The actor who played Han Solo and Indiana Jones blasted world leaders for failing to take action against a threat greater than the “Star Wars” Empire or rival archaeologists: climate change.
“The climate crisis is real — the weight of scientific evidence is overwhelming, … but evidence can be ignored. It can be manipulated,” Harrison Ford told Time magazine. “Leaders who choose to make climate change a divisive issue do it to protect the entrenched economic interests who profit from behavior that destroys our planet. It’s selfish. It’s short-sighted. It needs to stop. … This shit is going to kill us.”
Ford, the vice chair of the nonprofit environmental group Conservation International, also lent his voice to “The Most Critical Action,” a video the group released on Thursday.
“Storms, floods, droughts and fires are destroying our homes,” Ford said in the video. “A pandemic threatens our lives, is decimating our economies and laying bare the depths of social inequality. The necessary foundation of our lives is a vital, healthy natural world. … We are watching that foundation crumble. Irresponsible human activity is limiting the ability of the natural world to provide what we need to survive. You can’t eat politics. You can’t breath ideology. We have people in leadership positions who refuse to accept objective science. They are robbing us of the ability to collaborate, to compromise, to move forward.”
The video tells viewers that the “most critical action you can take is to vote” and argues that they most rise above political ideology and vote to save nature.
Mainstream audiences know Ford best for his roles in movie blockbusters such as “Star Wars.” But the 78-year-old actor has been a passionate environmental activist for years. He won the Jane Alexander Global Wildlife Ambassador Award in 2018.
President Donald Trump — who has frequently dismissed climate change as a legitimate threat — said in 2015 that one of his favorite movie performances was Ford’s terrorist-fighting commander in chief in the 1997 film “Air Force One.”
Ford was not impressed. “Donald, it was a movie,” Ford responded shortly afterward. “It’s not like this in real life. But how would you know?”
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