Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [149]
“Of course there was economic fallout,” says Dick Ayres, working with the NRDC. “But you have to measure it contextually. What do you do? Allow one generation to thrive at the cost of a loss to all future generations? The truth was, Cal Edison planned an ‘oil by wire’ monster that would have ruined the Grand Staircase–Escalante [national monument area] forever. That was an unacceptable loss, and Bob reversed it.” Still, Redford felt empathy for those disappointed by the lost immediate financial advantages of Cal Edison investment: “There’s no question that low-income folk suffered. But a quick fix that damaged our heritage was not the answer. As I saw it—and Ted, Stewart and many others—this was a one-issue case. We were certainly not dumping on Utahans. There were battles to be fought in Utah and elsewhere for fair educational opportunities, for jobs, for Indian rights, for species protection. We understood this. But this was about conservation. And one important thing emerged from all the furor about Kaiparowits: plain and simple, people understood very little about environmental threat.”
It was the greatest irony that the Nixon administration could claim environmental achievements—it saw in the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (pollution control) and the passage of the Environmental Quality Policy Act (monitoring impact statements), the National Air Quality Standards Act (monitoring auto emissions), the Resource Recovery Act (controlling recycling) and the Water Pollution Act. But Nixon certainly never deserved all the credit. Some of those achievements were the result of work by eco-activists in Congress and a handful of lobbyists like Nader and the scientist Barry Commoner. The Water Pollution Act, for example, survived Nixon’s veto, and the first Clean Air Act in 1970, championed by Senator Edmund Muskie, only won Nixon’s support as a political maneuver to counteract Muskie’s rising popularity as a Democratic presidential candidate. Probing this deeper understanding of environmental politics horrified Redford. In 1970 Americans constituted less than 6 percent of the world’s population but used 40 percent of the earth’s resources while producing 50 percent of global pollution emissions. Cheap energy, almost half of which was imported oil, powered the rapid economic growth, but when OPEC embargoed oil in 1973 and sent prices soaring, the advocates of unrestricted domestic development for self-sufficiency—of massive strip mining, offshore oil drilling and relaxation of environmental regulations—took center stage. After Earth Day in 1969, the work of Barry Commoner and the NRDC dented public apathy by creating an awareness of imminent irreversible ecological damage and inspiring pockets of activism akin to the civil rights and antiwar movements of the sixties. But the sustainable development lobby was inconsistent at best and in danger of being lost under the economic exigencies of successive administrations dealing with recession and inflation.
“Education was the answer,” says Dick Ayres. “But people have an extraordinary difficulty with the word ‘education.’ Too often it implies self-discipline or personal reform, and there’s a natural resistance to such things.” Redford believes, “The message was pure. We are in stewardship of the earth. We have a moral obligation. We accomplished something morally important at Kaiparowits and I had hoped it would advance a trend. I believed the country was ready