Environment

Of all the social issues we can write about, the environment offers the broadest set of opportunities – and challenges. This guide looks at how to work with environmental issues in fact-based scripts…

Wildfires, floods, poisoned water supplies, vanishing species, corporate cover-ups. There are endless environmental screen stories to tell and plenty of great examples we can draw on. These types of stories span genres and time periods.

But what the most successful films and television series with ‘green themes’ have in common is that they balance the human impact with the environmental issue in a way that resonates.

Approaches to environmental screen stories

There are plenty of diverse approaches to writing about the environment. Here are some of the most common (with a few of the examples drawn from original narratives):

1. Personal: Screen stories about the environment can take the form of a personal tale that concentrates on how one or more individuals interacts with their environment. The River (1984)

2. Investigations: Stories can fall under the investigation/legal drama model, in which the protagonist delves into an environmental harm and attempts to bring the responsible parties to justice. A Civil Action (1998)

3. Action/adventure: In these stories, the environment becomes the antagonist, with the protagonist’s journey used to highlight issues like natural disasters. The Lost Bus (2025)

4. Premonitory: Original environmental stories can also serve as cautionary tales set in the near or distant future – starkly illustrating what happens if we fail to protect the planet. Extrapolations (TV, 2023)

5. Cultural: There is also plenty of opportunity to explore the environment from a cultural standpoint, focusing on particular groups who may be marginalised. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (2019)

6. Catastrophe: These stories show us either a real or imagined disaster which impacts the environment and communities in a tragic and long-lasting way. Deepwater Horizon (2016)

7. Whistleblower: Related to the investigation approach, this type of story focuses on the experience of someone who goes up against the system and pays the price. Silkwood (1983)

8. Satire: Unlikely to fall into the fact-based category, these stories use humour to get their point across and even employ metaphor to stand in for ecological harms. Don’t Look Up (2021)

9. Activism: These stories follow protagonists who take a hard-line stand against environmental harms and the perpetrators. Night Moves (2013)

10. Climate-focused: Within the wider group of environmental stories, this subgroup focuses on the impacts of climate change. Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)

There’s a more comprehensive list of environmental films and shows at the end of this article.

Structuring environmental screenplays

The first question is: which comes first, the issue or the plot? The answer – as is so often the case in screenwriting – is that character comes first.

In fact-based stories, we’re largely guided by the real-life events. But whether the story is fact-based or original, it’s still important to establish the emotional heart of the story right from the start. Here are some examples – which I return to throughout this article:

Chernobyl (2019): This multipart TV drama about the 1986 Russian nuclear disaster begins with a flashforward voiceover. Nuclear expert Legasov, a character we’ll get to know well, recounts his involvement with the tragedy into a tape recorder. It then takes us back to the day of the accident, starting with Lyudmilla, a young woman whose firefighter husband is about to get called in to tackle what’s assumed to be a blaze at the nuclear plant. It then moves on to show the disaster (in graphic detail) from the perspective of the plant’s workers.

Erin Brockovich (2000): This acclaimed biopic of a single mother and legal assistant fighting to bring a utility company to justice begins with the titular character recounting her life and lost ambitions in an unsuccessful job interview – before her day gets far worse. This sets up what’s to come when she finally lands a job at a law office, which brings her into contact with the families of Hinkley, whose lives are being impacted by pollution from the PG&E plant.

Dark Waters (2019): This powerful film about a corporate lawyer’s lengthy fight against DuPont and so-called ‘forever chemicals’ begins more visually with teenagers sneaking into a restricted area for a late-night skinny dip, only to dive into water that we quickly learn is polluted with some unknown substance. We then move to the offices of protagonist Rob Bilott, a corporate lawyer working on the side of big business.

In each case, the human element of the story is established from the first page.

Research

The best environmental screen stories are built on solid research. Even if much of that research doesn’t make it into the script, knowing our story world means we can write with confidence and flexibility.

In terms of conducting research, it’s a good idea to cast a wide net before narrowing the focus to narrative ‘need to knows’. This might include:

  • News reports
  • Journal articles
  • Relevant fiction
  • Documentaries
  • Reports and documents
  • Relevant non-fiction books
  • AI – not every writer’s cup of tea but great for a quick overview of an industry or chemical process!

