Whoopi Goldberg has teamed up with the climate action group Extinction Rebellion for an animated short film, released as part of World Environment Day.
In the clip, Goldberg voices a grandmother reading a bedtime story to her grandchild, voiced by Livia Nelson. Goldberg’s tale describes climate change and the devastating impact it has had on our planet: “The people built factories polluting the air, leaving the animals homeless, with only death and despair. The rivers were poisoned, the fish couldn’t breathe — all the plastic smothered them in all of the seas.”
Suddenly the grandmother closes the book she’s reading from, and asks her grandchild to finish the story. “One day, the people realized that all those things were very bad,” the child narrates. “They wanted to change things and not kill everything anymore. It wasn’t easy, but then more and more people agreed.”
She describes people planting trees, riding bikes to school and fishing plastic out of the sea. At the end, the child asks her grandmother if people really did try to save the earth. Goldberg responds, “Let’s hope so.” An end credit text states, “On our current path, by 2050 up to 1 billion people will be displaced, and almost half of all species on Earth will be extinct. This doesn’t have to be our future.”