10 Eco-Conscious Movies

The best environmentally friendly movies!

Though many movies are simply for entertainment purposes, others raise awareness about serious issues. The films listed below range from documentaries to thrillers that either educate you about how the environment is being harmed, how this destruction can be lessened or just about the wonders of nature – making you realize exactly how important it is to protect the environment.

Syriana
Starring George Clooney and Matt Damon, this film follows a group of stories united by the common theme of global oil addiction. The film jumps between the locations of Texas, Washington D.C., Switzerland, Spain and the Middle East. The petroleum politics and influence of oil on the global industry thoroughly affect a CIA operative (George Clooney), an energy analyst (Matt Damon), an attorney from Washington (Jeffrey Wright) and an unemployed migrant worker in the Middle East (Mazhar Munir).

An Inconvenient Truth
About global warming, this documentary features the former United States Vice President Al Gore and his efforts to teach people about the severity of global warming. It follows a slideshow presentation that Gore presents throughout the world and contains points to refute those who don’t believe in the idea of a climate crisis.

The Day After Tomorrow
Depicting the catastrophic effects of global warming and global cooling, this film stars Dennis Quaid as Jack Hall, a government climatologist. Massive disasters are shown happening all over the world and stuck in one of these disasters is Jack Hall’s son, who takes refuge in the New York Library with a group of friends – attempting to survive.

Winged Migration
This documentary follows the migration of a large number of bird species (geese, storks, cranes) over three years through 40 countries (and all seven continents!). The maker of the film, Jacques Perrin, made this documentary with a crew of 450 people and used planes, gliders, helicopters and hot-air balloons.

Hoot
Based on Carl Hiaasen’s novel, this movie is about three kids living in Florida who have to face politicians, police and land developers to save a population of endangered burrowing owls that live in their area. They must somehow stop the adults from building a pancake house on the vacant lot where the burrowing owls have made their home.

Whale Rider
When whales become stranded at the beach, the Chief of the Maori people living in a coastal village in New Zealand is sure that this omen signals the end of the tribe. The Maori claim that they are descendants of Paikea, the Whale Rider, and, of course, the one person who decides to make a major sacrifice for his people is the Whale Rider. This movie presents and aboriginal view of nature.

Blue Vinyl
This documentary starts out with director Judith Helfand attempting to convince her parents to remove the blue vinyl siding off their house. She and Daniel B. Gold (another documentary-maker) go to Louisiana (the vinyl capital of the United States) and then to Italy to talk to experts, doctors and activists about the perils of vinyl, proving it to be a very dangerous piece of plastic.

Soylent Green
Starring Charlton Heston as a police detective investigating a murder of the executive of a food company, this movie shows the future Earth suffering from depleted resources as a result of global warming and overpopulation. In this film, most of the world’s population survives on processed food rations given by the Soylent Company. As Heston’s character discovers, there is something truly horrendous and disgusting behind the green wafers handed out by this company.

The Day the Earth Caught on Fire
This film was released in the US just a few months before the infamous Cuban Missile Crisis. It tells the story of a reporter trying to expose a cover-up by the government of two nuclear tests conducted by the US and the Soviet Union that cause the Earth to break away from its orbit and go towards the Sun.

FernGully: The Last Rainforest
In this animated film, a forest fairy accidentally shrinks a logger when she tries to save him from being crushed by a tree and shows him how humans are ruining the environment. When the loggers cut down an enchanted tree, a polluting force called Hexxus is released who gains power from pollution.