Overview:

It’s the largest movement the world has ever seen, and maybe the most important – in terms of what’s at stake. Yet it’s not easy being green. Environmentalists have been reviled as much as revered, for being killjoys and Cassandras.  Every battle begins as a lost cause and even the victories have to be fought for again and again. Still, environmentalism is one of the great social innovations of the twentieth century, and one of the keys to the twenty-first. It has arisen at a key juncture in history, when humans have come to rival nature as a power determining the fate of the earth.

A Fierce Green Fire tells stories of environmental activism – people trying to save the planet, their homes, their lives, the future. Our aim is to create the first big-picture overview of environmentalism.  The film spans five decades and brings together all the aspects of the movement.

A Fierce Green Fire unfolds in five acts, each with a key story and compelling character:

• David Brower and the Sierra Club’s battle to halt dams in the Grand Canyon
• Lois Gibbs and the Love Canal residents’ struggle against toxic chemicals
• Paul Watson and Greenpeace’s campaigns to save whales and baby harp seals
• Chico Mendes and the rubbertappers’ fight to save the Amazon rainforest
• Al Gore and the collective effort to address issues of climate change

Each act also sketches the broader picture of an era:

• the ‘60s conservation movement that focused on saving wildness
• a new environmental movement that arose in the ‘70s around pollution
• alternative and radical strands, the ecology wing of the movement, through the ‘80s
• the rise of global issues like resources and biodiversity loss, from the ‘80s into the ‘90s
• climate change and sustainability as the unifying issues through the last two decades

Everybody knows how important environmental issues are. But few know about the activists who battled to bring them to our attention. Great stories, full of drama and passion, they are perhaps the best way to understand the crisis of humanity and nature facing us.  This will be a defining film that reaches and teaches a huge and hungry audience.

Status:

The good news is A Fierce Green Fire is more than half done. Eighteen interviews have been shot. A wealth of archival material has been assembled. Four of five acts have been scripted and edited. A recent grant will enable us to make the final act on climate change and finish the rough-cut by March of 2010.

Plans are to fine-cut the film in the second half of 2010. Depending on completion funds, A Fierce Green Fire will be ready for release at the beginning of 2011.

A Note About the Title:

The film’s title -- A Fierce Green Fire -- is borrowed from the book by Philip Shabecoff, which continues to stand as the best history of the environmental movement to date.  It is taken from a famous story by the pioneering ecologist Aldo Leopold. In it he recounts his awakening as a ranger for the U.S. Biological Survey:

In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a

second we were pumping lead into the pack... We reached the old wolf in time

to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known

ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes – something known

only to her and to the mountain.  I was young then, and full of trigger-itch;

I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise.  But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither

the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.”

– Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac