Movie Review: Earth Days
April 22 is Earth Day, as it has been every year since a bunch of Harvard graduates organised a grass roots teach-in on the environment in 1970. The history of Earth Day is the subject of the closing film at the second Projecting Change Film Festival, entitled straightforwardly Earth Days. The film fest, which saw 2,200 attendees last year, could itself easily be titled “Earth Days” when you consider the strong environmental focus of its line-up.
Earth Days (www.earthdaysmovie.com) is a well-crafted documentary that, through interviews with key participants in the green movement, taps a rich vein of optimism and hope while acknowledging that an awful lot of damage has been inflicted on our fragile planet.
The story of Earth Day and the development of the environmental movement are closely intertwined: writer-director Robert Stone's enjoyable film suggests that you can pinpoint the start of the modern environmental movement to the first Earth Day in 1970. People like Rachel Carson with her pesticides expose Silent Spring, published in 1962, created a new sensitivity toward the environment, but it wasn't until millions took to the streets across the U.S. on that first Earth Day that people realised that they were linked by a common concern. A political force had been born. Nixon – not remembered for his green credentials – created the Environmental Protection Agency to monitor pollutants in the same year.
Stone's choice of nine interviewees reflects his interest in the political development of environmentalism in the U.S. over the years with inside stories from original Earth Day organiser Denis Hayes, early environmental author and former Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, and eco-conscious Republican congressman Pete McCloskey. There's a sense of achievement mixed with amusement and regret, but perhaps the most poignant moments are when the interviewees talk about their memories of life before land started being gobbled up by post-war development.
Stone reels off copious amounts of archive footage, particularly of Fifties utopian visions of the future, to put us in the mindset back then and contrasts it effectively with the contrarian ecological warnings of authors Paul Ehrlich and Dennis Meadows in The Population Bomb and Limits to Growth, and Earth Times editor Stephanie Mills, who chose not to have a child for environmental reasons. They make a good point that their predictions of ecological collapse due to exponential population growth were not necessarily wrong, we just put them off for a while.
The BBC Wildlife series Earth has been re-edited into a feature length movie for theatrical release. Expect nothing short of stunning imagery of the natural world, although sanitised of its bloodier aspects for family viewing. Earth comes out on, you guessed it, Earth Day.
The Projecting Change Film Festival takes place 2-5 April, Fifth Avenue cinema, www.projectingchange.ca