Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [194]
At the following Canyon de Chelly conference, representatives of the Navajo Nation and the energy companies argued the development of the Southwest. Once again, the combatants were at first mutually unsympathetic. Redford took center stage, said Minger, doubly passionate because of his kinship with Native Americans. In his opening speech he pleaded for “balance in the inevitable land exploitation of a development-orientated society.” Peterson Zah, the Navajo chairman and an IRM board member, responded with an angry recital of the damage already done: there were fifty million acres of Indian land in America; in the West, most were already scarred, with no less than three major generating stations and a dozen coal mines in the Canyon de Chelly reservation alone. “Labor benefits apart,” said Zah, “there is a dilemma for us Indians if we continue to think this way about ourselves.” According to Navajo legend, said Zah, humanity rose from the land and air around it: “Their skin from the red earth, their teeth from the white corn, their hair from the black thundercloud.” Redford found Zah’s speech “emotionally moving and intellectually motivating.” Some weeks before, he’d met Wallace Stegner, his favorite western author, at an Ansel Adams exhibition in San Francisco. Stegner and Adams and Zah were calling attention to the same thing: that our nature, and our destiny, are defined by the environment that bred us and how we maintain it. “Occupying the planet seemed to me to be about stewardship,” says Redford. “More and more I felt education was the tool to bring a workable peace to the rival factions. And roundtable talk in a depoliticized atmosphere was the place to start.”
The notion for a major global warming summit to crown the IRM’s work came in November 1987, during the last phase of making Milagro, while Redford was attending the Denver Symposium on Clean Air. Redford was riveted by a slide show about the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere presented by John Firor of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The point was made that global warming was second only to nuclear holocaust as an imminent annihilatory threat. “I hadn’t registered the phrase ‘greenhouse effect’ before,” says Redford. “It suddenly struck me that no one was getting this message. The planet was in trouble, and we were arguing Republican versus Democratic policies. Someone needed to say, ‘Hey, pay attention!’ ” Minger, newly elected president of the IRM, sat with Redford at the symposium. “He was keen to raise our international profile,” said Minger. “Human survival seemed a good place to start.”
Redford had recently accepted an invitation from the Moscow U.S. Information Agency for a movie retrospective to be hosted by the Tashkent Film Festival. In advance of the trip he took the opportunity to write to the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences in his role as IRM chairman, requesting an international conference on environmental change. Global warming was, of course, of concern for some scientists in Moscow. The national policy of uskorenie, or accelerated industrialization, paralleled America’s thirst for corporate mergers and industrial expansion through the eighties and created the same kinds of pollution problems. Since the days of Benjamin Franklin, the Russian Academy of Sciences had exchanged information with American scientists, but the cold war put an end to that. Still, for more than twenty years, a sector of the Soviet scientific community had continued to research pollutants. In 1968 the Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov appealed for a “law of geohygiene” to save the planet from “the poison of industrial pollutants produced in the United States and the U.S.S.R.” Early in