American Masters

Elephant trumpeting

Do you know what it's like to lose a child? Do you?

THE CHAMBERS BROTHERS

Time! I'm the one that's got to breathe that stuff at night. Time! We are going to shed blood because of our land. We will. Time! Stop blasting our homes! Ohhhhhhh! Now the time has come Time! No place to run Time! I might get burned up by the sun Time! But I had my fun Time! Now the time has come Time! There are things to realize Time! Time has come today Time! Time! Time! Time! Yeah! The environmental movement is about nature versus humanity. It arose at a time when our industrial civilization has grown so powerful, it threatens the natural world on which we depend for survival. It has become the battle for a living planet. But at the beginning, saving the land, nature, wild and pure, was the main thrust of conservation. The pivotal battles were over dams. The first was Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park. San Francisco proposed to build a reservoir. It turned into the defining struggle of the conservation movement, a clash of two pioneers. John Muir, preservationist, wanted to preserve nature -- for its sake and also for our own sake. Well, the other side of this argument was a fellow named Gifford Pinchot, who was made the first head of the Forest Service. Pinchot's philosophy was that conservation meant the wise use of resources and that, if you had two Yosemites, it was okay to use one of them for water supply. Muir fought on for 12 long years, but, in the end, Hetch Hetchy was drowned. Muir died soon after -- some say of a broken heart. But it was not until the postwar onslaught of development that attitudes began to shift. Prosperity brought with it a desire to save nature before it was all gone. The Colorado River Storage Project proposed 15 dams stairstepping all the way from Wyoming to Mexico. It meant another dam in another national park -- Dinosaur National Monument. The Sierra Club, at this point, decided this was a chance to go on the offensive, and they said "No, damn it. We're going to stop them." And they hired David Brower, a guy who crackled with ideas, and made him executive director. Brower transformed the Sierra Club into a fighting organization. It took seven years, but they stopped the dams this time. They won, but there was a terrible price -- the Sierra Club agreed not to oppose a dam further down the Colorado River system, at Glen Canyon. Nobody from the Sierra Club had seen Glen Canyon. Once they began looking and seeing what was there, they realized what a terrible, terrible mistake had been made. But it was too late. Glen Canyon was lost. Dave, in particular, blamed himself. I was willing and able, at that time, to make the horrible mistake of being willing to sacrifice Glen Canyon, in order to save Dinosaur at Echo Park, simply because I didn't know what was in Glen Canyon. And that was one of the bitterest lessons I ever had. But Brower's chance at redemption would come soon, and prove to be a turning point. In 1965, the Bureau of Reclamation announced plans to build two power dams, and a tunnel to connect them, through the heart of the Grand Canyon. It would've killed the river that carved the Canyon and it led to the pivotal battle against the dam-builders. Here, you have a river coming along and the Marble Dam is going to stop it. It's going to divert it through a tunnel that's going to go way downstream. They were going to take the water out of the river. All of it, except for 1,000 cubic feet per second, you know?

Laughs

THE CHAMBERS BROTHERS

There'd be no water in the river. My attitude was always "be unreasonable." Let's not be nice. I mean, if you don't have any hatred in your heart, what are you living on?

MAN

The dams in the Grand Canyon, that was going to be a fight to the death. You can't build half a dam. They weren't going to accept a little dam. It was, "We aren't going to allow dams to be built in a national park." Brower was a man on fire. Fueled by the bitter lesson of Glen Canyon, he rallied the Sierra Club to fight the dams in the Grand Canyon; however, aligned against him was Secretary of Interior Stewart Udall. The dams had already been passed in Congress. The deal was done. Udall was celebrating the great victory of these dams that were going to go in and everybody, you know, on that side of the story was confident they had won the struggle and Brower was desperate. And he said, "We need something new." He wanted to do advertising. We did a headline, "Only you can stop Grand Canyon from being flooded for profit." That first ad got a gigantic response, 8,000 or 10,000 pieces of mail. Stewart Udall said he had never had a response like that. The day after one of these ads ran, a little gray man in a little gray suit with a little gray briefcase showed up at the door of the Sierra Club with a hand-delivered letter saying, "The Internal Revenue Service can no longer guarantee that contributions to the Sierra Club will be deductible from taxes." This was big news in itself. Here, the IRS is going after the poor little Sierra Club for trying to protect the Grand Canyon. I mean, how crazy is that? That was one of the high points of the Sierra Club's existence, in terms of credibility and nobility, was that we said, "Go to hell." I mean, "We don't want it." And they didn't expect that. That really shook up Washington, you know? "This little outfit is going to stop our dams."

