Earth Days Have Found Us

by Carl Frankel, July 27, 2009

Documentary filmmaker Robert Stone has been making films since 1987, when his first effort, Radio Bikini, about the relocation of Bikini islanders for US nuclear testing was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary. Since then, he has built an impressive body of work that examines intriguing aspects of American history and popular culture, such as the homegrown terrorism of the 1960s (2004’s Guerilla: The Taking of Patti Hearst) and the place of conspiracy theories in our culture (2007’s Oswald’s Ghost).

With Stone’s latest effort, Earth Days, the filmmaker has for the first time turned his cinematic eye to the environment. The documentary examines the origins of the environmental movement in the 1960s and ’70s, with a special focus on Earth Day 1970, a watershed event that put environmentalism on the map in earnest. The film, which premiered as the closing night film at this year’s Sundance festival, has been well received: Variety called it “quietly majestic, moving, elegiac, and deeply contemplative.”

Rhinebeck’s Upstate Films will screen Earth Days on August 15, with Stone appearing in person to discuss the film. He won’t have far to travel: He’s been a Rhinecliff resident for the last five years.

I caught up with Stone recently for a conversation about art, the environment, and the future of the planet.

Of all the films you could have made at this point in your career, why this one?
My two small children were the inspiration. With all that’s happened recently, it’s hard to remember that only a few years ago, the environment wasn’t on people’s minds very much. Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth hadn’t come out. Obama wasn’t president. But things were changing rapidly, in no small measure because the science of climate change was becoming more widely accepted. I felt compelled to make a film that dealt with the environmental crisis because where we go from here will determine the type of world my children live in. And it seemed to me that one area that had not been explored enough was how we’d gotten to this point.

A lot of young people are downbeat because they look back, see Bush’s assault on the environment, and feel as if they’re starting from the beginning, in terms of getting things going. This isn’t the case, though. The environmental movement isn’t starting from scratch, it’s making a comeback.