Cameron Diaz – who grew up asthmatic in Long Beach, California, where her dad worked on pipelines for Unocal and trucks dumped waste from the town´s refinery at the end of her block – has made a 5 minute YouTube – friendly film in which Cameron asks questions about the environment. The film was directed by Jesse Dylan (Kicking & Screaming) and was released online in June.
In Cameron Diaz Saves the World! she drives around the U.S. in her hybrid, pulling over every now and again to ask random people, “Do you know where your water comes from?” She is not trying to stump them but rather for them to say “Of course we don´t know. And we should probably find out.” Cameron is not telling people what to do so much as inviting them to do something – and making them realise that they want to. And she does what most activists forget to do: she makes the environment look like it´s worth saving by focusing on how in touch with nature we already are. At one point, she ask asks a bunch of ducks, “Do you come to this park often?”
Diaz also plays the laywoman, Skyping with experts for advice. But she´s not nearly as uninformed as she makes out. Al Gore gave her slide-show training, she has shot public service announcements, hosted a short-lived MTV show called Trippin, which made the environment look like the extreme sport it is, and worked with Gore to form Save Our Selves, which threw the Live Earth concert. Cameron pays carbon offsets for all her travel and even more impressively, she announced on The Tonight Show that she doesn´t flush after urinating! Diaz got the idea for the video when she realised that unlike Paris and Britney, the planet didn´t have a publicist. It does now.
Check out Cameron Diaz Saves the World!
Source: adapted from TIME magazine
