Earth Day movie playlist: 15 cautionary tales of climate disaster

Clockwise L to R: Michael Shannon in Young Ones, The Day After Tomorrow, Quvenzhané Wallis in Beasts Of The Southern Wild, SnowpiercerImage: Screen Media, 20th Century Fox, Searchlight Pictures, CJ Entertainment, Earth image by Gordon Johnson, via Pixabay

Catastrophic super storms, blizzards, droughts, floods, noxious skies, barren lands—they sound like natural disasters, but they’re all the potential consequences of the harm we humans have been doing, and continue to do, to our planet. On Earth Day, we’re encouraged to think about conservation and the actions we can take to help stop or reverse the damage. In that spirit, we’ve put together a list of films to watch that dramatize what might happen should our efforts fail.

Some of these movies take place in a post-apocalyptic future—as envisioned by filmmakers in the recent and not-so-recent past—while others are reflections of our present society. They introduce heroic characters fighting to prevent tragedy, or coping in the midst of it, or surviving in the aftermath. They show us greedy and power-hungry villains who selfishly gobble up resources to improve and preserve their statuses at any cost. These stories serve as warnings about the monsters and other horrors we might unleash if we continue down our current path.

We’ve ranked them based on a highly non-scientific and totally subjective scale, taking into account the overall quality of the film, plus how effectively it addresses the theme of climate disaster. Maybe watching one or more of them will inspire you to do your part to ensure they don’t come to pass. It’s the very least we can do.