Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [150]
In the run-up to the election Redford dedicated himself to study. He had aligned with the Utah Native American Consortium and dedicated a slice of his time to two PBS documentaries, The New Indians and The Wolf Equation, which were further ecological wake-up calls. All this work concentrated him on the battleground of wilderness preservation. In Ford’s last days in office, Congress had ordered the Bureau of Land Management to survey all roadless areas to establish new wilderness designations in the Federal Lands Policy Management Act, an extension of the 1964 Wilderness Act. Redford saw this as a golden opportunity to widen debate about the environment. Addressing the use of land was critical because of the recent movement of the population. Over the last fifteen years, Americans had started migrating en masse to the Sun Belt of the South and southwestern states, where populations had doubled since 1960. Arizona, his next-door neighbor, had shown a population growth of 25 percent in five years. “Clearly resources were already strained, and the situation would worsen,” he felt. “I thought this was a marvelous thumbnail to bring to the attention of the next administration to show how quickly we were losing ground to civilization changes and consequent mismanagement of what we had.” Along with John Adams and NRDC, which was immersed in clean air initiatives, Redford prepared documentation to land on the next president’s desk.
During the primaries, Carter summoned a number of study groups to his headquarters in Plains, Georgia. Redford visited, representing the Hollywood PAC contingent, with his land use documentation. “I was under no misapprehension of what he was looking for,” says Redford. “It was power alliances. I liked his plain talking. He was interested in the same thing FDR was interested in: the voice of the common man.” Redford, though, had learned his lessons from Joan Claybrook. In the final analysis, Carter was as unfocused on the issues that seemed critical—energy and the environment—as the Republicans before him. But Redford was not dissuaded. “I thought, He’s looking for the Hollywood endorsement from me. So I’ll look for something from him. I’ll play by the rules of the game.”
Two years before, the governor of Idaho, Cecil Andrus, a renowned environmentalist, had written a fan letter to Redford, inviting him to bring film business to the state. In his research Redford had discovered that Andrus had made conservation his main concern in Idaho, a state as fundamentally conservative as Utah. Like Redford, Andrus had tackled a major power plant—Pioneer, near Boise—and blocked strip mining in the White Cloud Mountains. A friendship developed and Andrus became, says Redford, part of his “education team.” Now Redford decided to employ Andrus as a bargaining tool. Without guilt, he pressured Carter into considering Andrus for the job of secretary of the interior. “I don’t think Carter had anyone in sight, but I knew Cecil’s values, I knew we were both motivated by Earth Day concerns and I knew he would be a big asset for the country if Carter continued to be under pressure with rising oil prices and the moves to increase our own oil production.”
When Carter was elected, Andrus got the Interior job. Joan Claybrook, too, took a post in the new administration. Redford thought the appointments were critical, since Carter “had no energy or environment policy to begin with.” The overarching national energy crisis focused everyone. Nixon and Ford administration policy had been to counter oil price hikes by extending leases for drilling along the southeastern coast. Carter wanted retrenchment, initially with the emphasis on limiting leases. Andrus proved hugely influential, and his impact on the new policy was evident by April 1977 when, in a television speech, Carter cited the resolution