Climate Action
The Climate Apocalypse Metaverse: What Television Teaches Us About Environmental Cataclysm
April 21, 2025
Art has long functioned as a mirror, reflecting our world back to us in ways that illuminate hidden truths and provoke crucial conversations. In particular, science fiction and dystopian television have a unique power to translate real-world crises into gripping narratives, making abstract and overwhelming issues — like climate change — more digestible.
As we celebrate World Creativity and Innovation Day, let’s examine how entertainment can shape public opinion and inspire action, using fiction to draw us closer to the urgent realities of our warming planet.
Some viewers may shy away from these shows for fear of falling into an existential spiral over climate catastrophe. But these stories are not crafted to incite anxiety for anxiety’s sake. Rather, they serve as cautionary tales, urging us to recognize the flaws of our current world and make necessary changes before it’s too late. If the characters within these fictional universes can find hope, love, and resilience in the wake of devastation, then surely we can do the same — before the ultimate disaster strikes.
The Youth Shall Inherit the Earth: The Hybrids of Netflix’s Sweet Tooth
WARNING: Minimal Spoilers.
In Netflix’s Sweet Tooth, humanity is ravaged by a mysterious global virus. At the same time, hybrid children — half-human, half-animal beings immune to the disease — are born. Adapted from a comic book series, Sweet Tooth unfolds through the eyes of Gus, a half-deer child who views the world with the innocence and wonder only a child can possess. But despite his inherent purity, Gus and his kind are feared by adults who view them as unnatural and dangerous, a panic that mirrors the real-world hostility toward diversity and the unfamiliar. While the series never fully answers whether the hybrids caused the virus or were nature’s response to it, it is clear that they hold the key to humanity’s survival.
The hybrids symbolize a necessary symbiosis between humanity and nature — an existence in which we do not exploit the planet but live in harmony with it. Like real-world young climate leaders, the hybrid children envision a kinder, more sustainable world. Amanda Burrell, the show’s executive producer, has cited young climate activists as inspiration, recognizing their clarity of purpose and determination to fight for a livable future.
Once kids like you were born, the Earth could start to heal. You can live without taking.
Bear to Gus
Sweet Tooth highlights the power of youth, not only as those willing to fight for the future but as those capable of reimagining a world free from the injustices and destruction that have defined the past.
In the series, the hybrids’ primary obstacle is the “Last Men,” a militarized group clinging to the old world order who seek to eradicate the hybrids and reinstate a patriarchal, capitalist society. The hybrids nonetheless persevere, laying the foundation for an alternative to the former ways of society, one in which survival isn’t defined by conquest but by care.
This three-season series — beyond its mere entertainment value — offers a blueprint for a future built on empathy and coexistence, reminding us that the future belongs to those who embrace change, not those who fear it.
Lifeboats at the End of the World: Hulu’s Paradise Tackles Climate Catastrophe
WARNING: MAJOR Spoilers for Episodes 1, 7, and 8.
Before its premiere, the show’s creators veiled Paradise as a political thriller, centered on the assassination of the U.S. president. But by the end of the first episode, it becomes clear that something far bigger is at play — civilization as we know it has collapsed, and the survivors are living in a carefully controlled society built in secrecy under a Colorado mountain.
The subterranean city of Paradise appears idyllic, a utopian refuge complete with high-end supermarkets and thriving community members. However, for much of the series, the exact cause of the apocalyptic event that forced its characters underground remains a mystery. Was it a nuclear war? Climate collapse? The unsettling answer is both.
The series delivers a chilling scenario where environmental catastrophe triggers a global domino effect. It starts with melting polar ice caps, destabilizing an underwater super-volcano in Antarctica. The eruption, in turn, melts an ice shelf, sending a mega-tsunami barreling across the world’s coastlines, swallowing entire nations before reaching the U.S. Governments, realizing that resources will become scarce, resort to nuclear war to eliminate competitors, accelerating the planet’s destruction.
While climate change is often perceived as a slow-moving crisis, Paradise reveals that tipping points can be reached in an instant, transforming gradual warnings into an immediate and inescapable nightmare.
As in real-world climate disasters, the wealthy and powerful are the ones who escape. Their lifeboats come in the form of a ticket to Paradise. Built by workers who were ultimately sacrificed — many of them people of color fatally exposed to toxic materials before the world even ended — the underground city reflects real-world environmental racism, where marginalized communities bear the brunt of pollution and hazardous conditions.
The political change that we’ve just gone through in in the country, the eerie coincidences of proximity of tech billionaires to the executive branch… those are all easy tangents to draw. It’s also strange in terms of the presence of global warming and the fires that just transpired in California.
Sterling Brown, Paradise Actor
A Frozen Warning Against Quick Fixes: A One-Way Ticket onto TNT’s Snowpiercer
WARNING: Spoilers for Episode 1.
