can, and are able to just show up and do it in a good way to me is being a good citizen. However, I'm going to give a caveat to that as somebody who's literal, like mantra from the beginning of my career was "just show up and do it in a good way"--- what happens when you just can't show up? And I had someone when I was going through all of that, tell me that you have to think about it more like a choir. Sometimes you're singing, sometimes you're singing with everyone else, and sometimes you're not singing and you're letting other people sing, and you have to trust them when you're not singing and when you can't show up that other people are and trust each other. And so that has become, I've been holding both those things at the same time. You show up and you do it in a good way, but if and when you just can't, you have to trust that there are people in this with you who are.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I love that. Show up and do it in a good way. Reminds me of one of my favorite lyrics from my favorite band of all time, and the lyric is "all we have to do is be brave and be kind."
Anna Jane Joyner:
Oh, so good.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Thank you so much for joining us, Anna Jane. Thank you for showing up for this conversation. I really, really appreciate it.
Anna Jane Joyner:
Awesome. Well, so lovely to connect with you, and thank you again for having me.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Anna Jane, it was so great to speak with you. Thank you for sharing your stories, both personal and professional, and I look forward to seeing more honest portrayal of our climate reality on screen soon. Listeners, you can learn more about Anna Jane's work at goodenergystories.com, and remember that there are many ways you can show up and do it in a good way.
Good Citizen is produced by the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in collaboration with the Future of StoryTelling and Charts & Leisure. You can learn more about TR's upcoming presidential library at trlibrary.com.
