WWU measured a 2.3 earthquake from Swifties recently. Movies, ads & music can cause cultural shifts too. Will writers & actors use that power to address climate change?
The earth literally moved when Swifties at the Taylor Swift concert in Seattle, Washington last weekend. The seismologists at Western Washington University detected a 2.3 magnitude earthquake adjacent to where her concert was at Lumen Field. That’s emblematic of the power of culture to shift the ground beneath our feet – and maybe beneath our habits.
Movies, ads, art, books and music have the power to move us, sometimes profoundly, causing a cultural earthquake. “Jaws” did, as did “E.T.”, “Philadelphia,” Andy Warhol’s art, the Live Aid concert in 1985 that raised $127 million for famine relief in Africa, the televised McCarthy hearings and Watergate hearings and January 6th hearings, “Succession,” and the mushroom cloud commercial from Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 presidential campaign that resonates today in the movie “Oppenheimer,” to name a few.
“For anything to happen on a grand scale, we need to have culture supported,” Chantal Bilodeau, Founder of the Climate & Arts Initiative, explained in an exclusive interview on Electric Ladies Podcast. “Artists are good at planting these seeds, putting the stories out there and for anybody. The key is repetition. So, if you encounter a certain story, certain type of story, in the music you listen to, in the articles that you read, in the billboard that you see or the murals that you see when you walk down the street, at some point, it creates a frame that you can start to live in and the changes become something that is natural.”
Will the writers and actors on strike reflect on how to use their power as storytellers?
As writers and actors’ strikes force the entertainment industry to pause, reflect and negotiate, maybe, just maybe, they can also consider how to use the power of their mediums to educate, motivate and engage their audiences on how the technologies, habits, and products that address climate change enable us to maintain the lifestyle to which we have become accustomed or make our lives more efficient, safer, healthier or more fun.
