Robert Stone – Director of Earth Days
Robert Stone is a multi-award-winning, Oscar-nominated and Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker. Born in England in 1958, his grew up in both Europe and America. After graduating with a degree in history from the University of Wisconsin/Madison, he moved to New York City in 1983 determined to pursue a career in filmmaking. He gained considerable recognition for his first film, “RADIO BIKINI” (1987) which premiered at Sundance and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary. Multi-tasking as a producer, director, writer, editor and sometimes cameraman, he has over the last 20 years developed a steady international reputation with a range of unique and critically acclaimed feature-documentaries about American history, pop-culture and the mass media.
EARTH DAYS is a feature length documentary about the origins of the modern environmental movement, told through the eyes of nine Americans who were inspired to act on what they believed was the most important challenge facing mankind.
The film opens in the 1950s when a small group of scientists began to document the impact of our technology on the Earth’s ecosystem. Within a decade it seemed to many Americans as if the post-war dream of a better world brought about through science, technology and economic growth—the American dream—was turning into an unfathomable nightmare. National concern about the environment crystallized on April 22, 1970, when twenty million Americans across the country participated in celebrations and demonstrations—the largest in American history—demanding political action to protect the environment. Their grassroots call to action led to groundbreaking national legislation, and started a revolution that is with us still.
The film features active participants in these watershed events, representing a diverse cross section of American life and politics. Former Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, renewable energy pioneer Hunter Lovins, biologist Paul Ehrlich, former Republican Congressman Pete McCloskey, and Apollo Nine astronaut Rusty Schweickart are among the witnesses. Each reflects on their awakening to an environmental crisis, and the unprecedented movement that grew out of their response to that crisis.
EARTH DAYS examines both the groundbreaking achievements and missed opportunities of a decade of activism. Producer/Director Robert Stone, whose previous films for American Experience include the critically acclaimed OSWALD’S GHOST and the Academy Award-nominated RADIO BIKINI, artfully assembles never before seen archival footage to create a film that offers both a poetic meditation on man’s complex relationship to nature, and a probing analysis of past responses to environmental crisis.
EARTH DAYS was selected to be the Closing Night Film at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. It will be released theatrically in 2009, followed by a national broadcast on PBS/American Experience in April 2010 to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the first Earth Day.
For more information on the upcoming film, go to http://www.earthdaysmovie.com
Earth Promise: What changes, or Earth Promises as we call them, have you made in your lifestyle to be more green? Changes in home, travel, work, with your kids and community?
Robert Stone: My life has changed quite a bit in the last few years. I moved with my family from New York City to a small town in the Hudson Valley. We buy locally grown food as much as possible, we compost, we recycle, we’re planting a vegetable garden this spring – all the kinds of things one can do in the country that are next to impossible in the city (except for recycling of course). Energy-wise we’ve installed a new high efficiency furnace in our old house, have insulated the house and done other modifications to cut down on our energy consumption. I still have to travel a fair amount for work but we’re beginning to fly people here whom we want to interview rather than travelling with a crew and a large amount of equipment to film an interview with a single individual. I’m don’t think any of this is going to save the planet but at least I’m trying to do my small bit and to set an example for my kids.
EP: Were you “green” as a child?
RS: I’m 50 years old so I was about 11 when the first Earth Day took place. I remember being extremely caught up in the whole environmental movement at that time. And of course the energy crisis hit a few years later so that compounded my awareness of this whole issue. It really became a passion of mine and all of that has stayed with me ever since to one degree or another. It’s the kind of issue that kids can get their heads around very easily. Pollution, species extinction, excessive energy consumption are all things that kids seem to respond to intuitively. The trick is to keep them engaged as they become adults. I’ve spent the bulk of my career mining my childhood for topics to make films about so in this respect I’ve remained very much engaged with my perception of things from when I was a kid. It’s the well to which I return whenever I make a historical documentary.
EP: What was your first, ah ha! Green moment?
