Laila Zaid: Humor helps to talk about the climate crisis – 05/22/2023 – Environment

Actress Laila Zaid has popularized the topic of climate change on social media with satire and irony. Known for roles in productions such as “Malhação”, “Orgulho e Paixão”, both by Globo, and, more recently, in the series “Todo Dia a Mesma Noite”, by Netflix, she says she has found in humor a way to sensitize Brazilians. —already “too busy trying to survive”, as he puts it.

“The average Brazilian still doesn’t understand the beabá. How am I going to want to talk about decarbonization, energy transition, preservation, if he doesn’t even know how to say ‘indigenous peoples’? He’s still calling ‘indigenous’, tribe”. humor comes to build a culture”, he says.

Laila says she inherited from her family, since childhood, a close relationship with nature. She started working with socio-environmental themes in a project in public schools in Rio de Janeiro, using theater techniques and tools. Behind the scenes of soap operas, plays and films, she also used to be the “ecochata” with her co-stars, she says.

For the general public, however, her facet as a socio-environmental communicator only emerged after launching the children’s book “Manual para Super-Heroes: The Beginning of the Sustainable Revolution”, in 2021. From then on, she began to bring content on sustainability to her profiles on social networks.

“During the pandemic, we went to live in a community in the middle of the bush, in a forestry school that we developed with wonderful educators. I started to present this on my social networks and I saw that there was a demand for this type of knowledge”, he recalls. .

“People wanted to know what they could do in their private lives: simple, easy behavior changes that could be more in line with the environment. There I understood that I was becoming a bridge.”

Today, with almost 300,000 followers on Instagram and approaching 190,000 on TikTok, it addresses topics ranging from the excessive list of school supplies requested by the children’s school to oil exploration at the mouth of the Amazon. She also plays with the very reality of social networks when she plays the character of a blogger who promotes sustainability in a completely wrong way.

The content with the greatest repercussions, he says, are those that manage to link the climate crisis to financial or health issues. “We don’t have the cognitive capacity to deal with distant threats. We have to bring them as close as possible”, she explains.

Climate activists say that we need to engage people not only through reason, but also through emotion. There is a growing interest in doing this through art and entertainment. Would you say it’s actually easier to get people’s understanding and involvement that way? Undoubtedly. If you do an exercise to search your memory for your school memories, memories will probably come up that are much more related to affections, sensations, experiences than to the didactic content.

I totally believe in a message being conveyed through emotion, and art does this with mastery, but there is no pretense that this is the only way to communicate about the weather, even because we drink from somewhere.

We need scientists at the forefront, performing and developing knowledge, information. We need journalists, translating that knowledge into more intelligible content for laypeople. And we also have artists and influencers in a country that is one of the biggest consumers of social media in the world.

How did you become a socio-environmental activist and communicator? I think I always have been. Since I was a child, I have always been very connected to the environment through my education. My father was a hippie surfer. I grew up on the beach and all of our trips were to nature. My grandparents were very socially engaged people and I learned from a very early age to see this engagement as a matter of course.

I’ve always used that voice of mine. I was that person who made a soap opera and pissed off the cast, the production. I was eco-chat.

It took me a long time to use social media. I only really started when, in the pandemic, my book [“Manual para Super-Heróis”] was going to leave.

During the pandemic, we went to live in a community in the middle of the bush, in a forestry school that we developed with wonderful educators. I started to present this on my social networks and saw that there was a demand for this type of knowledge.

People wanted to know what they could do in their private lives: simple, easy behavior changes that could be more in line with the environment. There I understood that I was becoming a bridge.

You already said on another occasion that you use the tools you learned in theater to talk about the environment. What tools are these? Can you give a concrete example? Perhaps from a job that you did and that obtained a very satisfactory result in this field. My first work with this was inside the classroom. I developed a social project that I took to schools and that later went to a boys’ shelter in Rio de Janeiro. I used acting classes.

