American Experience: Earth Days

Every day is Earth Day -- A timely bit of history, that shows how change can happen, without being preachy
Earth Days, by celebrated documentary filmmaker Robert Stone, begins with a powerful montage of United States presidents, beginning with John F. Kennedy, proclaiming the urgency of the mission to clean up our air and address our dependency on dwindling energy sources. Our future as a nation depended on it.

Of course, as we know, the urgency has not diminished (especially in the wake of the recent oil spill disaster) but the clarity of the vision has. This is signaled in the film as the final president in the series, George W. Bush, expressed nothing more than the need to reduce our dependency on foreign sources of oil. Even Ronald Reagan spoke with much greater force on the subject than that. In part, as this film shows, the clarity of the mission diminished as the clarity of our air increased. It was the success of early environmental pioneers like JFK's Secretary of the Interior, Stewart Udall and California Congressman Pete McCloskey, in the face of very obvious...

Getting Back to Basics
I remember when I was in grade school we would do a special project on Earth Day, or plant a tree, or something symbolic like that - but after that bell rang, I didn't have a clue what Earth Day was. And I was perfectly content to keep it that way. This held true until I received the preview from WGBH. My immediate thought upon looking at the cover was, "Earth Day...this will be fun", but I was so wrong. I learned SO much from this episode. In school we spent very little time learning about the 60's-80's - we would highlight some stuff about the presidents and then move on. This episode taught me more than my 4 years of high school did about this time period.

The very beginning and the very ending of a movie or tv show can really make it or break it - and this one definitely did it for me. The opening of the episode showed clips from every president since Kennedy making speeches about Earth Day. I found this so interesting because I hadn't seen or heard half of them make...

Superabundance
Earth Days is a comprehensive history of the evolution of the environmental movement in America, told from the point of view of nine individuals who participated in the early stages and the inception of an annual Earth Day (1970). The documentary opens with compelling films, many taken from early TV commercials and news stories, illustrating how Americans became enamored with the automobile and with conspicuous consumption, the two forces that heavily contributed to the global environmental and energy crises. Former Interior Secretary Stewart Udall describes the uphill political struggle to convince presidents, congress, economists, and businessmen of the need to become more cognizant of the heavy toll taken by ordinary business beliefs and practices. Astronaut Rusty Schweickart describes the impact of the space program in building the understanding of humanity's dependence upon a very beautiful but very damaged planet. Others, including Earth Day organizer Denis Hayes and...

Click to Editorial Reviews