Can the Enviro Movement Be Saved? That's the Hope of the New Film 'Earth Days'

By Kerry Trueman, AlterNet. Posted August 17, 2009.

Earth Days, the new film that opened this weekend from acclaimed documentarian Robert Stone, is being promoted as a history of the environmental movement in the United States. But it's more of a road trip, really: the road less travelled. The road not taken. The road to hell, blazed by grassroot good intentions that got asphalted and AstroTurfed.

AstroTurf once referred to the fake grass brought to us by the clever chemists at Monsanto, but in this era of tea-baggers and birthers and death panelists, it's become shorthand for cynical PR campaigns funded by fat cats posing as watchdogs.

Stone's skillful blend of archival footage and new interviews with the environmental movement's founders documents a movement still in its infancy when an oily alliance of extraction-happy industrialists and the Don't-You-Dare-Ask-Americans-To-Care contingent conspired to smother it in its crib.

The movement survived, but it didn't thrive. Next year marks Earth Day's fortieth birthday. Will it be a milestone, or a millstone? Earth Days depicts the birth of a movement that started with so much promise but ran aground on the shoals of shallow self interest, blithe indifference and callous greed. It's Stone's fervent wish that if enough folks turn out to see Earth Days, we might be able to get this boat floating again.

When Rachel Carson published her seminal Silent Spring in 1962, the chickens came home to roost and discovered that in the mad dash to feather our nests we'd done a fine job of fouling them, too. Carson's watershed work got the ball rolling, but it took the acid-inspired global vision of Stewart Brand, who published the ground-breaking Whole Earth Catalog in 1968, to popularize the notion that we've only got one Earth and we might want to stop stomping on it.

The movement really picked up steam in 1970, when 20 million people turned out across the nation to celebrate the first Earth Day. It was the first time in our history that we began to grapple with the reality that no country, no matter how big or how bold, has infinite resources.

After the energy crisis of the seventies, though, and Jimmy Carter's cardigan-coated, much-maligned but sadly prescient message to turn down the thermostat and chill on the consumption, our collective will to find alternative ways to fuel the American dream ran out of gas. A key turning point in the film -- and our future -- is captured, painfully, by a clip of Ronald Reagan essentially enshrining the squandering of the world's resources as an American birthright.

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Kerry Trueman is the co-founder of EatingLiberally.org. You can follow her on Twitter.