Award-winning documentary filmmaker Robert Stone literally grew up with the environmental movement. Now 50, Stone was just eight years old when his mom (“she was a character”) read Silent Spring to him. At 11 he crushed cans on the very first Earth Day in 1970.
That first Earth Day also inspired him to create his first film, a documentary about pollution in his hometown. He says that it was a direct line to his latest production, Earth Days, a compelling look at the birth and history of the environmental movement in the US. The film combines archival footage and present-day interviews with nine “witnesses” including Whole Earth Catalog creator Stewart Brand, former Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, Congressman Pete McCloskey and activist Hunter Lovins.
Mr. Stone took the time to discuss Earth Days with Tonic during the recent press tour for the film, which was chosen to be the closing night film for the Sundance Film Festival.
Tonic: What inspired you to make this movie now?
Stone: The easy answer is my kids. I wanted to explain to my two boys, who are nine and seven, that things have gotten a lot better in terms of the environment. Young people in particular think we’ve been on an environmental downward death spiral.
I know from experience in my lifetime that’s not the case.
Things were on a terrible state in the 50s, in the early 70s, and people got off their asses and demanded change. And very rapid change took place that dramatically cleaned up our air and water. The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the EPA was set up to regulate all of these things, all done in a 4 year period.
Tonic: During Nixon!
Stone: That’s right, during the Nixon administration. That’s the good news of the film: There are technological solutions to many of our problems, and it’s been done before. We just need the will to demand the change.
Tonic: Seeing the archival footage in Earth Days of the innovations from 30 or more years ago, it’s surprising that we’re not further along.
Stone: We’ve got this electric car in the film, developed in 1967 by General Motors, that spec’d out pretty similar to the Chevy Volt, coming out next year. This technology’s been on the shelf for decades.
We were on a path toward sustainable energy, and we got off the path. We took our eye off the ball, and we lost 30 years.
Tonic: What happened to get us off the path?
Stone: The environmental movement ran into problems in the 70s, when it took a regulatory approach.
It was necessary at the time to make the kind of rapid change we did make, for the government to come in and say, “Your factory can’t do this to the rivers. You can’t just throw anything you want in the atmosphere.”
But that approach incited a backlash. One of the examples in the film is the logging industry in Northern California.
Activists went up and said, “We don’t want you logging the forest!”
The loggers said, “This is what I do for a living, get out of here!”
So the environmental movement became hippie, anti-capitalist treehuggers, vs. “anti-environment” people.
Tonic: Ironically, everyone wants trees!
Stone: If you’re a logger, you probably want tress more than any environmental activist wants trees, because that’s your livelihood. You’re out in the forest every day!
The failure was largely a matter of framing the debate poorly.
As Hunter Lovins has pioneered, and describes in the film, a more successful approach is to engage people in solutions where you present it as being in their self-interest to do things that are environmentally sustainable. Which is it! Self-interest and collective interest.
Tonic: What effect does the current political climate around energy security have on the debate?
Stone: In 1952, the Truman administration did a study about America’s future energy and resource needs. They came to the conclusion that by the 1970s America would be importing more oil than it’s producing, which it did.
And that we would run into shortages, which was the case.
And we would be importing massive amounts of energy from overseas, which would lead to security problems, to wars the Middle East and around the world. Which is where we are now.
The recommendation in 1952 was that we need to invest heavily in solar energy, and other renewable resources here in the US, to make us less dependent on foreign sources. They were ignored!
And I think the reason is that, despite all of the propaganda, people can’t get their heads around something that’s going to happen 50 years, a 100 years out there. It’s too far.
Tonic: What could help people understand the issue?
Stone: Much of the success and failures of the environmental movement is around enabling people to perceive the nature of the problem.
So framing the debate in terms of National Security is one possibility. Everyone can get their head around the idea that we can’t keep importing massive amounts of oil and funding the people who hate us.
Tonic: What does framing the debate do?
Stone: All of these problems are less ones of personal virtues, but of larger scale political problems. So your success communicating about it is tied to how people perceive it.
Jimmy Carter had a great argument to make, but he wasn’t a good politician. He framed it in terms of the sacrifices people had to make, restraint and cutting back and turning down your thermostat.
Ronald Reagan had a faulty argument to present, but he was very effective communicator, who framed it very well.
Tonic: So if you just put them together …
Stone: Well, we have a president now who’s good at both. As the film pointed out, the great successes came when those came together, and failures when they fell apart.
Tonic: What do you want people to think when they walk out of Earth Days?
Stone: First and foremost, that our problems are our own creation, and solutions are in our grasp. We’ve made great changes before, and we can make great changes again, the problem is lack of political will. It’s not an abstract concept, it’s in our history.
This backstory is an essential context for anything you might hear related to the environment, and that’s never been done before. There aren’t even any books on it.
Tonic: Why do you think that’s the case?
Stone: I think it’s largely because the subject of the environment is naturally a forward-looking enterprise. Looking forward is not getting the attention of the public that everybody seems to hope that it would. At this juncture, the most important thing for the environmental movement to do is look back.
Tonic: If you could get people to do three things, what would they be?
Stone:
- Don’t have more than two kids.
- Vote and support politicians who support your concern with the environment, and oppose those who don’t.
- Get personally involved.
Tonic: How can people make it personal?
Stone: If a daily act of awareness – like biking to work — encourages you to become politically engaged to support larger, systemic changes, then great! But if you feel that that’s all you need to do, and you’ve done your job, then we have a deep problem.
Those of us who are privileged enough to have a roof over our heads and have the time and energy to care about the environment have an obligation to get engaged and lead the world. We can’t do that with feel-good measures for our own personal happiness.
Tonic: What about doing things like signing online petitions or campaigns to call politicians?
Stone: It doesn’t mean a damn thing. I’m adamant about this.
People think it’s enough to take 20 seconds to sign an online petition or write a check to the Sierra Club, and or Moveon.org, and it’s just not true because the other side is doing the same thing.
Boots on the ground make a difference. It gets media attention, puts pressure on political leaders in a way that signing online petitions and sending checks to lobbying groups does not.
The greatest success in this country was when 20 million people – 10 percent of the American population, the equivalent of 40 million today – came out in a single day for the largest demonstration for change.
There’s a big effort to make Earth Day 2010 that kind of event, and I hope this film can help make it happen.
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Feel inspired by Robert Stone? See the film and you’ll want to get out there and get involved on Earth Day 2010, April 22. Check out the Earth Days site for more information about Stone’s film, and the Earth Day 2010 site for information about how you can do something locally.
Photo by Catherine Lincoln.