‘Extrapolations’ creator Scott Z. Burns on inspiring human change to address climate change

Susan King
·5 min read
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Does writer Scott Z. Burns have a crystal ball? The acclaimed writer foreshadowed COVID-19 in his 2011 “Contagion,” the Steven Soderbergh thriller about a highly contagious virus that becomes a worldwide pandemic. And now he’s warning the world about climate change in “Extrapolations,” Apple TV +’s eight-part anthology series with an all-star cast led by Meryl Streep, Ed Norton, Kit Harrington, Sienna Miller and Daveed Diggs.

Michele Norris, an opinion writer at the Washington and longtime friend of Burns, recently discussed the series over Zoom with the writer/creator and Norton.

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Burns noted it’s a balancing act to educate audiences while simultaneously entertaining them. “I think I started from a place which is a documentary. It is a bit of a self-sorting organism. That’s changing a little bit; we’ve seen a lot of docs that have been made. Some are really wonderful that try and talk about the risks of climate change. We’ve also seen some stories that are scripted that deal with the possible outcomes. There’s a natural tendency, I think, on the part of a dramatist, to look at the end of that story.”

He is more interested in the “messy” middle because “in the messy middle, we all still have agency. Cutting to the end may have certain dramatic opportunities, but it sort of limits the opportunity for human behavior to be explored. That was the opening premise for this. Between now and however the time of crisis is resolved we all are going to see this [climate change] show up in our lives in very different ways, depending on who we are, where we live, what our resources are. So, I wanted to do a survey of all of that and that’s sort of where I started with this.”

Burns added there was a similarity in the process of how he wrote “Contagion” and “Extrapolations.” In the case of “Contagion,” he wanted to write a movie about viruses and how “as we encroach more and more on nature, we were going to come in contact with viruses that our bodies have never met. It was something my father was, frankly, was obsessed with, so he and I spent a lot of time toward the end of his life talking about it. What I learned from all those experts [in viruses] is really similar to what I learned talking to the experts in climate, which is it was never an issue of will another pandemic happen. It was always just an issue of when “

When Burns wrote the pilot, “we consciously chose things that are already going on. There are already floods and fires and famines linked to drought. The question I wanted to explore and that the scientists who I spoked to opined on with our writers’ group was how far does it go before we decide to meet climate change with human change and stop it? Those were the more human issues we wanted to tackle here. “

In Norton’s episode, he plays a scientist who is trying to save the world by preventing in part solar geoengineering. Norris asked Norton, who is a United Nations Goodwill ambassador in Biodiversity, if he took the role “in some ways to act your values, live your values and do something aligned with your core values in life? “

“One of the things I like most about what Scott and his team did with the texts of this whole series is that it’s not a Jeremiah,” Norton noted. “It’s not sort of a soapbox with an assertion of values. It’s really a meditation on how much uncertainty is intrinsically embedded within these scientific questions, ethical questions, societal questions. You say it was a chance to act my values? Yes and No.”

Norton added the series is an “imaginative provocation. I don’t even think you have to take a position for it to be healthy to get people to put their minds toward the contemplation of what the implications of this particular set of challenges are. We need to be meditating on it. We need to be thinking ahead more. We need to be grappling with the quotidian details of life that could be altered as a result of what’s coming. I’ve always loved to be part of a drama that provokes questions and leaves people to contemplate what they think the answers might be.”

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