I developed super dynamic classes, with games to bring emotional, environmental and social education to those children. You saw in a very beautiful and practical way this understanding of collectivity, of care for the environment, arriving through games — this is a tool that I bring from the theater.

What I’ve been doing on social media is basically this. I take, for example, a super thorny or super complex topic, like oil exploration at the mouth of the Amazon, and I develop content about it with humor and irony. Sometimes I develop scenes myself, which I do with myself, or with a friend who is at home, or I call a comedian friend.

You recently had public recognition from Ivete Sangalo, who spoke, during a show, about the importance of your work and even joked that, because of you, you are afraid of forgetting your water bottle when you go to the gym. What content have you generated on Instagram so far with the most repercussions and popularity? One that went viral a lot was a complaint I made about school supplies. You know the contents that will perform better, because they are the contents that speak to a lot of people.

I went to buy my children’s school supplies and I saw the excess, the lack of thought about it, the value totally out of line with the Brazilian reality. I made a video and it was like this, gunpowder.

When I teased plastic toys it was really cool too. It was one of the first videos that went viral.

This happens when you associate it with the financial issue, with the health issue. That’s a big learning curve. We don’t have the cognitive capacity to deal with distant threats. We have to bring it as close as possible.

You’ve done a lot of work in theater and TV. Why have you prioritized humor in your work as an actress and also as a communicator and socio-environmental activist? When I auditioned for the first time in my life, the casting director said, “You’re really bad, but you’re really funny. Come back here tomorrow.”

Then I started to make humor, and the market has a lot of that. When you do something well, that “shelf” is where you go. So I spent many years doing humor on television, cinema and theater. It is my place of comfort.

And, when you are going to talk about a subject like the climate crisis, which is a subject that nobody wants to know about… Nobody wants to know that the house is on fire, nobody wants to hear that it is our responsibility and nobody wants to have to put out this fire.

How am I going to deliver content that is super difficult to digest, without generating resistance? Humor was the way I found the most efficient for this.

Her children’s book is a fun and interactive handbook on the sustainable revolution for children. How have they reacted to him? They think they really are going to become the planet’s perennial superheroes, and they do. The first two missions are to save water and energy, and the children become vigilantes at home.

What I get the most feedback from families is like this: “I can’t turn on the faucet because my daughter already fights, I can’t open the fridge because someone already calls attention”. The book is a call for active child participation. He starts from the premise that it is much more difficult for us adults to change habits than it is to create new habits in children.

You believe that leading a more sustainable life is a direct consequence of a love for nature. How to cultivate it in Brazilian cities, where the majority of the population lives, with such problematic socioeconomic and environmental indicators? This is a bottleneck, because the child needs to have contact with nature to understand, to see himself as part of, to love and, consequently, to take care of it. In an urban environment, this access to green is more restricted, especially for the most underprivileged population.

We need to make two efforts. Provoke public policies that promote this contact: we are going to invest in social areas, such as parks and squares. And also understand that a child who goes to that soccer field in the community, that is already a very enriching experience, because that child is seeing the horizon, he is running. It’s the start of something.

And, if there is not such direct contact with nature, that people develop a sense of collectivity, which in communities is much stronger than in the richer areas of cities.

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Laila Zaid, 38

He studied advertising at PUC-RJ, but found his professional path in the performing arts, in soap operas, plays and films. She is the author of the children’s book “Manual for Super-Heroes: The Beginning of the Sustainable Revolution”, published by Editora Melhoramentos in 2021. She is also a columnist for the Um Só Planeta project, by Grupo Globo. She specialized in climate change at the Climate Reality Leadership Corps and also studied health and the climate crisis at Harvard University.

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UNDERSTAND THE SERIES

Planeta em Transe is a series of reports and interviews with new actors and experts on climate change in Brazil and worldwide. This special coverage also accompanied responses to the climate crisis in the 2022 elections and at COP27 (UN conference held in November in Egypt). The project is supported by the Open Society Foundations.