When we imagine the apocalypse, we often think of fire — an inferno engulfing the planet, consuming everything in its path. But in Snowpiercer, the end of the world comes in the form of ice.
TNT’s series depicts a future where a failed attempt to reverse global warming has frozen Earth into an uninhabitable wasteland. The last remnants of humanity survive aboard a perpetually moving train, trapped in a hierarchical microcosm of the very class divisions that led to the planet’s downfall. The train itself is the invention of a billionaire who anticipates the disaster before anyone else.
As civilization collapses, desperate survivors without tickets storm the train in a violent bid for survival. Some make it onboard, only to be crammed into the tail section while the wealthy elite in the front cars continue their lives in comfort.
The disaster in Snowpiercer stems from the same short-sighted thinking that plagues real-world climate policy: the tendency to slap a Band-Aid on a gaping wound instead of treating the root causes.
The fictional scientists who tried to cool the planet artificially fails because they ignore the real culprits: fossil fuel dependency, overconsumption, and corporate greed. Daveed Diggs, the show’s lead, describes Snowpiercer as “a story about what happens after it’s too late,” a grim warning that feels all too relevant in a time when climate denial still runs rampant in political discourse.
Hope is inherent through living, continuing. If you’re waking up every day, that means, inherently, you’re living with hope.
Steven Ogg, Snowpiercer Actor
Yet, despite its bleak setting, Snowpiercer offers a glimmer of hope through collective resilience. The tail-end passengers forge a community, clinging to a belief that survival itself is an act of resistance. Refusing to accept their fate, they band together to plot revolution, proving the power of solidarity in even the most dire of circumstances. Snowpiercer ultimately asks us to consider our own future: Will we, too, wait until it’s too late? Or can we change course before we doom ourselves to an endless loop, circling the ruins of what once was?
Nature Fights Back: The Fungal Zombie Apocalypse of HBO Max’s The Last of Us
WARNING: Spoilers for Episode 1.
The Last of Us takes a more direct approach to climate horror, linking environmental change to the outbreak of a deadly fungal pandemic. Released in 2023, the series follows Joel, a tough-guy survivor, and Ellie, a teenager carrying a secret that could save humanity, as they navigate a post-apocalyptic America overrun by the infected.
But while the show is centered on a zombie outbreak, its underlying message is far more timely: climate change is the real threat. The series opens with a 1968 talk show where an epidemiologist warns that fungi, though not yet a danger to humans, could evolve if the planet were to get “slightly warmer.” Decades later, his words become reality, as global warming allows a deadly fungal pathogen to adapt and burrow into human brains.
As society collapses under the weight of the infection, survivors attempt to rebuild within rigid authoritarian quarantine zones, struggling to maintain what’s left of humanity. But The Last of Us doesn’t just depict despair. Scattered throughout its desolate landscape are thriving communities — people who have found ways to live sustainably amid the chaos. They grow their own food, harness renewable energy, and find joy in human connection.
Meanwhile, as Joel and Ellie travel west, they witness nature reclaiming abandoned cities, with moss and vines overtaking concrete structures, transforming urban centers into lush green oases. In a world devoid of human interference, the Earth begins to heal itself, hinting at the idea that while civilization may be fragile, nature is resilient.
The show forces viewers to confront an uncomfortable truth: even a small temperature shift can have catastrophic consequences. We already struggle to reckon with the visible effects of climate change — hurricanes, wildfires, and rising sea levels — but The Last of Us reminds us that the threats don’t stop there.
Many scientists have argued that climate change will make pandemics more likely… this worrying future is already here.
Ed Yong, Atlantic Journalist
While the show may be fictional, the possibility of climate-driven pandemics is not far-fetched. And yet, amidst the terror, the show offers a message on the power of human endurance. In the face of loss and destruction, people adapt, rebuild, and refuse to give up on each other. The show’s signature line, “When you’re lost in the darkness, look for the light,” serves as a reminder that, even in the worst of times, there is always something worth fighting for.
The Future is Not Yet Written
These television series may depict dystopian futures, but embedded within their narratives is a pivotal message: survival is possible, but only through transformation. We don’t need to wait for disaster to strike before we take action. Instead, we can use these fictional tales as motivation to disrupt the status quo and forge a more sustainable world now.
As Earth Day 2025 approaches, let us reimagine our relationship with the Earth. Join us at EARTHDAY.ORG as we celebrate this year’s theme, Our Planet, Our Power. Attend or host an event focused on collaboration, community resilience, and healing the ground beneath our feet. Together, we can build a world where harmony with nature is not just fiction but reality.
The fate of our planet is in our hands. These series are no longer mere entertainment; they are warnings — and opportunities — to rewrite our future before it’s too late. What will you do with this knowledge? There is still time to change our collective story.