TURNER

People in the public may not have known what they thought about the Sierra Club, but they sure knew what they thought about the Internal Revenue Service. Sympathy for the Sierra Club just boiled over and people joined in droves.

MANDER

We did an ad called, "Should we flood the Sistine Chapel so tourists can get nearer the ceiling?" That was in reaction to the statement that the public was going to love these dams because it would bring the people closer to nature's glories.

SCOTT

If you drown a wild river under a reservoir, it kills the natural story of that river and its canyon and the life that lives there. It's an all-or-nothing. The public rallied to the idea of saving the Grand Canyon. Opposition to the dams grew fast and furious. Pressure grew so strong that it turned the tide. Finally, Congress prohibited dams anywhere in the Grand Canyon and expanded the national park. It was a complete victory for Brower and the Sierra Club. Every now and then, some issue arises that is elevated into a sort of stratospheric focus of public attention. It becomes more than the issue itself. It becomes symbolic and the rallying cry for a whole generation of activists. The '60s brought the flowering of conservation. It was propelled by many things -- air and water pollution, sprawl and development, massive fishkills and endangered birds, the Cuyahoga River catching on fire, and oil spills off California and Cornwall. But the real consciousness-changer was seeing Earth from space.

MAN

When, in '69 and '70, we started to get real photographs of the Earth from space, that completely changed people's perspective on themselves and their role in the planet. They were stunning because you saw a green, blue, cloud-bedecked, living planet in the background with, in the foreground, a dead moon with nothing but craters. The life/death image, all combined in one beautiful and compelling scene, was what people, I think, began to realize, that we could be the moon, we could be as dead as the moon.

JONI MITCHELL

They paved paradise Put up a parking lot With a pink hotel, a boutique And a swinging hot spot Don't it always seem to go You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone? They paved paradise Put up a parking lot

MAN

All the social and political ferment that was going on in this country was building up and building up and building up and, on Earth Day 1970, it was like water bursting through a dam. And they charged the people a dollar and a half Just to see 'em Don't it always seem to go You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone They paved paradise Put up a parking lot But I think you have to start out looking at the big picture. The big picture is that we live on a finite planet with a limited capacity to sustain life. If we do not save the environment, then whatever we do in civil rights or in a war against poverty will be of no meaning, because, then, we will have the equality of extinction. Earth pollution is mind pollution. 20 million people came out for the first Earth Day, still the largest demonstration ever. It catalyzed the transition from conservation to a new environmental movement and the next big issue -- pollution. Put up a parking lot I carried a child for nine months. Our little Julie was stillborn. The loss of our child may be a direct result to the chemicals. Please don't allow this to happen to anyone else before you get them out. Don't let it happen to yourselves. Pollutants and toxic chemicals grew out of a bright and shiny vision of civilization. It was an age of miracles. But it had a dark side. DDT had saved millions in the fight against malaria; however, it proved lethal to wildlife. The first to sound the alarm was Rachel Carson, whose book "Silent Spring" set off widespread concern and controversy. People were finding, from Rachel Carson and others, about DDT and other poisons that were getting into their food. Raw sewage was going right down the Hudson River. Air pollution was growing just as fast as new automobiles were coming out. And, all of a sudden, people said, "Wait a second. This is not how we have to live." The great question of the '70s is -- shall we surrender to our surroundings or shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land, and to our water? Earth Day launched the second wave of environmentalism, marked by a series of landmark environmental protection laws -- the creation of the EPA, strengthening of the Clean Air Act, expanding the Clean Water Act, passing the Endangered Species Act, and creating the Superfund. The issue of toxic waste began bubbling up at a place called Love Canal. It was neither the first, nor the worst, toxic waste dump. What made the difference was the people of Love Canal, led by Lois Gibbs. You are murderers! Each and every one of you in this room are murderers! We want out! We want out! When Love Canal came, it was a new segment of the movement. It wasn't that we don't care about the forest. It was the people-focus that set us aside from the other elements that had come before us, and, really, the focus on, "If the fish are dying and if the birds are dying, then we're going to die." Buried beneath the neighborhood were 20,000 tons of poisonous chemicals dumped in an old canal by Hooker Chemical Corporation. Reports of trouble began in 1976. I read a newspaper article and Love Canal had 20,000 tons of chemicals buried in it and that it was leaking into the neighborhood. And I was like, "Oh, my goodness, that's where Michael's going to kindergarten. That's why Michael's so sick." Lois tried to get her son transferred to another school, but the superintendent refused. When I met with Dr. Long, he said, "I am not about to move 407 children because of one irate, hysterical housewife with a sickly kid." Instead, Lois began to circulate a petition to close the school. She went door-to-door, discovering the extent of the damage. I was shocked. I was absolutely shocked. I thought I was the only one with a sickly child. I thought I was the only family that was affected by these leaking chemicals from Love Canal. In their basement, you could see where the chemical residue just comes up through the basement floor and just pools there. And it smells; it smells like a chemical factory. It's nasty. When Lois took her case to the state, officials surprised her with an emergency declaration to evacuate the nearest homes. However, the outer ring of homes surrounding Love Canal, 800 families, were given nothing. Would you please tell me, do I let my 3-year-old stay?! She has a birth defect now.

