1996 Robert Redford and Annette Gellert at the San Francisco Public Library

To give you an update on Robert Redford's arrival, which is who, and it is he that we are waiting for. His plane was late and he's expected to get here just about 4 15 or 4 20. So wanted to keep you posted. We're going to wait for him to get here before we begin. Thank you for your patience. We're very pleased that he has offered such generous support to the Stegner Center. Please welcome Robert Redford. Thank you. I'd like to apologize for any delays that may have come up for anybody. I had a hard time getting out of Los Angeles. They wouldn't let us out. Speaking about Los Angeles, let's talk about San Francisco. My own involvement in environmental matters goes back about 25 years. It's a comfortable feeling that I have being here in the area where I received so much support and companionship in early years when there weren't many people out there trying to raise a voice for the people in general against kind of Goliath mentality about industry and pollution and so forth. It's a comfortable feeling to be here and the obvious development and growth of this center is clearly an important thing. I can't think of a better place for it to be housed than in a place where the leadership for the environment really found its birth. I'm quite honored to be a part of that. On the issue of why we're here, I'm here really essentially for two reasons. One is the film that you're going to see tonight and the mission of this center and the man who really inspired it and my own support of the filmmaker and honoring his dedication and commitment to his subject. It just happened to coincide with the subject that I admired greatly and so I hope that the film tonight is something my involvement with it, my participation in it, is something I'm very proud of and I don't hold it in any smaller position than the major films that I've made in my career. I think it's equally important. So I hope you'll find the experience satisfying and as to the man, the other point was well if there's anything that I can do that helps bring this man's voice to a wider audience then it's well worth it. That coupled with the center itself and what I think it's going to do and how important I think it is, the resources, the services, the nurturing of unfortunately still too uninformed citizenry as to what their rights, their legacy is and so on. So those are the two reasons why I'm here. As far as the man is concerned, the film I think will speak quite well to that but I think what he stood for as a voice of truth and the history of the West didn't always go hand-in-hand because you had myth somewhere came in there and took on a big role and I think he was wonderful in maintaining the beauty and the magic of the West while dispelling the myth that might take us off track and give us bad information about what this place really is. So his voice I think we're here, we're honoring tonight and in addition to that what he inspired in others, activism among artists and he literally the power of his art got governments to do the right things in terms of the environment. I'm talking about the wilderness letter that led to what it led to which is something I think we just saw in the creation of the monument in southern Utah. So doing that and also the legions of people out there that he in his support he gave a voice to. So it's really about his voice representing what I like to believe is our voice representing our interests with nature and the environment all done through art. Those are the reasons I'm here and I'm proud to be here. Thank you. I also would like to point out that the wilderness part of the wilderness letter is on that glass there as you enter the center and there is some information you might want to take a look at about the new monument in Utah and in fact Dave Livermore who works with the Nature Conservancy in Utah is here tonight as well and I'm really pleased because one of the things this is really what interdependence and interconnection is about and we need to be thinking about it both in terms of how we work with each other as well as ecological issues. The Fred Gellert Family Foundation has demonstrated a significant commitment to funding environmental issues and exploring innovative approaches to ecological sustainability and that Gellert the co-chair will explain why. Well the main reason is because of my children because like many of you I'm a parent who loves and cares about my children. In our children's lifetime twice the number of people will occupy the planet than live on it today putting impossible demands on limited resources. We already can measure the destruction of topsoil, wetlands, forests, fisheries, clean air and clean water. The long-term quality of our children and their children is in question unless we as a society change our behavior. This change can only be made if we're informed enough as voters to demand it from our elected officials. The electorate reaches consensus through public hearings and debates which is the reason for the debates here. Debate is necessary to hold up new ideas for public review so that many old ideas which are manipulated and perpetuated by special interests can be laid aside. For instance we had 40 years before DDT was banned and tobacco was regulated because of the junk science that was dominated by funding sources that kept saying that they weren't harmful to our health. Up until now we've only been working on the problem piecemeal on parts of the problem at a time instead of working on the problem as a whole. There are many environmental groups working on different facets of resource management, pollution prevention and policy change without any overriding vision for where we need to be in 60 years. For instance buying land preserves which is where most of the donated money for environment goes does not address the problem of chemical toxins in our aquifers. Only comprehensive policy change can do that. Government is also engaged in environmental crisis management and stifling micromanagement without a comprehensive policy which suits special interests who want to keep things the way they are. Other countries provide positive models like Holland and New Zealand who pull together behind a comprehensive national policy program committed to recover environmental quality within one generation. Now in Holland 10 percent of the prime agricultural land which was originally wrested