Earth Days
by director/producer Robert Stone
I would like to invite you to see my new documentary, Earth Days,
a meditation on humanity's complex relationship with nature and an engaging
history of the revolutionary achievements—and missed opportunities—of groundbreaking
eco-activism in the 1960s and ’70s. Given the contemporary emergence of a
new environmental mentality, I feel that this is an excellent time to look
back at environmentalism's first wave and its fascinating figures that provoked
change and awareness in a truly radical way.
Earth Days is in many ways the culmination for me of years of thinking
and studying and making films about the events that shaped my own childhood
and that of my entire generation of Americans. As such, this film is as much
my own story as it is the story of the nine characters who form the spine
of my new film, and maybe even the story of us all.
In all the contemporary agonizing about climate change, so much of the environmental
movement’s past successes have been almost completely forgotten, particularly
by young people, most of whom see their efforts at environmentalism as starting
from scratch. They have little or no knowledge of their own history. In 2007,
I embarked on a film about the environment reaching a crisis point, our achievements
and mistakes in tackling these grave problems, and about taking our eyes off
the ball.
This is without a doubt the most ambitious film I’ve ever made. In taking on
such a big subject I was determined to make the film firmly grounded in personal
narrative, to make it entertaining and visually arresting, and to avoid many
of the common pitfalls of environmental documentaries. Early on, I settled on
nine Americans through whom we come to see the environmental changes that began
to take place after World War II, changes that compounded themselves to alarming
levels by the end of the 1960s. We witness the fruits of their extraordinary
successes in political activism, as well as the results and lessons of their
missteps. To my mind, this is the great forgotten story of the 1960s and ’70s,
obscured perhaps by the simultaneous efforts in Civil Rights and ending the Vietnam
War.
Ultimately perhaps, environmentalism is the greatest legacy of the social and
political upheaval of that period. Within a single generation we fundamentally
altered how we perceive the relationship between man and nature. It can almost
be seen as a sudden evolutionary leap that we took as a species, and it’s one
that has never before been documented.
Earth Days is certainly a cautionary tale, but it also illuminates the
historical fact that positive changes in social attitudes, technological possibilities
and political determination can take place very rapidly if the will exists to
make it happen. We were halfway there a generation ago, but then we lost our
way. As we at last begin anew to tackle our many environmental challenges, it’s
vital to know how we arrived at this predicament and what lessons from the past
we can draw upon in facing an uncertain future. This is why I made this film,
and why I made it now.
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