INTERVIEWER

So they weren't willing to move you out, but they were willing to tell you to stop growing vegetables? Willing to tell us not to have the kids go barefooted, not to have them go in the basement -- "Don't plant a garden, but enjoy your house, live there with your family, while we continue doing our tests and use you as guinea pigs." The Love Canal residents decided to do their own health study and found an alarming increase in disease and birth defects. We found that 56% of the children in our community were born with birth defects. 56% of our children had three ears, double rows of teeth, extra fingers, extra toes, or were mentally retarded. During that study time, there were 22 women who were pregnant and, of those 22 pregnancies, only 4 normal babies were born. And the health department literally threw the health study on the floor. I mean, literally took it and just threw it on the floor and said, "It's useless housewife data, collected by people who have a vested interest in the outcome." The New York State health department was prodded into doing its own health study and presented their findings to a packed meeting in Love Canal. The health commissioner took the stage and said, "We found that 56% of the children in Love Canal were born with birth defects," and we're secretly, as sick as this sounds, saying, "Yes! Yes! And now you're going to evacuate us, right?" I mean, that's what we're hoping for. And then he says, "But, we don't believe those birth defects are related to Love Canal." And it's just the whole audience, you could hear, "Huh?" I mean, it was just like -- And he's like, "We believe that those birth defects are related to a random clustering of genetically defective people." I'm getting tired Of them weepin' I'm getting tired Of them screamin' I'm getting tired Of them all Wakin' me up In the middle of night There is Poison in the well Everybody's goin' to hell There is... For the residents, Love Canal became a 2-year struggle to get relocated. Lois Gibbs pushed relentlessly and finally forced the state to bring in the federal government. The Environmental Protection Agency launched a pilot study of chromosome damage. The results of the tests were explosive. Chromosome damage means my two children may be genetically damaged, as a result of Love Canal. That was the straw that broke the camel's back. The EPA recommended relocation, but the White House blocked the emergency declaration. The residents of Love Canal demanded an explanation. When EPA officials arrived, they decided to take them hostage. Pass the word around. We're not going to do anything violent. We're just going to keep them in the house. Nothing more than that. Body-barricade the doors, okay? Okay, pass the word. And don't let them out. -All right, no one else. -No one's coming out. Come on guys, sit! I guess I'm here for the duration. Meaning what? "The duration." Well, I guess until the White House gives the homeowners some sort of answer.

MAN

Gibbs spoke with Congressman LaFalce to get some answers. LaFalce is set to meet with President Carter at this hour at a dinner meeting at the White House. We should have more information tonight. I have told the White House -- and this is upon your approval -- that we will allow the two EPA representatives to leave, but, if we do not have a disaster declaration Wednesday, by noon, then what they have seen here today is just a Sesame Street picnic in comparison with what we will do.

Cheering

MAN

Two days later, Lois called the White House. Amazingly enough, her ultimatum worked. "An emergency to permit the federal government and the state of New York to undertake..." Then, all of a sudden, she said, "And we will grant temporary relocation..." I'm like, "And we will grant temporary relocation --" Al of the sudden, it was just like even the birds, I swear, weren't singing -- "...until we can get permanent relocation money allocated." Here's to the homeowners and all our hard work, huh? Whoo-hoo!

