The Eco-Villain: Why Movies Keep Turning Environmentalists into Bad Guys

“This universe is finite, its resources finite,” Thanos says in Avengers: Infinity War. His answer to that problem is to wipe out half of all life with a snap of his fingers.

Thanos is not the only movie villain whose answer to a big problem is to get rid of people. In Kingsman: The Secret Service, Samuel L. Jackson plays Richmond Valentine, a villain with “a plan to save the world from climate change.” Without giving away how (we will not write it here, so we do not spoil it if you have not seen the movie yet), his plan would drastically reduce the human population. In Inferno, Ben Foster plays Zobrist, a tech billionaire “so obsessed with over-population” that he has created a plan “to drastically reduce humanity’s numbers.”

All three villains have the same answer to climate change, which is fewer people on the Planet. We find that interesting, because in our documentaries, the people who care about the Planet do things like count wolverines and study eagles.

Why the eco-villain keeps coming back

Writer Don Carr has noticed the same pattern. “Environmentalists in pop culture are consistently portrayed as scolds, hypocrites or Malthusian villains,” he wrote in Sierra in 2023. His examples run from the EPA investigator in Ghostbusters to the eco-villains who unleash monsters in Godzilla: King of the Monsters.

Carr’s worry is a practical one. He wrote: “Few people are going to want to join an effort full of uptight, smarmy doomsayers.”

We think there is also a simpler reason. A villain needs a motive that the audience can half believe and real worries about climate change and resources can give the villain one. It is the plan that turns the character into a villain.

What the villains get wrong

The fear behind all three plans is old. In the terms of Thomas Malthus, the 18th-century scholar, Thanos’s snap is a “positive check”. Malthus argued that population collapse and environmental damage happen when there are too many people and not enough food.

The modern version of that fear arrived in 1968 with Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, which promised that in the 1970s, “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” According to a count cited by Smithsonian Magazine, starvation claimed four to five million lives in that decade, and most of those deaths were caused by war rather than by overpopulation. 

Even the fear of overpopulation also turned into real policy in some countries. In India, millions of people were sterilized in 1970s.

This is why we think the films are right to make these characters villains. The trouble is that the environmentalist on screen is so often that villain.

The numbers also show that headcount is only part of the story. An Oxfam report found that between 1990 and 2015, the richest 10 percent of people were responsible for 52 percent of the emissions added to the atmosphere, while the poorest half were responsible for 7 percent. In other words, a small share of the world’s people produce a large share of its emissions. 

Population growth is also slowing. 

The UN expects the world’s population to grow from 8.2 billion in 2024 to a peak of around 10.3 billion in the mid-2080s, and then to return to about 10.2 billion by the end of the century.

Where Zero fits

Zero, a 13-minute dark comedy on our platform, takes the eco-villain idea and turns it into a dark comedy. 

The film features “a zero waste serial killer, with one bloody mission to combat climate change and overpopulation.” The crew made the film as a zero waste production and the Environmental Media Association awarded it a Green Seal. 

We like that the people behind the film found a much gentler way to help the Planet than the killer in their story. 

Meet the real environmentalists in our films

Compared to eco-villains of popular culture, the environmentalists in our documentaries do slower work. In Chasing a Trace, a researcher traces wolverine tracks in the high alpine of western Canada and sets up a study to learn more about an animal that is very hard to count.

Another one is Highway Wilding, which is about the wildlife crossings built over and under the Trans-Canada Highway in the Canadian Rockies.

You can also watch Resilience: Fish Eagles of Naivasha (Part 1), in which Kenyan-born raptor scientist Dr. Munir Virani sets out to explain why the fish eagles of Lake Naivasha are managing despite the pressure on their lake.

None of these people has a plan to fix the world in one afternoon. And we believe their work is more hopeful because of that.

Watch these films on our platform

Zero, Chasing a Trace, Highway Wilding and Resilience: Fish Eagles of Naivasha (Part 1) are streaming now on The Green Channel, the environmental documentary streaming platform. 

If you would like more films about the people who study and protect wildlife, you can explore our Nature Documentaries collection.

Watch Zero on our platform today.