RS: That’s a tough one. I remember driving from the small town I grew up in in New Jersey to New York with my parents fairly often and we had to pass by the refineries and gasworks in Newark, near Newark Airport. If you know that area you know that the pollution there is pretty bad. But as bad as it is now, it was unbelievably bad in the 1960’s! Unless you experienced it, it’s hard to describe the level of air pollution that existed before the environmental laws were enacted. So that little trip we used to make to New York and back certainly made me aware that something was very wrong. But in terms an ah ha moment it would have to be the first Earth Day in 1970. Suddenly we all put two and two together and started to connect all these things we were seeing around us into an overall environmental crisis. And suddenly a movement arose to address it. I made a short super-8 film for my science class as an Earth Day project called “Pollution.” I still have it. There’s not a question in my mind that there’s a direct thread in my life going from showing that little film to my 7th grade science class to screening EARTH DAYS as the Closing Night Film at Sundance this year. For me, and I think for most of my generation, it all started with Earth Day.
EP: Tell me about your new movie, Earth Days? What was your inspiration in creating this movie?
RS: My kids are the inspiration for this movie, without a doubt. I’m really fearful of the world they’re going to grow up in. When I think of all the tremendous changes that have happened just in my lifetime, it’s pretty horrifying to contemplate what they will witness in theirs. We’ve been dealt a pretty bad hand by those who came before us I’m sorry to say. Previous generations only cared about economic growth. Little thought was given until quite recently to how all this economic growth (and population growth) was negatively impacting the health of the planet. People only saw the positive side to it in terms of raising their standard of living. So I feel a very real responsibility to do something as a parent. I’m also a filmmaker so using whatever talents and skills I’ve accumulated over the years to address this issue is the best way I know of to make a difference. It may be a drop in the bucket but it’s what I know how to do.
EP: When did you come up with the idea and how long did it take to put together?
RS: I came up with the idea for this film in early 2007. It grew out of a conversation I had with my executive producer at PBS/American Experience, Mark Samels. We were discussing ideas about what kind of film I might like to do. America, he said, was beaten down and bummed out by 9/11, the war in Iraq, the policies of the Bush administration, etc. I’m usually the go-to guy for dark subject matter but he persuaded me, at a time when it seemed everyone I knew was doing dark films about Iraq and terrorism, to try to take on an idea that had something positive to offer the world. In 2007 you had to think pretty hard about that one. I told him that there were only three major things that had happened in my lifetime that I felt had had a lasting positive influence on our culture (that was no doubt a bit of hyperbole but it got his attention). My list of the three were the Civil Rights Movement, the Space Program and the Environmental Movement. I told him I’d like to make a film about the history of our awakening to the environmental crisis, an awakening that in many ways followed the trajectory of my own life experience. Mark supported the research and soon decided to back the film to the hilt. I was off and running. He also encouraged me to think big and has supported the idea of this being a theatrical documentary, not just something for television. It’s a very unusual film for a television network to get behind. But Mark understood its potential very early on and supported the idea of thinking outside the box in terms of creating something unique that’s both a work of history and a work of art. As a filmmaker with a strong independent and iconoclastic streak this was a golden opportunity to try make something truly great and to have the backing to pull it off. They could not have been more supportive.
EP: In the film, you trace the origins of the environmental movement through the eyes of nine people who were very influential in the early stages. Tell me about them. Were they an inspiration to you while making the movie?
RS: Taking on a subject of this scope (a film about everything really) was quite a challenge. I felt that in order to make a film that would connect with people and also deal with some of the most deep and complex issues of our time, I needed to ground the film in personal narrative. I don’t use narration in my films, never have. So the characters in my films tend to drive the narrative; it’s as much about them as it is about the subject matter. So with this film I decided I wanted to take the audience on a personal journey through the time period in which we awakened to the environmental crisis, roughly 1950 to 1980, through the eyes of several people who actually shaped the direction of the movement that arose to confront this crisis.
I finally settled on nine people, of whom three or four emerge as the central characters, but all have their say. They are: Stewart Udall, Denis Hayes, Stewart Brand, Paul Ehlich, Stephanie Mills, Rusty Schweickart, Pete McCloskey, Hunter Lovins and Dennis Meadows. Each of them in a sense represents different aspects of the crisis we face and different aspects of the approach the movement took as it developed in the wake of Earth Day. Ultimately people identify with people not issues, so this was an approach that I felt would engage an audience in a personal journey while also allowing them to contemplate some pretty huge issues that on their own might appear dry and remote, like a typical science or history documentary. I think any documentary that has something big to say and wants to reach a wide audience, particularly a theatrical audience, needs to be as much about the messenger as it is about the message. Otherwise you’ll simply be preaching to the choir or written off as propaganda, or both, and I’ve never had any interest in that. Were they an inspiration? Of course. How could you not be inspired by people who’ve devoted their entire lives to making the planet a better place for future generations? And they’re still at it. They’re genuine heroes, each and every one of them.
