• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 854 0

Museum of Natural History, he had recorded a wildlife conservation album, The Language and Music of the Wolves, which became a national best seller for Columbia Records and inspired wide debate about depleted wilderness species. This satisfied him more than much he had done over the last few years. More and more he found himself absorbed by environmental study. He read Rachel Carson’s influential Silent Spring, a clarion call against the earth’s degradation, and former interior secretary Stewart Udall’s The Quiet Crisis, which traced the route from Indian stewardship to the technological rape of the land. It intrigued him that, after the first Earth Day, The New Republic had mocked the concept of eco-activism, yet six months later a full issue was devoted to the subject. Shortly after, in December 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had come into being. Redford interpreted all these movements as signs of a national willingness to assess neglected, critical issues. He was proud of CAN and Lola’s work but he sought something closer to wilderness for his own focus and found it almost immediately, literally in his own backyard.

For months he had been observing the buildup of heavy machinery at the mouth of the Provo Canyon Road. There had long been a plan to expand the two-lane highway into a wider cross-state conduit, which he had spoken out against. Now it appeared to be under way. Redford understood that a widened road would deface the landscape, but he only grasped the full extent of the potential impact when the local chapter of Trout Unlimited asked him to become formally involved. The Provo River, one of the great trout rivers of the West, was under threat. Redford researched the proposed road and discovered the extent of the vested interests: elected officials and transport department executives who owned sand quarries and gravel supply companies. On the group’s behalf, Redford visited Utah governor Calvin Rampton. Redford had been good for business in Utah: he had created many jobs and ensured prominent western premieres of Butch Cassidy and Downhill Racer at Provo and Orem. But Rampton gave him the brush-off. “I sat and listened to all the old chestnuts about due process,” says Redford. “What he meant was the vested interests would continue to control the process. I suddenly saw that this was the ancient issue, the old-style abuse of Indian lands all over. What I was dealing with, I quickly learned, was the tip of the iceberg in the West. In the preceding decade, no fewer than six major power plants had been sited in the Four Corners. No one in New York or L.A. minded much. But they were causing the kind of doomsday pollution scenario Rachel Carson prophesied. I decided there and then it was time to get off my ass and do something, even if it meant making an enemy of Rampton.”

Redford helped combine the three local activist groups into one. Then he organized groups of sixth-grade and junior high school students to form a human chain march on the governor’s mansion. “It achieved no more than a holding action on the highway dispute,” says Redford, “but it got people talking in an enlightened way.” Lola advised her husband that the war might best be fought on several fronts. CAN was making itself known in Washington and making friends like Dick Ayres, who was raising funds for the new legal regulatory watchdog, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Redford followed this trail and introduced himself to a number of key movers and shakers with conservationist leanings, among them Wayne Owens, the administrative secretary to the progressive Democratic senator from Utah, Frank Moss, who himself had formulated an environmental platform for a run at Congress. These new relationships, says Redford, fed an urge to engage with society in ways other than moviemaking.

“He opened up another part-time career,” said Sydney Pollack. “I used to say to him, ‘Bob, this is specialized work; this will drain your energies.’ But he just had to do it. It was a compulsion connected to the landscape.” Michael Ritchie, who