From Planet to Page: EMA’s Interview with Writer Arielle Díaz

At EMA, we frequently discuss sustainable production through our EMA Green Seal, but did you know that sustainability can also begin on paper? Writers play a critical role in transforming popular culture and media into a force for good. From Wall-E to The Lorax, media is at its most impactful when it’s telling an engaging story with a moral compass. At our annual EMA Awards, we honor these writers and creators, encouraging them to incorporate environmental stories and solutions into their scripts. For this reason, we are thrilled to share our conversation with writer/producer Arielle Díaz. We hope this insightful conversation encourages you to pick up a pen and write the next EMA-nominated screenplay.

 Arielle Díaz is a Peabody- and GLAAD-nominated TV writer and producer from Chicago, raised by her Mexican immigrant grandparents. She most recently wrote on Season 2 of With Love (Prime Video), which earned a GLAAD nomination. Her other credits also include Gentefied (Netflix; Peabody- and GLAAD-nominated, with one of her Season 2 episodes named one of IndieWire’s Best TV Episodes of 2021), The Last Man on Earth (Emmy-nominated), and Big Shot (Disney+—no nominations, but John Stamos’s hair deserved one). Arielle writes for underestimated girls with oversized glasses, oversized feelings, and oversized dreams. She’s also a former Googler and a new angel investor passionate about wellbeing and clean beauty—though her grandparents still mostly just want to know if she’s eating enough.

We’ll start from the beginning. What inspired your environmental stewardship?

It started with food. When I got sick with chronic health issues a few years ago, I had to completely rethink how I was living—starting with food. Paying close attention to what I ate revealed how significantly it affected my energy, digestion, and overall health and well-being. That curiosity led me deeper into the origins of our food and how it’s grown. I learned about the history of industrialized farming and monocropping practices, and how those systems strip the soil of nutrients and destabilize entire ecosystems. It also makes our entire food system extremely vulnerable to natural disasters and unstable economies, making it an unsustainable way to continue.  

That’s when I started exploring regenerative farming and learning about food sovereignty. Just this summer, I visited a farm in Puerto Rico that's working to reduce the island’s high dependence on imported food. Approximately 80% of Puerto Rico’s food is imported from the mainland U.S. Seeing firsthand how farmers there are rebuilding resilience through local agriculture made a huge impression on me and planted a seed for what’s possible.

In my daily life over the last three years, I’ve made small but consistent choices, such as sourcing eggs, meat, honey, and produce from regenerative farms, building relationships with farmers, and asking questions about their practices. It began to heal my own body, and it has grown into the way I live: more intentional, connected, and conscious of the ripple effects of what I consume and how it is grown.

You’re a Peabody-nominated TV Writer and producer. How does your passion as a writer intersect with your love for the environment?

Right now, I’m drawn to stories with themes of inheritance. Not just in the obvious sense of money or land, but in the invisible things we inherit—family patterns, cultural memory, even illnesses that can be read as the body’s form of self-protection. That has naturally led me to explore how inheritance connects to the environment: how the systems we’re born into, such as our food systems and land use, become a part of our personal story and our family systems, whether we choose them or not.

I’m actually in Portugal at a writing retreat as I say this, immersed in research and studying genre as a tool. I’m new to genre as a tv writer so I’m geeking out a bit  because it’s a literary device that lets you give interesting form to something abstract—like a haunting force in the woods beyond a family farm standing in for the unease of living inside systems too big to fight (like American agribusiness or corporate greed for example), and then filtering it through a very human, character-driven lens. For me, that’s the intersection right now: excavating the heart and guts of a character’s micro story while using genre to illuminate the larger macro point.  

What are some examples of TV or movie writing that you think effectively includes environmental messaging?

