- Hey everyone, I am Joe Gordon-Levitt,
host and producer of "Create Together."
This is "Action Planet."
I'm not a scientist, but my lay understanding of the science
is that the situation is growing more and more urgent.
- When you take action, your life gets meaning.
When you get a meaning in life, you become happy.
- When people connect, they care.
- When you're feeling well and doing well,
you have no choice but to be well to the planet.
- We are up to the task of managing this crisis.
- And it's a mountain we can climb
if we climb it together.
- If we don't do what science demands,
we pass a tipping point and it's out of our control.
(upbeat music)
- "Create Together" is something that,
it did sort of spring out of the beginning
of lockdown last year, where, as we were all staying home,
it just felt like something positive
and something productive and something connecting to do,
to not just look at social media,
but to use the internet to make art together
and having this collaborative experience,
dealing with the trying circumstances of the pandemic,
and that's what we did season 1,
and we won an Emmy for Innovation.
Very, very proud of that and shared that with all these,
it was the most inclusive production
we've ever done on HitRecord,
thousands and thousands and thousands of people
from all over the world contributed and made art together.
(light music)
Well, since season 1 was sort of sprung out of lockdown,
what if season 2 is all about going outside?
And it actually felt like, you know what?
What better time than to really appreciate the outdoors,
to appreciate nature, the enormous gift
that we've all been given as a human race
and make art about that.
I mean, the internet should be bringing us together,
and I think, in many ways it does.
But let's be honest.
There's also a tendency that we're all kind of taking notice
of in the last few years that the internet
can pull us apart.
The internet doesn't have to be that way.
I think the internet turns into that
when everyone's kind of fighting for attention
and when everyone's kind of fighting for ad dollars
and eyeballs and followers and likes.
Art, if you take it way back, before civilization,
et cetera, I believe that early human beings
were sitting around a campfire telling stories,
singing songs, doing dances.
This is ancient and people
didn't used to do it by themselves.
That's the origins of art,
and that's kind of that communal,
collaborative feeling we're trying
to get back to on HitRecord.
(light music)
I would hope that can reframe the conversation.
So it's not a question of whether or not
we want to protect nature.
And I think that, like they wouldn't say,
I don't care about nature, we don't have to protect nature.
They would say, yeah, but if we're choosing
between protecting nature and an economy
where people have jobs and can be prosperous,
then we have to find the balance between,
we have to let people have jobs.
It seems to me that, in fact, the best way to move
our economy forward is to be doing things
in a more clean and efficient way.
It shouldn't be about, do we want to protect nature?
Everybody understands that we need to protect nature.
The question is, how do we do it?
(upbeat music)
What's even more worrying is that we, in many cases,
can't even seem to have a conversation about it.
I find that really unfortunate
and probably counterproductive and bad for the ultimate goal
of the health of our species.
And I find that if you're working together,
those sort of divisions often melt away.
There's a guy who's a great musician in our community
and he votes Republican and we've gotten into spats
in the comment threads about our politics,
but then we make art together.
And I feel like there's something productive about that.
That's beautiful.
I think there's something worthwhile
about humanizing the other side.
I think collaborative art can often do that.
(light music)
I'm a dad now, so I appreciate nature so much anew,
watching, you know, my three-year-old and my five-year-old
like get to throw rocks into the water and things like that.
They just, they tune into everything so much differently
than us jaded adults do.
They're just really interested in a bug
or how a puddle gathers mud.
Gorgeous, gorgeous things, if you take a moment
to stop and look at them, that we busy adults
don't usually habitually stop and look at.
But they do.
I love that, and it definitely,
being a dad helps me appreciate nature in that way.
(light music)
Well, when I was a kid, when I was like my kids' age-
- [Audience] Aw.
- I was already aware of the environmental movement.
And I mean, I was raised
by pretty politically active parents.
And so, I've always had an awareness about it,
and it's always been sort of at the front
of my mind and my family's mind.
It has changed over the decades that I've been alive,
though, in that we're seeing more and more
really emergency level, concerning,
dangerous impact from the gradual change of the climate.
So it does feel like the urgency has grown
since I was a little kid.
And it's hard to talk about because look,
these things still are more gradual.
It's not like the coronavirus, which,
you know, killed hundreds of thousands of people
in the span of a year.
It's not like that.
It's something that we have to be concerned about
over the next X number of decades.
I think there's some of that effect that comes
into the conversation with a concern for the environment.
But nowadays the urgency has grown
compared to when I was little.
(light music)
Oh yeah, I will admit, I knew you were gonna ask
this question and I wore my California Grizzly shirt.
There's no more grizzly bears in California, where I'm from.
They're still alive, elsewhere in the country,
but the last California grizzly was killed
about 100 years ago.
There've been efforts to repopulate California
with grizzly bears.
Hopefully we get there.
(upbeat music)
I'm gonna be really honest here.
I think if you want to make an impact on the environment,
these five Rs don't cut it.
If you want to make an impact on the environment,
start a career in politics, start a career in journalism,
start a career in science, start a career in industry,
start a career in business, work, get to work.
My understanding of the science is that the impact
that individuals like us have is relatively small
compared to the enormous impact made by the big operations
and systems that are in place right now.
If we want to help our environment,
we have to work on those systems.
(light music)
You have every reason to be anxious. (laughs)
And not just about the environment.
I think that the world is changing very rapidly
in a number of ways right now.
For me, I've learned that those nerves can be empowering,
that that feeling of anxiety can drive me
to like get up and wanna go and do some stuff.
And that is what we need,
whether it's solving problems with the environment
or other pressing problems in humanity right now,
it's not gonna get solved by hanging out.
It's not gonna get solved by chatting on the internet.
It's not gonna get solved by taking it easy,
to be really honest.
It's gonna take a lot of really hard and intense work.
That's, in my life, been my best way to deal with nerves
and anxiety is just like channel that into going hard.
(light music)