Robert Stone's "Earth Days" is a surprisingly calm documentary about the history of American ecological activism. But it's good calm, not dead calm.
It's a relief to see a filmmaker use commercials and industrial footage from the 1950s, portraying America as a materialistic wonderland, without adding too much jokey or tendentious spin. (The same goes for Stone's use of PSAs from the 1970s warning of environmental blight.)
Stone's own greatest visual stroke is conveying an epiphany of the planet as a life-unifying sphere during a drug trip in San Francisco - an experience that eventually led Stewart Brand to found and edit the Whole Earth Catalog. This whole movie urges its audience to take a rounded view of its subject, and a long one, too.
In scope, it reaches from the George W. Bush years back to the Depression of the 1930s - Stewart Udall, former secretary of the interior, recalls it as a time when people respected the planet and its goods out of need. Just a few months ago, it might have sounded more persuasive for "sustained development" trailblazer Hunter Lovins to argue, hopefully, for bipartisan solutions to environmental crises. In the current climate, it seems telling for the final credits to reveal that former California Republican congressman Pete McCloskey, a longtime ecological partisan who forged partnerships across House and Senate aisles, became a Democrat in 2007.
But the real thrust of the movie is to jolt its audience out of rigid, categorical thinking. Stone reminds us that this movement united thinkers as different as nature writer Rachel Carson, author of the epochal attack on pesticide use (and pseudo-progress), "Silent Spring," and biologist Paul Ehrlich, whose book "The Population Bomb" sounded the alarm about natural resources overtaxed by human growth rates.
When Denis Hayes organized the first Earth Day in 1970, it brought together everyone from buttoned-up conservationists to love-beaded counter-cultural utopians. The film achieves surprise and sparkle when it uses history to remind us that we're all in this together. My favorite moment comes when astronaut Rusty Schweickart recalls that marine explorer Jacques Cousteau loved the American space program for the jolting perspectives it provided to surface-dwellers.
"Earth Days" conveys the need not just to protect terra firma, but the sky above and the sea below.
MPAA rating: unrated
Running time 1:30
Starring Stewart Brand, Stewart Udall and Paul Ehrlich as themselves.
A Zeitgeist release. Directed by Robert Stone.