Applause, cheering

MAN

At last, President Carter came to Love Canal to sign the agreement buying out the homeowners. There must never be, in our country, another Love Canal. Thank you very much. But the forward progress that had started with Earth Day came to a screeching halt. There is environmental extremism. I don't think they'll be happy until the White House looks like a bird's nest. The real counterrevolution began with the election of Ronald Reagan. Reagan appointed Anne Gorsuch to the EPA, who didn't want to enforce regulations; and James Watt as Secretary of the Interior, whose idea of conservation was to turn all public lands over to private industry. The American people reacted very strongly.

Chanting

MAN

That was when the momentum shifted to the grassroots. And I'm here with you, shoulder to shoulder, 'til we clean this mess up. Hundreds of groups sprang up to fight pollution and poison in their own backyard. 100% of all of Houston's city-owned landfills were located in predominantly black neighborhoods. 100%, without deviation. 6 out of 8 of the city-owned incinerators were located in predominantly black neighborhoods. We will not allow Warren County to become a dumpsite! It was not until Warren County, where that toxic waste landfill was placed in the middle of this predominantly black county, that began to galvanize people to talk about this whole idea of environmental racism. The protesters were told not to block the trucks. They are now lying in the streets, now, blocking one truck moving into the landfill. They're refusing the order to move and they are being arrested, one by one. This black community being dumped on, being targeted, and people saying, "No, we have a right to live in a clean and healthy environment," that's when the whole idea of environmental justice, as a national movement, came into effect. The mainstream environmental movement, for too long, did not realize how important this was and did not cooperate and partner with the environmental justice movement. And it took two decades for those two movements -- civil rights movement and environmental movement -- to converge. Then we said, "Okay, environmental justice for all." It's about race and class and, if a community that is poor and it is powerless, if they're getting dumped on, then that is an environmental justice issue because it's about power, or lack thereof. This is about human rights. Well, I've been goin' to college now Close to four years Chasin' the American dream When along comes this class On environmental studies Tells me it ain't what it seems I've been livin' too high on the hog They say And actin' not very politely Gotta stop my swervin' and start conservin' Ecology movements grew out of the 1960s counterculture. They wanted to build alternative futures and live the change. But a ragtag band of ecologists put their bodies on the line in defense of environmental issues. They got their name at the end of a meeting. An elder pacifist said, "Peace." Someone called out, "Make it a green peace." The name stuck and Greenpeace brought together the ecology and antiwar movements for the first time. We were asking the question, "Okay, the war in Vietnam's over and what are we going to do next?" And the answer to that question was, "We're going to start an ecology movement, and the first thing we're going to do is save the whales." What we put into effect was a plan that Bob Hunter had come up with from reading a lot of Gandhi. He felt that we could just put ourselves between the harpoon and the whales and they wouldn't kill the whales. Oh, the Greenpeace is a-sailin' They're crazy as hell They'll be ridin' the big ocean In a hollowed-out shell They'll probably get seasick Or they'll probably go blind They're probably on drugs Or at least out of their minds In 1975, Greenpeace set off to hunt the whalers. After two months at sea, they came upon the Russian whaling fleet.

WEYLER

There's five over there, there's one by the Vostok. We're coming upon a floating slaughterhouse. There's blood in the water. There's huge slabs of blubber being hauled up on these big factory ships. Blood is just pouring out of this pipe, and the stench, alone, made us all want to throw up.