James Cameron’s Avatar doesn’t exactly whisper its environmental message. It kind of paints it in neon, and I’m sure you’ve gotten this before, but it’s so good, not to mention. Even with its overt messaging, it still manages to land deeply in the heart. What makes it effective is that it’s not just about “protecting trees,” it’s about showing a whole living system (Pandora) that feels sacred, interconnected, and worth fighting for. The Na’vi see nature as family, not a resource. That perspective forces us as viewers to question how numb we’ve become to our environment, where bulldozers in the Amazon or pipelines through sacred lands don’t break our hearts the same way as fictional trees glowing on screen.

The environmental message lands because it's felt, not only reasoned. When the Tree of Souls falls, you feel the grief, a spiritual violation, and a cultural erasure. Which, by the way, isn't fiction. It’s happening right now to the Wixárika tribe in central and northern Mexico, where sacred pilgrimage routes are under threat from mining and illegal deforestation. These spaces are more than beautiful landscapes; they’re living sites of prayer, thousands of years old, with ancient memories and continuity. When they’re destroyed, an entire people’s rituals and rights are disrupted. Films like Avatar remind us and educate us, in mythic form, of what’s at stake.

The film works because it packages environmental urgency within a blockbuster spectacle. You come for the cool visuals, but you leave wondering what it would mean to live in a relationship with the planet. That’s the seed it plants. And ultimately, I think that’s the job of the writer or filmmaker—to plant a seed.

How can Hollywood, especially writers and creators, benefit from indigenous wisdom and philosophy?

I love this question because indigenous wisdom reminds us that stories are medicine and not just entertainment. They carry memories, value systems, and frameworks for living in right relationship with each other and with the planet. If Hollywood adopted an orientation toward that lens, it would be an invitation for new business strategies/models and structures.

When you treat stories like medicine, you think about things like longevity, not just opening weekend. You’d also extend the benefits of success more equitably across the ecosystem, including artists, crews, studios, agencies, distributors, exhibitors, tech providers, financiers, marketers, and audiences. Not just a handful of executives. It’s a win-win-win model that strengthens the entire pipeline: better stories, healthier creative communities, and audiences that feel understood and continue to show up.

It would be a shift in seeing Hollywood as less of a machine and more like fertile soil that needs to be kept healthy and regenerative for a higher quality yield.  

This question fascinates me because I’d love to explore it beyond philosophy and find tangible ways for it to truly give rise to new business models.

What are you working on, and how can our audience support?

Thanks for this question. 🫶 Last year, I took a creative sabbatical in Mexico to reconnect with my roots, and this year I’m in Portugal nurturing a project at the writer’s retreat I mentioned earlier with other TV writers and screenwriters. Now I’m ready to be back in a writer’s room and be a part of a team again. As my project progresses from the seed stage to the sprout stage, I’ll be looking for the right producing partners to collaborate with. In the meantime, I’m ready to bring everything I’ve gained back into the room. In the meantime, I share updates about my writing and health/environmental journeys on my Instagram and LinkedIn. I’d love to engage with your audience there! My handles are @she.is.that and linkedin.com/in/ariellecontrerasdiaz.

Finally, our EMA Awards are right around the corner. Have there been any TV shows or movies from the past year that you think deserve an EMA Award nomination for including green messaging?

Yes! The Wild Robot comes to mind, which came out in September 2024. I’m sure you’ve seen this film, but I thought it was such a beautiful example of green messaging that doesn’t feel on the nose. I think animation has that benefit, just like sci-fi, because it suspends our conditioning for a moment and taps into our heart. The film is about a robot stranded on an island, where it learns to coexist in harmony with its environment and the creatures that inhabit it. It transitions from being an inorganic outsider to becoming an integral part of the ecosystem, where it cares for and protects wildlife, and comes to realize that survival is about connection, not domination. I love this story so much because it steers clear of any kind of savior complex and highlights the idea of relationships, connection, and belonging. (Which goes back to indigenous wisdom). The robot realizes it's a part of the whole, not separate from it, which is the basis for wanting to protect its home. We protect what becomes a part of us, right?

Stay tuned for this year’s EMA Awards nominees.