Speaking at the 2025 Forbes Sustainability Leaders Summit during New York Climate Week on Monday, Harrison Ford, the actor turned outspoken environmental advocate, issued a rebuke of his generation for its lack of progress in addressing environmental problems. Climate change, he argued, is not merely a scientific or economic problem but a moral one. “Everything about climate has to do with social justice as well,” he said. “We’ve run out of story. We’re up against a wall. It’s time to start fighting back in a different way with a new story.”
The remarks came during a panel alongside Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice-president of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives. Ford’s theme was generational responsibility. His own generation, he said, had “kicked the can down the road,” crossed every red line and left “a shit spot” for those who follow. Yet he still sees a chance for redemption. Young people, he insisted, are “the greatest constituency left who can change politics” if they put down their phones, organize, choose leaders and seize the day. The older generation, with all its failures and successes, can only back them up.
He placed particular emphasis on Indigenous stewardship and genuine sustainable development. The economy as it stands, he said, is “unsustainable,” while Indigenous communities “are the stewards” protecting what remains under daily social and political pressure. Forget tokenistic “development,” he urged; saving nature and supporting its custodians is the real path to resilience.
Business, too, must be part of the fight. Ford praised innovation and profit in renewable energy as “key to our success” but warned that firms making “gangbusters” from the status quo are “subsistent” and at risk in a world where nature is lost. “Nature is the solution,” he said, noting Apple’s support of conservation initiatives as part of its sustainability efforts, which have significantly cut emissions over the past decade—proof, he argued, that firms can profit while cleaning up their business.
Beyond policies, Ford worried about a deeper social erosion. He lamented the loss of a political middle ground and of the “handshake” connections that once bound communities, blaming algorithms for turning civic life into “noise, not music.” From the air, he said, he can see how towns grew along rivers and how infrastructure reshaped landscapes; the virtues that built such places are now being exhausted.
His closing plea rejected escapism. Space may be the “end game for a lot of people,” he said, but “our future is right here.” The fight, as Ford framed it, is to tell a new story about the past, present and future—one that young people can make their own.
Ford, whose film credits include Indiana Jones and Han Solo in “Star Wars,” has been a board member of Conservation International since 1991, lending his celebrity to conservation causes for more than three decades.
Header image: Indonesian rainforest. Photo by Rhett Ayers Butler.
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