Planet under Pressure

ECOLOGICAL LESSONS
There comes a point in most actors’ lives when the journey,
the profession, the lifestyle that has served them so well,
and for so long, ultimately becomes less interesting.
The catalyst for this could be one of many things – age, family,
burnout, perhaps even a shift to another part of an industry
that is perennially asking more and more of its leading lights.
Why actor Edward Norton’s shift toward
a vision for our planet has been a
career in the making.
By James Evans
For Edward Norton, the stimuli responsible for making a change
were beginning to stack up after a particularly fervent period
of moviemaking in the first decade of the new millennium.
Through Red Dragon, Kingdom of Heaven, The Illusionist, and The
Painted Veil, the Boston-born actor’s output was unsustainably
high, and notwithstanding perhaps one or two film projects
that did not hit the mark, the deep-thinking Yale graduate
always seemed to engage and enchant cinemagoers with
informed, intelligent drama.
And yet, as a passionate, driven, dynamic, and respected
environmentalist, activist, social entrepreneur, and orator of
positive global initiatives, Norton, justifiably, began to see the
value in cinema diminish.
“When you have a perspective that runs across two very polarized
parts of culture, they will only, over time, become more
separated,” he begins. “Trying to justify, validify the importance
of a fight scene in a movie junket at a posh LA hotel, when
on the next page of your diary you have an environmental
project that will preserve, change, and perhaps even save lives
… that becomes a very different thing to try to balance up.
“The reality, of course, is you don’t attempt to balance it up.
The reality is you accept one is more important than the other,
and you let that guide you.”
Norton’s investment in social and ecological change is not a
charitable signup, nor a PR stunt; nor is it provoked by guilt
stemming from years of living the high life. The reality is
that the trappings of wealth and the adulation of fame have
never been of particular interest to Norton, whose yearning
for privacy goes far beyond that of most other actors in the
profession. >>
Global Goals Yearbook 2020
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