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By Root 878 0

1987 a minisummit in the form of a teleconference initiated by Roald Sagdeev of the Russian Space Research Institute, together with Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart and Walter Orr Roberts, the founder of the Colorado-based National Center for Atmospheric Research, opened the door for a new channel of bilateral exchange, which created an opportunity for Sundance. “To my surprise,” says Redford, “the cooperation was immediate. This was the eve of the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Gorbachev was in power, but we had no way then of knowing how compliant he would be. We knew whispers about Russian democracy in the making, but that was all. Reagan still viewed the Soviets as the evil empire. But Gorbachev was lowering the drawbridge. It was he who facilitated ease of passage for us. Once we had the nod, the walls came down.”

Redford was invited to cochair a workshop on global warming with the academy, which he did en route to Cannes for the festival showing of Milagro. Terry Minger, accompanying him, was astonished by the Soviets’ openness. “It wasn’t a hard sell at all,” said Minger. “There was a great willingness to reverse the damage of uskorenie. We found friends there.” During the Moscow workshop an agreement was signed for Sundance to host the first major climate change summit, christened Greenhouse Glasnost, the following summer. The speed of events, from perestroika to the Sundance symposium, said Minger, was extraordinary.

Back in New York, Redford employed what NRDC founding director John Adams calls “that old riverboat charisma” to draw together luminaries from all the relevant political, industrial and scientific fields for the symposium. Sagdeev, Schweickart and Roberts, the pioneers, were joined by Cecil Andrus, Howard Allen, astronomer Carl Sagan, U.S.S.R. consul general Valentin Kamenev, U.N. World Federation president Maurice Strong, Frederic Krupp and Michael Oppenheimer of the EDF and Richard Morgenstern of the EPA. Also among the seventy-member discussion panel were Susan Eisenhower, Bill Bradley, Stewart Udall, Rhode Island congresswoman Claudine Schneider and Adams. “It was an amazing feat of diplomacy,” says Adams, “in which Bob applied every trick of his iconography and every social and political skill to bring so many different people to the same table. He had boundless energy and marvelous ideas. I still shake my head in admiration at the memory of Carl Sagan strolling in the woods with Garry Trudeau and a gaggle of Soviet scientists and arguing world survival. What a rainbow of talents, and exactly the right cross section of power brokers to redress the situation.”

The coordination of the event absorbed three months of Sundance time, nudging aside film labs and tourist hikes. But the summit itself, says Bill Bradley, proved “the sort of democratic powerhouse that D.C. would be jealous of, probably was.” There were lectures, debates, science shows, one-on-one lunches and suppers with translators running late into the nights. Out of it all came an open letter to Gorbachev—now, seemingly overnight, the leader of a neodemocracy—and George H. W. Bush, Reagan’s successor as president. The heart of the letter was an appeal to both nations to formulate a shared global warming policy: “The U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. are the two largest producers of greenhouse gases. The U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. are also the two principal sources of the world’s scientific knowledge which can be employed to restrain emissions.” Both nations were asked to commit to “(1) the promotion of nonpolluting technologies, (2) the phasing out of chlorofluorocarbon emissions before 2000, (3) the reduction of worldwide deforestation, and (4) the initiation of a series of joint national educational programs.”

The Sundance symposium foreshadowed the premier U.N. Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992. Major participants like Bradley and Adams imagined a breakthrough. “After all,” says Bradley, “we as a community had time to look at the research and check the statistics. We had the evidence by then of how the planet was suffering.