Meet Paul Goodenough, Producer of The Most Important Comic Book On Earth

October 3, 2024 Impact, Environment, Arts

He's been a media maverick and an Emmy-nominated writer and producer, on shows like How To Train Your Dragon, Sherlock Holmes and GI Joe. He's even founded an LGBTI-friendly football club. Now, Paul Goodenough devotes his time to rewriting the story of Earth and saving species from extinction.

After selling his digital media company Aerian Studios which, at its zenith, was associated with over 2% of all internet traffic, Goodenough founded Rewriting Extinction with the aim of using a special kind of storytelling to help save the world.

With the help of environmental experts, world-leading comic artists, and 300 celebrities including Dame Judi Dench, Adam McKay, Paul McCartney, Jane Goodall, and Cara Delevingne, Rewriting Extinction - which has now rebranded as Rewriting.Earth - has reached over 200 million people, generated a million signatures, and helped to save over 600 species from extinction.

As part of the project, Goodenough produced The Most Important Comic Book on Earth. It was chosen as a Sunday Times Book of The Year and raised millions of dollars for 7 planet-saving initiatives.

That might be ‘good enough’ for most people, but not for Paul. He also co-founded Rewired.Earth and is working with Bankers for Net Zero and the United Nations on a new mega-project aimed at transforming the entire 35 trillion dollar global economy into a force for good.

Matters caught up with Goodenough to discuss the culture-shaping power of the humble comic and the wild future that is ours for the taking.

By Daniel Simons

War and Peas Fashion Show - c. Rewriting Earth X War and Peas

What inspired you to start Rewriting Extinction?

The whole thing for me started about 10 years ago, quite a way before Rewriting Extinction. I noticed a massive decline in the animals in and around my world, and I couldn't understand why more people didn't notice or didn't care.

My background before that was doing a lot of mass public engagement through digital media, working with companies like Warner Brothers, CNN, BBC, and Red Bull.

I rather lazily thought, I've got a career as a writer and a career as a producer of games and TV shows. Why don't I try and use those communication abilities to try and activate people to care about animals. My hope was if I could make everyone care about animals enough, that would give a really clear signal to governments and businesses to change.

So, being the lazy person I am, I took the skills that I already have and the things I loved, like comics and toys and thought, well, if I'm trying to communicate how important animals are, the best way I know of doing it is through comics.

Comics can take really big ideas and make them very digestible, quick, and fun, or very heartbreaking, or heartwarming.

Then I tried to find the most important projects on the planet that would do the most to help animals, so I could translate them, with the help of experts and comic artists, into stories that people cared about.

Then it came down to finding the projects that will actually make the biggest difference to animals, prevent extinction of species, and help rebuild the planet so we could draw attention to them and help them with fundraising.

So, that was a combination of projects from groups like Greenpeace, Born Free, the Wildlife Trusts, World Land Trust, Rewilding Reserve, and Rewilding Europe.

We made all of the stories and we put them into a book. We called it ‘The Most Important Comic Book on Earth’. It’s a bit of a play on words because it’s the most important book on the subject of Earth. We launched it in the UK in 2021 and in Germany this year. It's done quite well.

It was a Sunday Times Book of The Year and an Amazon bestseller and all of the proceeds went to the projects we were supporting.

Why do you think comics, or stories, are such a great way to inspire change?

Facts don't change opinions. Stories do. If I said to you, "One billion seabirds die every year ingesting plastic," it's very hard to qualify, very hard to imagine.

But if I tell a story about an albatross mother who had a sickly chick, and so she was going out collecting as much food as she could find to feed the chick, but all she could find was cigarette butts, and she was feeding her chick cigarette butts and inadvertently killing her own chick— that hits. That stays with you. And if you're a smoker, the next time you see your cigarette butt, you put it in the bin.

Emotion in a story can really change someone's opinions or their thought process. Then, once you've got them to care — actually care enough to listen — you can start saying, here are some solutions. If you expand that out over a national or international landscape, you can start to feel the sea of change in terms of how people view a product or how people view a solution.

Bunkers - c. Paul Goodenough and Dami Lee. With Cara Delevingne and EcoResolution.

You’ve worked with so many amazing celebrities. Do you have any favourite collaborations?

I need to say that a lot of my work has been standing on the shoulders of giants. There’s often a lot of negativity towards celebrities, which I think is completely unjust.

Celebrities are often pushed into the spotlight and asked to care about various causes without much kindness or understanding. I want to give a massive thank you to them for their time and effort, especially during COVID when they volunteered to help for free and stick their necks out.

Some of my favourite collaborations have been with Cara Delevingne, Taika Waititi, and Dominic Monaghan and Richard Curtis. Richard is someone I admire greatly, and I see myself as a sort of "diet Coke" version of him, working with celebrities to create impactful projects like he did with Comic Relief.

Working with Cara Delevingne was especially memorable. We brainstormed ideas and came up with a comic about billionaires being tricked into hiding in bunkers while the rest of the world fixes our problems.

The comic featured a humorous twist with a Greta Thunberg-like character locking the billionaires in their bunkers.

I Promise - c. Rewriting Earth X Dinos and Comics (James Stewart and K Roméy)

That’s great. I’m sure Douglass Rushkoff would love that one. There are so many fantastic comics in the book. They also have an enormous reach on social media. Which have been the most successful?

A few that have been incredibly successful. But the one that really has done just so well was “I promised”.

I was on a call with James and Kay, from Dinos and Comics, and we were trying to work out how to get dinosaurs to talk about extinction – because obviously dinosaurs appear in all of their comics.

