Earth Days - The Movie by Robert Stone
July 20, 2009 by Ambassador of Green
can you remember when everyone in America was not “Going Green”? Visually stunning, vastly entertaining and awe-inspiring, Earth Days looks back to the dawn and development of the modern environmental movement-from its post-war rustlings in the 1950s and the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s incendiary bestseller Silent Spring, to the first wildly successful 1970 Earth Day celebration and the subsequent firestorm of political action. Earth Days’ secret weapon is a one-two punch of personal testimony and rare archival media. The extraordinary stories of the era’s pioneers-among them Former Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall;biologist/Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich; Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand; Apollo Nine astronaut Rusty Schweickart; and renewable energy pioneer Hunter Lovins-are beautifully illustrated with an incredible array of footage from candy-colored Eisenhower-era tableau to classic tear-jerking 1970s antilitterbug PSAs. MUST SEE WEBSITE: www.earthdaysmovie.com
Very cool .. retro - see the trailer by Zeitgeist below:
Directed by acclaimed documentarian Robert Stone (Oswald’s Ghost, Guerrilla: The Takingof Patty Hearst) Earth Days is both a poetic meditation on humanity’s complex relationship with nature and an engaging history of the revolutionary achievements-and missed opportunities-of groundbreaking ecoactivism.
TheCoveMovie 
By JEANNETTE CATSOULIS
A sedate chronicle of the highs and lows of the environmental movement, “Earth Days” is less a rousing call to action than a bittersweet stroll down memory lane.
Assembling nine of the movement’s key players - including the biologist Paul Ehrlich and the former secretary of the interior Stewart Udall - the director, Robert Stone, encourages them to identify their light-bulb moments and motivating forces. The result is a beautifully composed tribute to visionary thinking and politicalingenuity, a timeline of peaks and valleys stretching from
the early initiatives of the 1950s to the legislative successes of the ’70s.
From pesticide regulation to population control (identified by the writer Stephanie Mills as “the
thorniest thistle of all”), each challenge has its champion and each champion his or her fondest memories.
Yet as delightful as it is to learn that the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand, was inspired by an
LSD trip on a San Francisco rooftop, the film’s most powerful emotions are evoked by its perfectly chosen
archival footage. Documenting news media reactions to the first Earth Day (a Communist plot? a new religion?) and the
spraying of DDT over suburban lawns and bicycling children, Earth Days” is at once regretful and optimistic, frustrated and proud. Mr. Stone has shown us the way; now all we need is the will.