WATSON

Suddenly, Bob and I were in a small boat in front of a Soviet harpoon vessel that was bearing down on us. In front of us is eight magnificent sperm whales fleeing for their life and every time the harpooner tried to get a shot, I was at the helm, so I would maneuver the boat to try and block the harpoon. And the harpooner's not shooting, but, eventually, somebody from the bridge walks down the catwalk and talks to the harpooner and the harpooner nods and the guy goes back and Bob looks in his eyes and he knows this guy's going to shoot this harpoon. Then he looked at us and smiled and brought his finger across his neck and that's when I realized Gandhi wasn't going to pull through for us that day. And, at that very moment, they fire the harpoon. This harpoon flew over our head and slammed into the backside of one of the whales and she screamed. It was a very humanlike scream, like a woman, and it took us completely offguard. The whalers purposefully shoot at a female, first, because they know that the bull whales will attack them. And then, when the bull whales come to attack them -- which is exactly what happened -- He was waiting for them, and very nonchalantly pulled the trigger and sent a second harpoon into the head of the whale, and he screamed and fell back and now the water's full of blood everywhere from the two dying whales, and as this whale lay and rolled in agony on the surface of the ocean, I caught his eye and he looked straight at me. And we're looking into the eye of this huge sperm whale and, I have to tell ya, it -- it's sort of beyond emotional. You know, there's certain moments that are so emotional, you're just in brand-new territory. Why were the Russians killing these whales? You know, they didn't eat spermwhale meat, but they did use the spermaceti oil to make high-heat-resistant lubricating oil for machinery. And one of the pieces of machinery that they used it in is the manufacture of intercontinental ballistic missiles, and I said, "Here we are, destroying this incredibly beautiful, intelligent, socially complex creature for the purpose of making a weapon meant for the mass destruction of humanity." And that's when it came to me, you know, like a flash, that we're insane; we're just totally insane. And, from that moment on, I decided that I work for whales, I work for seals, I work for sea turtles and fish and seabirds. I don't work for people.

Whales calling

WATSON

We were out there trying to make the whales famous, but in the process, we made ourselves famous. We were now able to talk about ecology and we were able to raise money. Now we were able to do a seal campaign and a toxic-dumping campaign. Offices were springing up all over the world calling themselves "Greenpeace." Greenpeace saw the media as the best means of changing consciousness. They called it "dropping mind bombs." My idea was that, if you took an image and you passed it through the media into the mass mind, you could essentially blow the mass mind with new images that would create whole new ways of looking at the world, and the image of small whales up against giant whaling machines was a mind bomb. In 1976, Greenpeace dreamed up their next campaign -- to save baby harp seals in Newfoundland. We're blocking the boat. It's backed up three times and came forward already. They're trying to bluff us off. No, they might just be lining up for a big one soon. The first year, they ran into furious opposition, especially over Paul's plan to spray dye on the seal pups, rendering the pelts worthless. That's, I think, where I had a first falling out with Bob, really, because they compromised with the Newfoundlanders. They didn't consult with me so I was quite angry on it. I don't believe in compromising. Paul was bitter. He came back the next year, determined to stop the slaughter. On the second seal campaign, in '77, you know, I pulled a sealing club out of a sealer's hand, threw it in the water. I'd handcuffed myself to the pile of pelts to try and shut down their operations. They pulled the pelts into the water and pulled me through the water and up the side of the boat and dangled me from the air and then dropped me back in the water and then they brought me up on the deck and then they pulled me along the deck as the sealers were spitting and kicking and punching. Soon after the second seal campaign, Paul Watson was thrown out of Greenpeace for breaching their ethic of nonviolence. He'd gone too far. Paul vowed to pursue the whalers without compromise. He set up his own group, the Sea Shepherd Society, and got himself a ship. The first thing he did was hunt down the Sierra, an illegal pirate whaler. Off the coast of Portugal, he found her. I hit the Sierra at the bow, to get its attention and to destroy the harpoon, then did a 360 turn around its stern and slammed into its side at 15 knots and split it open to the water line. That ship had killed 25,000 whales. What we were able to do, in one year, was to shut down every single pirate whaling vessel in the Atlantic. Then, Sea Shepherd went after whaling nations, scuttling Spanish, Norwegian, and Icelandic whalers. It took everyone working together to ban whaling. For 10 years, radicals and mainstream, governments and NGOs, campaigned to turn the International Whaling Commission from hunting to saving whales.

Chanting

WATSON

A moratorium finally passed in 1982 and, in time, it became a permanent ban on whaling, one of environmentalism's biggest successes. We live in the garden of Eden, yeah I don't know why we wanna Tear the whole thing down The Amazon was ground zero of global-scale resource issues and crises that arose in the '80s. The greatest rainforest on Earth was threatened on all sides by mining and logging, massive dams, and cattle ranchers. The fate of the Amazon turned on a most unlikely environmental hero -- a poor rubber-tapper and union organizer named Chico Mendes.

Singing

WATSON

The rubber tappers organized empates, or standoffs -- nonviolent protests in the tradition of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, where they surrounded the trees and tried to explain what a disaster cutting down the forest was for everyone.

