Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [151]
John Adams and the NRDC continued to deploy legal arguments to force strong new provisions in a revised Clean Water Act, and in this, at least, there was success. Adams was very appreciative of Carter’s and Andrus’s support in this effort—but mostly of Redford’s. “He was not properly credited with that achievement,” says Adams. “Those revisions got voted through largely because of Bob’s awareness campaign. He was here, there and everywhere at that time, writing letters to congressmen, pillorying people in business, taking meetings with Andrus, popping up on radio spots all over the nation, week after week.” Adams calculates that Redford alone was responsible for increasing NRDC membership by a hundred thousand. “He became the face of clean air, but he was much more than that. Bob was an ideas generator, and though Andrus—and ultimately Carter—were frustrated in office by the events in the Middle East overtaking them, they always had Bob in their sight as a reformer. They always had room for him.”
In an effort to bolster CAN, Redford launched another awareness program with the Environmental Defense Fund, this time to publicize cancer-causing agents in pervasive, nationwide pollution. He set up a spin-off, Citizens Action Now, a variation of Consumer Action Now, structured like the Business Roundtable, which raised $50 million a year to lobby for solar, geothermal and other alternative energy sources. NRDC did the heavy lifting, then Redford persuaded Ted Ashley at Warners to become involved. “This was two or three years before the nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island,” says Redford, “so we had no bad publicity from the energy sector working in our favor. But what it boiled down to was profile. We knew the Business Roundtable was powerful, but we also knew we could match their profile in the media. They were committed to more drilling, more strip mining, more nuclear excess. We were pledged to reduce all of it.”
Warners arranged sixteen special premieres across the country to raise money for this “Hollywood CAN,” and Redford flew to Nashville to drum up support from performers like Willie Nelson, Charlie Daniels, Waylon Jennings and Harry Chapin. An ambitious series of benefit concerts was planned, but ran out of steam after the premiere event with Daniels. In the end, says Redford, Hollywood CAN went the way of Carter’s energy policy. “We were too uncoordinated, just like Carter’s camp. We naïvely believed activists of the same stripe fight together. They don’t. Ralph Nader is a great guy, but his first interest is Ralph Nader. We partnered with his Congress Watch on the basis of splitting the monies fifty-fifty. It’s sad to admit that bureaucracy—including our own admin-istrative slowness—bogged it all down.” A decade later, such global ini-tiatives as Bob Geldof’s Live Aid would prove the curative value of high-profile music fund-raisers. Hollywood CAN, alas, raised little and lasted less than a year.
What Redford had achieved in a year of hunkering down with Andrus was a personal understanding of diplomacy. “There was no use in throwing stones. I began to understand that the sustainable development issue was a