Earth Days (Sunday, August 16, 2009) (114)

This is a documentary about the history of the environmental movement from the early 1960s until the mid-1980s. The structure is rather interesting, following nine people who all had a hand in the movement from a organizational, scientific or political side. Each person's work is described and it is show how what one did affected the others.

The beginning of the film shows how with the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962, people began to become aware that air and land can be hurt by pesticides and chemicals use in large-scale agribusiness and how dumping chemical waste in rivers hurts ecosystems and drinking water. From there, it shows how there was a steady growth in environmental movement up to Paul Ehrlich's 1968 book Population Bomb about how overpopulation will also end up straining the earth's resources and food supply.


These two seminal books helped to lead young radicals and some main-stream politicians to being to fight for environmental protection. In 1970 the first Earth Day was organized across the United States and was a massive success.

The politics of the time are also shown very clearly with Kennedy raising the issue, Nixon ultimately passing some of the most important legislation (the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species List, the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency) and Reagan effectively ending some of the most important regulations.

All in all, this is a very sharp, good looking movie. The director Robert Stone uses footage of 1950s and 1960s advertising and mundane-ness very well to give the atmosphere (so to speak) that he's looking for. It's very clear that the 1950s was all about commercial and economic growth and richness and the country paid for it environmentally by the 1960s. There is also a lot of great little factoids about history - such as how on Thanksgiving day 1966, some 400 people died in New York City due to terrible air quality or that the isotope Strontium 90 didn't exist on the planet before the nuclear age, but how now every living thing (plant and animal) contains trace evidence of this. This is a very interesting and nice-looking movie.

Stars: 2.5 of 4