EP: The books Silent Spring by Rachel Carson and Population Bomb by Dr. Paul R. Ehrich were the big influencers that moved the environmental movement. Who are the key advocates today?
RS: Al Gore is clearly the key advocate of our time in much the same way as Denis Hayes, Paul Ehrlich and Rachel Carson were in period covered in my film. There are a great many others of course, but in terms of the movement today having a singular public face, Al Gore is clearly it. But he’s more of a synthesizer than an original thinker. The real scientific work and day to day political work is done by people most of us have never heard of.
Nixon started a “project of independence” during his presidency as it relates to the environmental issues. The concept was there, but it didn’t get to the heart of the problem. That was in the early 1970s. In 2009, have we gotten to the heart of the problem?
Project Independence was actually Nixon’s proposal to make the United States energy independent in the wake of the 1973 OPEC oil embargo. It, like other similar efforts by subsequent presidents, didn’t get to the heart of the problem, as Dennis Meadows says in my film, because our overuse of fossil fuels is a symptom of a more systemic problem, just as Global Warming is also really a symptom, not a cause. Human civilization is stressing the ecological balance of the planet beyond its ability to renew and repair itself. It’s not that America needs to become more energy independent (“drill baby drill”), it’s that we need to produce and consume energy in a way that is both sustainable and renewable. So no, we have not gotten to the heart of the problem. Not yet.
EP: Do you feel that the United States needs stronger laws to protect the environment? If so, in what areas?
RS: I would not have thought this before I made this film, but I think we need to enact laws that make the marketplace more efficient, particularly in the field of energy. The market is terribly inefficient when it comes to long-term challenges and that’s where a new legal and regulatory framework can help. One great example is the gas tax. It has been proposed that the government enact a tax that would ensure that the price of gasoline never falls below $4 / gallon, regardless of world commodity prices. That’s an enormous political challenge to enact but it would transform our energy policy almost overnight. By creating price stability, companies investing in renewable energy could then make long term investments without worrying that they’ll be undercut by falling prices in fossil fuel, which by the way would be the inevitable result of a successful renewable energy effort – less demand for fossil fuels will lower their price and therefore make them more appealing. Unless something like this is done to make renewable energy profitable, the easy availability of fossil fuel will always win out in the marketplace. I also think the idea of a carbon tax is terrific because it factors in the true cost of using fossil fuels that the market currently does not take into account. For example, the price of gas you pay at the pump does not reflect the negative cost to environment of spewing carbon dioxide out of your tail pipe. That’s another example of the market not functioning properly to reflect the true cost of things. Al Gore’s idea that ‘we should tax what we burn, not what we earn’ makes a lot of sense. I think things like this are the way to go. It’s not simply regulation telling companies what they can’t do, as has been done in the past. It’s creating a mechanism for encouraging the marketplace to respond to long-term challenges, and making it possible for people and companies to profit from doing so. Tap into the human propensity for greed to solve environmental problems and you’ll be surprised how rapidly change will come about. That’s the new area of environmental activism and I’d like to see environmentalists getting engaged in, moving this kind of market-based legislation through Congress. It’s activism with real results, just like what happened in the 1970’s in the wake of Earth Day. As my film demonstrates, public support back then was channeled into concrete political action very rapidly. A great deal of the credit for that has to go to Denis Hayes who guided this new movement into the polling booth. Dramatic improvements in the health of our environment resulted for all to see in fairly short order.
EP: In your opinion, how much of an environmental crisis are we really in? What are the consequences of non-action or limited change?