from the sea for farmland has been flooded to provide wetlands so that the wildlife can come back. That could never have happened if it had been an isolated incidence of one policy, one issue. It has to be wrapped up in a comprehensive change. There were 23 policy changes in one session of parliament that made that able to happen. Our nation pulled together in 1970 when there was the energy crisis and caused major conservation programs to be developed. So we can do it here. Business in some instances has come out ahead of environmentalists and in front of, definitely in front of government as far as going beyond regulations. Some of those businesses are Hewlett Packard, 3M, Patagonia, Bank of America. The environmental movement needs to awaken to its full potential rather than dwell in the past. It's lagging behind. The Stegner Center debates can help break through the institutional ossification that afflicts all large institutions including environmental organizations and charitable foundations. Open discourse can help create a more powerful environmental community that involves all of society in breaking the strangle hold. Special subsidized interest has on the nation's natural resources. We can do something. Each one of us as individuals, family members, community members can make a difference. We just have to decide to start. Understanding the issues is the way to start and this is the place. Thank you. Before we take questions there's a few other people that I would like to point out to. Ken Dowland who is the wonderful architect of this library. Sherry Thomas who runs the library foundation and Doug Colter who is president of the library foundation. Thank you all for coming. Now we could take some questions if Annette and Bob are willing. Do you have a question? I can't ask about the boots. I was going to ask you when the horse whisperer was going to come. When I make it. We haven't started yet. We start this morning. Are there no questions? If not. I've been reading about Geneva Steel in Utah. I'm aware of Geneva Steel. Companies to oppose the EPA increase in air quality restrictions. They particularly remarkable because they had shut down for two years and in that period of time everybody's health improved. The lungs don't smoke and all of a sudden lung problems are down and really started up again. No one was shot up in those communities. I would describe them as a major upheaval starting. I wasn't aware of the upheaval. It will usually boil down to health and money as it usually does. Geneva Steel, I was very involved in the 70s when I was doing a lot of work in the clean air. I was involved because I suspected that the particulates or whatever synergism was occurring in the air with all the particulates was really bad because you had not only the growth of automobiles with the new I-15 freeway that was coming through there and the intersects of 80, 70, and so on. There was dumping a lot of new and sudden pollution in the valley, which does trap air, but also you had what was coming off of Geneva Steel, which was uncontrolled and unchecked for all of its lifetime. The combination of those two, I worked with some other people to draw attention to try to get a study done to what exactly was the health hazard no one wanted to hear about. The community didn't want to hear about it because the plant was effectively using the jobs versus the environment issue, which carried a lot of weight through the years until it got demythified. Do you want to put 5,000 people in this community out of work before we have a study? So no one wanted to hear about it, and they were putting their head in the sand. And then finally, slowly, I think because of pressure coming on around Utah from other states and other examples and other places, the pressure was finally so great because of the huge community of children, it finally moved them. But I don't ever believe it was very strong. If this is coming back again, I suspect it's because they now know enough. They now know what we suspected 20 years ago, which is that the health is affected in that valley, and they're going to do something about it. But you have the industrial complex still in existence there. Unfortunately for Utah, what helped our cause there was the tremendous migration of software from Silicon Valley and places like that into the Utah Valley. Otherwise, it would still be hopeless. So that's mitigated against environmental... Thank you very much. And I... Yeah, Peggy. I'm not sure you're the right person to answer this when we meet, but about its distribution, both in this country and other countries. Have you met Steve Fisher? No. Well, you should meet Steve Fisher because he's the man. Steve, do you want to come up here? Steve can speak on his behalf. I can tell you a little bit of ours. Step is the fundraising effort. There's been a series of fundraising efforts to get as wide a distribution to the film as possible, one of them being the possibility of the Sundance Cable Channel for independent film. But beyond that, getting it on PBS, getting as much, you know, hopefully theatrical. It was made on tape and we were trying to get the transfer to film so we could get theatrical distribution. And it's a question of really taking it out into situations like this and getting enough word on it. The film stands, I think, well on its own. I'm certainly proud of it. He has every reason to be proud of it. But there's a movement now to get it as wide a distribution as possible, and I think there's... Yeah. After working for six or seven years on these films, we never know where they're going to go, but we just got word last week that national PBS is going to pick it up. So it will be broadcast throughout the United States. You know, I wonder, I was thinking, I was listening to you all talk, and I was thinking about what he would think. I think about the politics, because he's hovering all around this event. I'm wondering what he would have made out of the machinations of political posturing that goes on today. The posturing, the positioning, the spinning, all this stuff where people try to use the environment in some way to feather their cap. From a man whose strength really came from being simple and straight and eloquent at the same time, and how all these issues he cares so deeply about, how he would feel watching them kicked around, manipulated, distorted, to suit some political aim. I would think that would be fairly