Movie review: Earth Days

by John P. Meyer

Renowned documentarist Robert Stone delivers a moving, heart-rending, modestly hopeful history of the American environmentalist movement with his new film Earth Days.

The film opens with every president from Kennedy to George W. giving public lip service to the cause of environmental protection. The implication: words are cheap.

Told from the first-person viewpoints of nine key figures involved in the efforts to wake people up to the dangers of unfettered growth and unchecked consumerism, the 102-minute film plays at times like a spoken version of Koyaanisqatsi, using words to tell the tale of life out of balance, in lieu of images. This approach carries the potential for being far less entertaining, until we discover that the words being spoken are so vitally important, and that the people speaking them were some of the first to ever do so.

Here is the lineup of interviewees:

There are powerful images accompanying the statements of these influential crusaders for regional and planetary concerns (clear cuts of old-growth forests, endless urban sprawl, nuclear bomb blasts, smog-obscured cityscapes), but rather than detail them, I've opted for a recounting of some of the statements themselves.

If something here strikes a chord (or tweaks your conscience, or sparks your concern), catch the film while it's playing at the Angelika.

And if nothing here phases you in the least, then you REALLY ought to see it.

"When I was born, Strontium 90 didn't exist." - Denis Hayes

"I was trained to hide under my desk in the event of a nuclear explosion." - Stephanie Mills

"We're genetically and institutionally ill-adapted for it." - re. planning for the future

"For a century ... we violated the principles of ecology." - Denis Hayes

"The rivers of this country were essentially sewers." - Stewart Udall, referencing the period when he first took office as Secretary of the Interior

"I took some LSD on a rooftop in San Francisco ..." - Stewart Brand, re. an experience which led to a global vision of ecological systems

"All of us who went out and tried to live together in egalitarian mode got over it." - Steward Brand, re. the commune experience

"Much of the counterculture disapproved of the space program." - except for Jacques Cousteau, who recognized the power of global imagery from space

"I'm just floating there, almost as if I'm naked in space." - Rusty Schweickart, re. his views of Earth while stranded outside the Apollo 9 spacecraft

"It flips you from a world that we're in, to a planet we're on." - Stewart Brand, re. a photograph of Earth from space

"Earth Day might be a communist plot." - Georgia state official, circa 1970

"There are limits to growth and we're bumping up against them right now." - Stewart Udall

"This is where the science starts getting a little scary." - Hunter Lovins, on whether we've reached the tipping point beyond which no shift in our behavior can do us any good

"I'm hopeful for the future despite the recent past." - Stewart Udall, whose son and nephew were recently elected to seats in the U.S. Senate