If your story world hinges on technical concepts and science, it’s even more important to understand the underpinnings. It’s often revelations about the science and the scope of the damage that provide the tentpoles or turning points in a script.

The inciting incident in Dark Waters is a farmer from Bilott’s grandma’s hometown bringing him a box of ‘evidence’ showing that something is polluting his land. Later, Bilott learns about the science of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and finds evidence of a cover-up. It also supports what the farmer first told Bilott.

At the end of Act One of Erin Brockovich, the protagonist visits Hinkley for the first time to meet with a local resident who recounts her family’s health woes. This is the point where ‘chromium’ is casually mentioned for the first time in connection with PG&E. The sequence is bookended with Erin driving past the PG&E plant. On the return journey, it has a more “ominous” presence as she now realizes that something’s amiss.

Writing the environmental issue

So, how do you fictionalize all that research? Looking at some environmental scripts, TV shows and films, it seems to boil down to three things: relatability, visual representation, and authority.

When a character in a film or TV show experiences something most of us have experienced, it puts us in that character’s shoes. This is relatability.

We can apply this when writing environmental issues into screen drama by keeping in mind the real-world effects. The water glass scene in Erin Brockovich is a good example, with Erin challenging a team of stony-faced PG&E lawyers to drink Hinkley water.

Dark Waters is able to establish relatability as the real story involves a well-known corporation and a popular brand, Teflon. This immediately turns viewers’ attention to the non-stick pans in their own kitchens…

In the early scenes of Chernobyl, seeing oblivious residents go about their everyday lives as all hell breaks loose in the damaged plant makes the disaster (and purposeful lack of communication by the authorities) all too real.

This brings us to the second element of communicating the issue – how it can be expressed visually. Examples include:

  • Ominous scum floating on water that people swim in or drink
  • Images of sickness and death of people and/or animals
  • Imposing plants with chimneys pumping toxic-looking smoke over communities
  • Overflowing rivers, parched fields and extreme weather
  • Contrasting scenes of everyday life and destruction
  • Characters sneaking into restricted areas
  • Barrels of hazardous materials spilling over
  • Archival footage – such as news reports
  • Regions changing over time and by season

There may be no better example of visual-emotive storytelling on display than in Chernobyl. The visceral depictions of the nuclear disaster are gut-wrenching – from scenes of the plant’s exploded core to the gruesome injuries experienced by those on the scene.

However, an audience can only take so much gruesomeness, so the script includes smaller moments that underline the damage in a subtler way. In the first episode, harmful soot drifts in the air and falls onto a woman’s long white-blonde hair. In the second episode, a dying bird falls out of the sky amid a scene of children heading to school.

One advantage of writing about the environment is the scope of ways in which the issue at hand can be expressed visually.

However, certainly in science-driven stories, at some point a Basil Exposition-type expert is probably going to have to spell out the facts to bring the protagonist (and audience) up to speed. This is where authority comes into play.

Handling scenes like this can be tricky. The best advice is to keep them brief, straightforward and – again – relatable.

Most viewers aren’t going to care that much about (or remember) the periodic table. So, again, any visual demonstration or real-world comparison is going to bring the issue home in a way that no chemical formula could.

In Chernobyl, the damage caused by the nuclear radiation is expressed in terms of bombs detonating. In the Erin Brockovich script, Erin’s next stop after Hinkley is UCLA where, as a layperson, she (and us) learns the health risks posed by chromium-6 from an academic. In Dark Waters, a scene around page 40 when an expert compares drinking water with perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) to “drinking a tyre”.

Note that these scripts (and many others) don’t shy away from the science – it’s about explaining what it is and showing what it does.

Weaving the issues and the character

Beyond ‘balance’, a second word that springs to mind when it comes to environmental stories is ‘connection’. This means ensuring that the narrative doesn’t become divided between the ‘science’ and the ‘personal’.

The strongest environmental screen stories expertly weave these strands according to their narrative demands and genre.

Erin Brockovich is as much a biopic as it is a story of environmental justice, so we spend plenty of time seeing how Erin’s dedication to the PG&E case impacts her home life and budding romance. Dark Waters is more plot focused but we still see how the case takes its toll on Bilott and his family. Across five episodes, Chernobyl follows multiple characters as they struggle with the fallout of the nuclear disaster against the backdrop of the exploded plant and the spreading radiation.