RS: From having had the good fortune to study this subject quite a bit and to have met and spoken with a great many people who’ve devoted their lives to this subject, I can say that from what I’ve been able to understand, the crisis we face is quite dire. Our planet is in critical condition in terms of its ability to sustain human civilization as it now exists. The damage is happening unbelievably rapidly and it will probably have a major impact on humanity within our lifetime and that of our children. One way or another the changes we need to make will happen. They will either happen through concerted action now or they will be forced upon us later at a great and terrible cost in human suffering. I wish it were otherwise but I think there’s a general consensus within the scientific community at least that we’re going to face a cataclysm at some point in the very near future unless extraordinary action on a global scale is taken right away. Even with our best efforts we need to start preparing to adapt to dramatic environmental change as much as we are trying to avert it. Some sort of change is coming no matter what we do but it’s still within our hands to mitigate the worst of it and maybe come out of it better attuned to our place within the planets ecosystem.
EP: Sometimes if a message is played over too much, consumers will tend to ignore it after a while or tune it out or turn against it. First do you think people feel bombarded in a bad way with all the information from the media regarding climate change? Second, how can green Evangelists be more effective in making sure we are relevant but not overbearing?
RS: I actually think there’s perhaps too much focus on the doom and gloom scenarios surrounding the issue of climate change at the moment. In that regard I think people are understandably overwhelmed and perhaps have a tendency to tune out. You have to offer people some sense of hope otherwise you drive people to despair and that’s never going to solve anything. I should add here that I actually think there is hope, a great deal of it. But we need to get to work right away. I also think it’s important to get beyond this idea of producers and consumers when it comes to information, as if activists, or eco-Evangelists, are the producers and the ignorant masses are the consumers. That kind of thinking can lead you in the end to the same kind of arrogance that you see in big corporations trying to sell people a new brand of soap. This was one of the mistakes that were made by the environmental movement in the 1970’s that’s documented in my film. The end result was the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and a backlash against the whole environmental movement. The environment became a central focus of the culture wars that paralyzed any political progress in this country for 30 years. There are concrete steps we can take both as individuals and as a society that will both enrich our lives and help avert catastrophe. The trouble is there’s an apocalyptic streak in us all that kind of enjoys the concept of disaster a lot more than the mundane day to day efforts to make life better. Perhaps an energy revolution, like the one now being contemplated, will make making life better and healing the planet exciting, profitable and fun. It’s not enough to just to tell the world the sky is falling, even if it is.
EP: It appears that traditional media is finding it hard to communicate to the public these day especially with newspapers shutting down and not being the focal point anymore. And now that the new media, Twitter, Facebook, etc. is the new voice. Is this going to be the new influential way to achieve change?
RS: I’m not sure how much change is actually brought about by the media. I think the media is to a great degree responsive to what’s going on in society. If there’s a trend or a movement, the media will report on it and word will get around and ideas will spread. All of these things, newspapers, magazines, Twitter, Facebook, etc. are all simply means of communication. So long as communication is happening in one form or another then that’s a good thing. The thing to worry about is when communication itself becomes restrained but things seem to be moving towards more communication not less. Who’s to say whether it’s a better or worse form of communication than in the past? What I’m saying is that the media doesn’t create change, people do. The media, and even documentary filmmakers, may like to think that they are leading the way but I think that’s very rarely the case. More often than not they’re responding to and articulating an existing popular sentiment.
EP: Changes in our habits have to come from companies, our elected officials, as well as from individuals. What are some of the key steps we can take to move these along? Which of these groups will be the most impactful as well as hardest to get to change?
RS: One of the great lessons of the environmental movement that is chronicled in my film it’s that people need to remain engaged and not simply turn over responsibility to their elected officials and go on with their lives. There was a tendency in the 1970’s for people to believe that now that Congress had enacted all these tough environmental laws and had established the EPA to enforce them that there was nothing more to be done. The result was that much of this legislation eventually got watered down or was not enforced once people diverted their attention to other issues. There are powerful forces that will always challenge anything that is questioning or attempting to limit unrestrained growth. It’s this need for perpetual growth that is embedded in the capitalist system that is most responsible for the environmental damage to the planet. Yet it’s also what’s most responsible for lifting people out of poverty throughout the world. Navigating this complex tug of war requires constant engagement from all sides in order to steer a course towards a system that’s actually sustainable. At the moment it’s not and this is the heart of our problem.