Singing

WATSON

They actually were able to stop the forest-cutting by standing in front of the trees. It's a real heroic story and it happened often enough that it actually impeded an entire cattle-ranching operation, so much that they gave up. Chico was coming to understand that saving their way of life meant saving the Amazon. He began to build alliances with other rubber tappers and indigenous groups. And Chico decided to hold a meeting to try to form a national council of rubber tappers. They all came to the conclusion that they needed to have rights to use the land, that one of the things that was keeping them from being able to effectively defend the forest against the chainsaw loggers and the cattle ranchers was not having an actual right to this land. They were seen as squatters. The idea was raised that there should be rubber tapper reserves, like Indian reserves. The people wouldn't own the land, but it would be theirs, for as long as they wanted to work it. It was an idea of the people who actually lived in the forest. That was a huge breakthrough in concept. The rubber tappers decided to establish the first reserve at Cachoeira, the old rubber plantation where Chico was born and lived with family and friends. However, the land had been bought by a rancher named Darli Alves, so the seringueiros went to court to claim their squatter rights. It turned into a showdown.

INTERPRETER

Xapuri ranchers have always had trouble with seringueiros blocking their deforestation. Every time the ranchers tried to deforest, they were blocked -- in Xapuri, it's stalemate. The rubber tappers won. Cachoeira was declared the first extractive reserve in the world. But the rancher Darli Alves had vowed to kill Chico Mendes.

Speaking Portuguese

INTERPRETER

No one likes to die, but if it has to happen, then it should be to create more life. Christ was crucified. He gave his last drop of blood, but since that day, millions of communities have been born that believe and fight for brotherhood.

Bell tolls

Speaking Portuguese

INTERPRETER

I promise, before the blood of our companion Chico Mendes, to continue his work, to show our enemies that they will never succeed in silencing the voice of the seringueiros. Chico Mendes, wherever you are, don't grieve that they have silenced your voice. Your ideas exist among us. There were things that came together after his death that probably couldn't have come together if he was still alive because they'd still be fighting over whether the extractive reserves should be established or not. After he was killed, there was no question. So, now, it's quite clear that who saves forests are the people in the forest. Chico Mendes' work proved to be the turning point in the battle to save the Amazon. The Brazilian government recognized the rights of the forest peoples and established an array of parks and protected areas. 58 million acres were set aside in extractive reserves. 40% of the Brazilian Amazon was formally protected.

Singing

INTERPRETER

No Pepsi, no cola! We want drinking water! No Pepsi, no cola! We want drinking water!

WOMAN

There is no substitute for clean, fresh water. There is no substitute; there is no alternative and that's why water must be protected everywhere. All over the global south, environmental movements arose in the '80s and '90s. They were fighting for many of the same things -- to save their forests, to stop dams, against pollution and toxic industry. Their movements blurred the lines between social justice, indigenous rights, and environmental issues. In the developing world, they became one. The primary theme that runs through all these movements is the loss of the commons and the loss of access rights to the commons. And I think that's what people are really fighting for, is the right of subsistence and the right of access to clean water, to food, to forests, you know, the right to live. By the '90s, crises were unfolding in all the Earth's ecosystems -- deforestation, desertification, loss of water and soil, emptying oceans, and the Sixth Great Extinction. An ozone hole opened up over Antarctica that should've been enough to make an environmentalist out of anyone. But the mother of all environmental issues was coming, so big it would overshadow everything else. Why is it the problem from hell? It's the problem from hell, not only because there are so many sources of the problem, so you can't just laser in and solve one specific piece and it's done. You have to go at the cars, oil, power plants, and the way we farm, which food we eat -- it's everywhere. Associated with those sources are huge political and financial stakes. Man may be unwittingly changing the world's climate through the waste products of his civilization, due to our release, through factories and automobiles, every year, of more than 6 billion tons of carbon dioxide. We've been thinking about climate change and its relationship to increasing numbers of people, multiplied times their affluence, multiplied times the kind of technology they use to get rich, like coal and oil burning, and then we use the atmosphere as a free sewer to dump our wastes. We've known about that since 1900. But we didn't have any idea whether it was going to warm up half a degree or 3, the difference between, "Well, no big deal" and "Oh, my God." The real key moment of its emergence is summer 1988, the hottest summer the continental U.S. has yet known. There was a congressional hearing called to discuss this question of climate change. The evidence that the Earth is warming by an amount which is too large to be a chance fluctuation represents a very strong case, in my opinion, that the greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now. In 1992, the world came together at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro to sign a landmark treaty known as the Framework Convention on Climate Change. At the insistence of the United States, limits on greenhouse gases were purely voluntary; however, the treaty was a start and, when Clinton and Gore were elected that year, there were great hopes. Clinton and Gore got the policy right, but the politics went wrong from the start. It is certainly true that the Clinton administration made its share of mistakes, but it is inaccurate to history to pretend that that was the most important reason that we didn't get climate change legislation passed. By far, the most important reason was the political power of big oil and big coal.

