Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [193]
Milagro premiered in the United States in March. It barely covered its costs and suffered the loud disdain of critics like David Denby, who derided its muddled story line about “picturesque Chicanos.” Roger Ebert’s review diagnosed some of the problems. The movie, said Ebert, was a wonderful fable, “but the problem is, some of the people in the story know it’s a fable and others do not. This causes an uncertainty that runs all through the film, making it hard to weigh some scenes against others. There are characters who seem to belong in an angry documentary … and then there are characters who seem to come from a more fanciful time.”
Redford consoled himself in the activism that was ever present but never fully integrated. Ted Wilson had been wrong in his belief that politics would swallow him up. But Redford never let up, staying in touch politically, investigating PACs and keeping a hand in EDF and NRDC initiatives. “It was hard to hang in there politically or spiritually [in the time of Reagan], but it was harder to quit,” he says. “The realities spat in your face. Yes, Reaganomics created a boom. But the poor suffered. After Reagan crushed PATCO [the air traffic controllers’ union], labor rights fell apart. The old industrial infrastructure gave way to the growing service sector, but there was no proper labor protection movement left. There were no safety nets for the poor, for the environment, for anyone. Anyone with a heart watched all this tragedy play out against the backdrop of ballyhoo about the Soviet ‘evil empire,’ and just went crazy. More than a hundred people in the Reagan administration eventually stood trial for corruption. But the media dumbed down to meet the sleaze. I felt the national fault lines were wider than ever, and I wanted to do my bit to bridge them.”
“I knew he would get more involved,” says former senator Bill Bradley, a close friend since his days with the New York Knickerbockers basketball team, “because he was outraged by national policy. Apart from the budget deficit and the racial and poverty bias, there was a terrible acceptance of environmental abuse. As a senator, obviously, it was my job to address this mess. But Bob was every bit as responsive. It got to the point where he said enough is enough. He took off the gloves and got back in the ring.”
The Institute for Resource Management (IRM) was Redford’s instrument of attack. Entirely of his own design, he convened a series of eco-conferences coordinated with NRDC’s Citizen National Enforcement Program. At first Washington and the media shrugged them off. But the 1984 program that became known as the Bering Sea Accord changed that. Redford and his associate Paul Parker brought together representatives of nineteen oil companies, among them Standard Oil, Conoco and Texaco, along with conservation representatives from Alaska, for four sessions over a ten-month period to resolve a twenty-year debate over offshore oil drilling. The conservationists wanted to maintain the world’s richest salmon grounds, which were also home to endangered species of whales, walrus and seals. The oil companies wanted to mine what is regarded as America’s greatest untapped reserve. In the session staged on a boat in Morro Bay in late summer, the energy industry in effect stood down—temporarily—agreeing to conduct further research. Terry Minger, whom Redford had met on the Outlaw Trail ride, now an IRM executive, believed a miracle had been accomplished: “And the achievement was Redford’s. IRM’s function was to come to these conferences as a neutral body, which erred, if it erred, on the side of the environmentalists. Bob had learned from Kaiparowits, and he earned the trust of the industrialists by showing himself to be a rationalist first of all. He accepted that jobs and the economy were of supreme importance. He knew it was counterproductive to insult the other side. So instead he promoted exchange of information, education, understanding.