I think it was me who said, “well, you've got the tortoise character. Tortoises are still around. Wouldn't it be interesting if you had the dinosaur asking the tortoise to remember it when they were gone and to not make the same mistakes?” Something like that.

Then I think it was James who said, “what about if you had the dinosaur asking the tortoise to promise to look after the planet after he's gone?” and all of us went, “Oh, that hit! That's heartbreaking!”

I think we made the script for that or the general idea in five minutes. It was just that lightning moment.

Almost every weekend, if not every other weekend, we see it shared on another Facebook group or an Instagram channel, and it gets another 2 million plus views or likes.

It's probably one of the most viewed bits of environmental content ever made. I think the total views are in the tens of billions. It's just incredible.

Every time I reach out to a celebrity I show them that comic, and every one of them just immediately gets it. It's under 20 words, but you absolutely, immediately feel it in your heart what it must be like to have been a tortoise watching humanity slowly destroy the planet. And it just makes you want to do something.

I just need to give such love and gratitude towards Dinos and Comics, that’s the name of the artist collaboration of James and Kay, because that one bit of content has actually made a difference and changed the world.

It's a Bit of a Mess - c. Rewriting Earth X David Schneider X Amber Weedon

Rewriting Extinction focused on species extinction, biodiversity loss, and climate change. Do you believe we still have time to turn the ship around?

Absolutely. It is not too late. It's too late to stop some bad effects, but if we don't do something, it's going to be much worse. Think of it like a house on fire.

Just because one room is on fire, you don't just give up and let the whole thing burn down. There are loads of things we can do that are just around the corner and solutions that will make a massive difference.

We need to focus on the solutions and not on the problems. Rewilding, for example, is marvellous. It captures loads of carbon and gives us wonderful, wild spaces full of animals. It also creates tourism opportunities.

There are amazing sequestration technologies coming out as well, like what Dale Vince is doing with Sky Diamonds, turning carbon into diamonds and then using that as a commercial product.

So many incredible things are happening, for example, the Global Oceans Treaty, is turning 30% of the world's oceans into no-fish zones. We aren't actually that far off from being able to achieve equilibrium where the amount of carbon we're storing is similar to the amount of carbon we're emitting.

I heard recently that if we didn't fish 30% of the oceans, that would be enough to store all of mankind's carbon in perpetuity. Fish reproduce quickly and absorb a lot of carbon, especially algae and krill, as well as the giant beasts of the ocean like whales. This would keep us on an even keel and allow us to transition away from fossil fuels.

Stopping fishing in these areas would buy us the time we need to decarbonize the rest of our industries. Additionally, 40% of ocean-bound traffic is transporting oil and gas. If we use renewables, we can cut down on this traffic, allowing whales and other animals to breed more, which in turn absorbs more carbon.

As for rewilding, I recommend checking out Ben Goldsmith, Charlie Burrell, George Monbiot, Isabella Tree, and the Knepp Estate. These projects showcase the incredible benefits of rewilding.

For example, at the Knepp Estate, they introduced Tamworth pigs, which churned up the ground and created natural waterways, stopping flooding. This led to the return of species like the European butterflies and created an incredible place where animals roam wild through forests and woods.

The land now sequesters large amounts of carbon and is incredibly profitable because they don't need fences, food, or antibiotics. The land manages itself, and it's beautiful, loud with life, and a popular safari destination.

They all sound like great reasons for optimism

We are going to have a hard time, but the storm will pass. I am absolutely positive and very optimistic that humanity has learned from its mistakes.

We're learning too slowly right now, but I think the world in 15, 20, 30 years will be much more just, much cleaner, much healthier, and much less reliant on entrenched usages like the fossil fuel industry.

I honestly have never been more positive about the future of humanity. I mean, I remember when my dad was growing up, he used to tell me he cared about himself, his mates and his family.

Then in the 70s we started caring about our local community, our country, and other people. The sphere of care got bigger.

Then we got to the 80s, we had Comic Relief and projects like that. Our sphere of care grew larger. We care about Europe now. We care about Africa.

Then soon, in the 2000s, we started to expand our care to the entire globe. And then, in the 2010s, we started to care more about marginalised communities than we ever did before.

LGBT people, plus people of colour. Now, in the 2020s, we're also caring more about people who may be on the neurodivergent spectrum or have physical disabilities, life-limiting factors, or educational and social impact factors.

We have never cared more as a human race about each other than we do now. I am rampantly optimistic that by the year 2050, we'll have a world that is unrecognisably better, more beautiful, and just better than it is now.

Rewriting.Earth's newest short film Saving Jane has already been watched by more than 51 million people.

That's beautiful. What’s next for you and how can people engage with your work?

We've got over 600 pieces of content on our Rewriting.Earth website. We've made memes, videos, songs, short films, animations, comics, and they're all free. We just give them away. We've had tens of billions of views on our stuff, and we just say, "Just take it, use it." We have no agenda here.

We’re also working on campaigns with NGOs. We kind of act like an ad agency with Earth as our client. We just say, Look, what's the issue? What bit of content can we make? And then we give it away. And all of our stuff is free and non-exclusive. Anyone can use our stuff as long as you credit the creators to make sure that they get their thanks because they did this work.

We have just released a short film I’m really proud of called Saving Jane. It’s a powerful, beautiful animation about the link between pension funds and deforestation that we produced in collaboration with Richard Curtis, the Make My Money Matter campaign, Global Canopy and Global Witness. We're launching it in collaboration with Dr. Jane Goodall and Peter Gabriel. It got just over 51 million organic reach in one week so I’m over the moon!

For anyone that wants to connect with our work they can visit Rewriting.Earth or follow our Instagram page.