Establishing an antagonist

One challenge of environmental stories can be establishing a compelling antagonist. In some cases, the antagonist is Mother Nature herself, making the struggle a mostly physical one, such as in The Lost Bus (2025), which becomes a race to save children at a summer camp amid raging wildfires.

In other stories, the ‘baddie’ is a faceless corporation or government, an army of lawyers, or an easy-to-hate villainous CEO.

However, these types of antagonists can become a story’s strength as they provide a wall of resistance that the protagonist must overcome. This turns the story into a ‘little guy against the system narrative’, as the protagonist faces bottomless pockets and lengthy legal battles.

In Chernobyl, at first, no-one listens to nuclear expert Legasov, making him powerless to act as the disaster unfolds against the backdrop of Gorbachev’s Soviet Union.

In Erin Brockovich, no-one takes our ‘former beauty queen’ protagonist seriously, which becomes her superpower.

In Dark Waters, Bilott faces a room stacked with a mountain of boxes filled with ‘discovery’ documents from a corporation who never thought he would read them all…

‘Fighting the system’ narratives help to overcome another challenge in some types of environmental stories – personal stakes. This is especially relevant in investigative/legal stories where the protagonist may not be the person most affected by the environmental harm.

This risks a) the protagonist not suffering any real loss, or b) coming across as a saviour who swoops in to save poor folks.

So, it’s important to build in tangible stakes for the protagonist, which are in some way tied to the environmental story. In the excellent A Civil Action, slick sports car-driving Boston lawyer Jan Schlichtmann is faced with personal and professional ruin as he fights two companies over contaminated water that he believes caused cases of childhood leukaemia in Woburn, Massachusetts.

Timeline

Another thing to consider is the timeframe for the story. Environmental harm and its fallout can extend over decades, so it’s important to think about the best starting point. Often, this is when the catastrophe occurs or – as in Erin Brockovich – when the protagonist gets involved.

There might also be a prologue or flashforward to set the scene for the main story, as in Dark Waters and Chernobyl.

I’ve looked at screenwriting techniques for handling timeline issues in a separate post. But just to note that an elongated timeline can serve the story and help with stakes.

In Dark Waters, we see the toll the DuPont battle has on Bilott and his growing family as the case drags on with no end in sight. The fact that it extends beyond the scope of the film becomes a legacy to the real Bilott, whose fight became a life’s work that continues to this day.

Final thoughts

This article has touched on a few points to bear in mind when shaping an environmental narrative. The main takeaways are:

1. Start with character and keep the story rooted in the personal

2. Do enough research to be able to write about the environmental issue with confidence and clarity

3. Find ways of making the environmental harm visual and relatable

One last thing to think about is where the story ends as this will define your character’s arc and bring all the story strands to a dramatically satisfying (if not wholly positive) close.

In Erin Brockovich, it’s our protagonist enjoying family life and thriving in her new legal career. In Dark Waters, it’s Bilott in court, still fighting for the victims of DuPont’s forever chemicals. In Chernobyl, we return to where it began, with Legasov recording his memoirs two years after the disaster.

In fact-based stories, ending the script with text that reveals what happened next can be an effective way to draw the story to a close. It also reminds people that what they’ve just read is a dramatized version of the truth.

Filmography

A few more environmental-themed films and TV series to track down:

  • Lead Children (TV, 2026)
  • Toxic Town (TV, 2025)
  • High Water (TV, 2022)
  • White Noise (2022)
  • Okja (2017)
  • Snowpiercer (2013)
  • Promised Land (2012)
  • Michael Clayton (2007)
  • The Day After Tomorrow (2004)
  • Safe (1995)
  • The China Syndrome (1979)

If you want to get deeper into the issue (from a literature point-of-view), it’s worth tracking down the book Ecosickness in Contemporary US Fiction by Heather Houser. It looks at the link between bodily/mental health and environmental health, with reference to Todd Haynes’ Safe and the work of novelist Richard Powers (author of Gain, The Echo Maker and Overstory, among others).

The scripts for Erin Brockovich and Chernobyl are available through Script Slug. As of writing, the Dark Waters script is unavailable (for free). The source article, The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare, by Nathaniel Rich was published by the New York Times on 6 January 2016.