EP: It was noted in the movie that icons frame people’s way of thinking. You mention the photo of the earth taken from space as one of those icons. What is that icon today? What images hit home with people?
RS: Icons can also very easily become clichés. I suppose the melting iceberg or the polar bear is sort of an icon of Global Warming. The images coming out of Darfur are icons of human suffering. I’m not sure they actually have much more than a momentary impact because they make us feel bad. I honestly believe the ultimate icon of our age is the image of the Earth from space. It kind of says it all. I can’t imagine another icon so fully encompassing the human condition at this point in our evolution. Perhaps I say that because it came about in my lifetime but from my perspective it’s one for the ages.
EP: People need to get comfortable with the idea of the changes we need to make in our lifestyles. How do we make people feel more at ease? How do we change people’s overall environmental consciousness?
RS: I think one of the great contributions of both Stewart Brand and Hunter Lovins to this issue, both of whom are featured in my film, is that they see our transition to a sustainable society as a win-win situation, and I think President Obama is trying to convey this as well. There’s so much economic opportunity to be had from going green. There are jobs to be had and fortunes to be made. And it’s also good for society at large. This idea I think is well on the way to being sold to the general public and I think we can expect enormous technological changes in the years ahead in areas of energy production and consumption. That will be a huge step in the right direction. What’s still uncomfortable for many people is the degree to which public investment is crucial to create a viable marketplace for this transition. At the moment the marketplace does not account the so-called externalities: things like pollution of the air and water that are not factored into the price of goods and services. Private enterprise alone is not going to take us where we need to go as rapidly as we need to because, in the area energy in particular, we don’t actually have a free market. So the great hurdle that we’re facing right now, in my opinion, is making people comfortable with the idea of government intervention into the market place to make it function better and to make it more responsive to long term thinking. This is counter-intuitive to many people but it’s actually the only way we’re going to make the changes that need to be made to sustain our economy and our environment.
EP: To quote from Denis Hayes, the first Earth Day organizer, “What we were trying to do is to create a brand new public consciousness that would cause the rules of the game to change…it was wild and exciting and out of control – and the sort of thing that lets you know you’ve got something big happening.” Those words could not be truer in 1970. What do we have to do get “something big happening” today?
RS: I think you could start by picking up where Denis Hayes, the organizer of the first Earth Day, and others have left off. That was one of the reasons I made the film. This movement has a rich history that most young people know nothing about. They are standing on the shoulders of giants and they should use that lift to take this movement to the next level, rather than imagining that they’re starting something from scratch. So I think making Earth Day 2010 (the 40th anniversary of the original) a huge and major world-wide event could be a real game-changer. But it can’t just be a televised U2 concert on the Washington Mall or something like that. That’s what we’ve come to expect from these kinds of things lately (think Live Aid and all the rest). I would like to see something where people everywhere are actually engaged in doing something locally with their community, not just sitting inside watching an event on television. That’s what the first Earth Day was all about and it altered the thinking of an entire generation. It moved Richard Nixon, of all people, to be the most environmentally active president we’ve ever had. It postponed the day of reckoning by perhaps half a century or more. Build on the foundations that have been erected for us and keep on building until we achieve a sustainable society. April 22, 2010 is a good place to start. I’ll see you there.
EP: What do you feel was/is the turning point in this environmental movement? Or has it not happened yet?
RS: There have been several and I’ve identified them in my film. The publication of Silent Spring was clearly a turning point. The publication of photographs of the Earth taken from outer space was another. Earth Day 1970 clearly was a major turning point. It’s really an evolutionary process where one thing builds upon another. Al Gore has initiated a turning point in awakening us to the perils of climate change. I’m sure there are more turning points in our future. Maybe, as I’ve mentioned, April 22, 2010 can be another turning point.
EP: What is the one Earth Promise you are going to make in the future that you have not done yet?
RS: I promise to buy an electric car.
EP: Excellent interview and a truly wonderful movie.
One of the people we had the privilege to interview was Nathan Winters. Not an actor, a politician, musician or movie director. All he did was ride his bicycle across the United States to raise for the Nature Conservancy and increase awareness regarding our environment and the importance of protecting it and caring for it. To read more about Nathan and his amazing journey, visit his site at www.FollowNathan.org. 
