Speaking to ABC News, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau — who played the sister-loving, king-slaying knight Jaime Lannister for all eight seasons of Game of Thrones — revealed that if he didn't become an actor, he wanted to be a journalist. He's kind of getting his wish with a new documentary series he's hosting called An Optimist's Guide to the Planet, where he travels the world talking to people who are coming up with solutions to problems of pollution, environment crises, and climate change.
At least one person in there remarks on how odd it is to be hosting Jaime Lannister. I wonder how often it comes up.
Anyway, the phenomenon of climate change — the warming of the world thanks to human intervention — has been talked about a lot in recent years, and it's easy to see it as an apocalyptic threat. That's important, because it can spur people to action, but it can also have the opposite affect and inspire some people to lay down their arms and give up, convinced that resistance is futile. That's the kind of attitude that Coster-Waldau is hoping to combat with this series.
"I'm not trying to diminish the challenges because they are real and we have to keep talking about them. But what I also want to address is the way we talk about them," Coster-Waldau said. "The fear, always using fear as a motivator, I don't think that's good. I don't think it's good that 50% of 18- to 25-year-olds in our part of the world don't believe in the future, and don't have hope for the future. Because if you don't believe in , why then act, right?"
"We have to course correct. And I'm not trying to and I'm being an optimist not because I just like to be an optimist, but I do think traveling the world with this show and meeting these people all over the world, doing incredible work and you watch every episode, there'll be moments where it just blows your mind and it does give you hope because we have the solutions we just have to implement."
There does seem to be some cool stuff in that trailer, including a carbon-neutral jet fuel, man-made clouds, and a kind of worm found in a beehive that can apparently dissolve plastic, which is notoriously hard to break down.
Fear is a powerful emotion, and easier to use as motivation. But hope is powerful too, and has fewer destructive side effects, Maybe Coster-Waldau's work on An Optimist's Guide to the Planet can help turn some attitudes around. The series premieres on Bloomberg TV on February 8.
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