depressing. He would understand it, though. Yeah, he would understand it. One more question, although also these people sort of lurking in the back that I didn't see, Steve Fisher and Kathy Helmick, who also is one of the stellar librarians here at the library. Thanks, Kathy. So this question here is the last one. How do we, do you have any suggestions for helping them learn how to do theater? Well, I do, yeah. I mean, we're doing a lot ourselves. You know, at Sundance, we have a children's theater. There's a whole section of that theater program of development that has to do with the environment put in children's book terms. I would, I can't speak for the co-chairs here, but I would suspect that the center is going to go a long way doing that, with the programs that it's going to come up with, in addition to the debates that it's going to be having a series, which I think is great. And the attention that will come from that, and the providing the resources and the services it's going to provide them, I'm just assuming that they will, as the thing gets going, come up with programs that can reach out past that into the community, and particularly young people, because that's where the future is. That's where the education has to go. Well, the center won't do any good if it just stays here. It has to go out into the community and get education and help. Absolutely. But I think also that if parents themselves are educated on the issue, which is what I was mentioning, that they should be teaching their children too. It's up to parents to teach their children to be good environmentalists. You see, it's not going to, I mean, clearly, I'm not being abstract when I say it's not going to come from the top. I mean, it's so obvious it's not going to come from the top, that it has to come from the grassroots. And it is, and all the good work in the environment for the last 25 years has, in fact, come from the grassroots organizations, particularly here in northern California. So I was actually hoping that the children would teach their parents. I have a question that's pretty close to her. It has to do with urbanization and also building power plants in low-income urban areas. And of course, the lure is, well, there's low income in this area, and by building a power plant, it creates jobs. And we just had a situation here in San Francisco about very similar to this, where there's two power plants out in the Bayview-Hundred Point area, and they wanted to build another giant one. And it was basically a grassroots uprising against it. And right now, it seems to be pretty much stalemated. But there are powerful people still trying to push that through. Oh yeah, they won't give up. They have bureaucracy in their side, they have money in their side, and those are two tough things to fight, you know. I think that that issue, again, it's the jobs versus the environment. And we're relating to your question on educating the young. Education can just work its way through. It's almost like grass going through cement cracks, but it does come through. It can dispel some of the mythology around this issue of jobs versus the environment, like we have to have a power plant in order to eat. Well, let's look at what the real cost of a power plant is. We just went through this in southern Utah with the Grand Staircase, which is kind of a weird name, of the monument. They're trying to dispel a lot of the arguments the opposition was using, which were totally bogus, about education for children, jobs, bread on people's plates. Rather than looking at the full cost of the plant, health-wise, economically, environmentally, whatnot, we can break through that information and the public gets it. I have faith in them, they'll do their own thing. Well, I've got to confess to be very knowledgeable on this. My editor sent me here because I write on the entertainment industry, but the thing is that they're doing all these surveys, and I was talking with one of the people who live in that community, and she was saying that when she puts her sheets out, that they come back almost black. Well, not black, but dark. Now, I don't think you need a whole bunch of scientists going out there doing a whole bunch of tests to know that if someone puts their sheets out, the environment's pretty bad if they get, you know, it's all full of crud when they pull it in. I would get a washing machine. This is one of the issues that I hope will be part of the debate when we start talking about local economies versus global economies, and the essential need for control at the local level over economic decisions. And certainly, the siting of a power plant and the health consequences of that power plant become local economic issues, and the community has the right to decide whether that's the kind of basis they want for the economy of their neighborhood. And in most cases, the economic benefits of such a facility don't inure to the people in that neighborhood either. So it's a critical issue. All of the so-called environmental justice issues are very critical, which I've worked in all my life, is that we have atomized the issues, and we need to show exactly how the dots are connected, how all of these choices, like the siting of a power plant, affects the local economy, affects the local neighborhood, and affects the global economy. Thank you so much for coming. I, I. I have one thing. Oh, great. This is, we make this last piece of the ceremony here, where a lot of things come together. Stegner, this group, myself, and some other people who can't be here today. But recently, some of, some people like to think there was a victory. It may be a pyrrhic victory, but there was a victory in southern Utah around the, the lands in southern Utah being protected by this monument. I think a lot of it had to do with the contents of this book, which has a lot to do with Wallace Stegner and his early warnings. And a very small grassroots group that had little to no support, was fighting a huge, huge beam-off in the big power complex, and the political complex, which was tied to the power complex. Anyway, it, the, the victory of that monument, I think is, is very well documented photographic, photographically, in this book. I wrote, I wrote the foreword for it, so it's a little self-serving. But I would like to present that to this group here, in appreciation for what you've done. Thank you. Thanks for coming. Come back and read the books here at the Stegner Center.