ANNOUNCER

Now, some politicians want to label carbon dioxide a pollutant. Imagine if they succeed. What would our lives be like then? Carbon dioxide -- they call it pollution. We call it life.

WOMAN

You had the Global Climate Coalition, which was the coalition of industrial actors -- many hundreds, thousands of companies, labor unions, farm organizations -- who organized against binding targets to reduce emissions. A doubling of the CO2 content of the atmosphere will produce a tremendous greening of planet Earth. Global warming is too big an issue for the environmental movement to take on. It took a long time even for environmentalists to really pick up on it. For much of the 1990s, it was a second-tier issue among environmentalists, who were sticking with their old campaigns -- on important subjects, just less important, as it turned out, than the shifting energy balance of the entire planet. Kyoto came in 1997, the first opportunity to negotiate a tougher treaty. The United States resisted mandatory cutbacks and insisted on impossible conditions. Meanwhile, the Europeans were pushing for aggressive emissions reductions. Kyoto deadlocked.

REPORTER

What are your major points of contention, still? No contentions. Got to get agreement. How far have you come along? We are negotiating, and that's all we want to say right now.

Applause

REPORTER

At the last minute, Al Gore arrived to save the day. I am instructing our delegation right now to show increased negotiating flexibility. The United States agreed to mandatory cutbacks and signed the Kyoto Protocol, but they knew the treaty was dead on arrival and never even submitted it for ratification. Then, when Bush was elected, he rejected Kyoto. The Kyoto Protocol was fatally flawed, in fundamental ways. Disasters brought back the issue of climate change. Hurricane Katrina was a wakeup call that revealed the impacts of global warming in ways that had not touched people before. In Europe, a heat wave killed 70,000. Drought and fire turned Australia and the American Southwest into infernos. Arctic ice disappearing, coral reefs bleaching -- everything was happening faster than scientists predicted. I'm technologically optimistic that we can prevent a lot of dangerous outcomes -- not all, but many -- but I'm kind of politically bleak that we're going to do it until we have enough tangible damage that the symbol is able to tip us over the political tipping point of long-term action. And we got close in '88, maybe a little bit in Katrina, and then we faded away each time. All the polling data showing that Americans understood what was going on and what the danger was, but, still, nothing happening in Washington, not a damn thing, you know? 20 years without any legislation that would've done anything to deal with the biggest problem that the world's ever faced. I don't know, do we have to have a hurricane take out Miami and Shanghai to have everybody wake up? If that happens in 2025, by then, it's going to be too late to prevent, you know, melting of Greenland. If it happened next year, it might be possible to still do that, but what a hell of a way to run a planet. I started emailing people to say, "We're going to go for a walk." We left from Robert Frost's old cabin because we liked that most cliched of all poems about the road not taken. Now, we've moved on to do the global version of this, 350.org, in reference to Jim Hansen's number, this red line for the planet. "350" refers to parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the number considered safe by scientists. It was surpassed in 1988, the year Hansen first issued his warning. Copenhagen, the 15th Conference on Climate Change, was meant to strengthen the Kyoto Protocol. It came freighted with hopes that, at last, the United States and China -- the world's biggest emitters of carbon dioxide -- would join the rest of the world and take action before it was too late. However, Copenhagen turned into more of the same top-down political failure. Once again, the U.S. declined to offer significant emissions reductions. Once again, that resulted in deadlock. This time, it was President Obama who tried to save the day, but his last-minute accord sowed discord. I believe that the pieces of that accord should now be clear -- all major economies must put forward decisive national actions that will reduce their emissions. I see it as a success. A modest success. I think we could, we should've achieved more. Well, this is a disaster. Well, it was a good speech, but what we need now is action. Climate change remains the impossible issue -- impossible to deal with, yet impossible to ignore. As people who care deeply about the environment, we keep looking for love in all the wrong places, and that's from our political leaders. -Climate justice! -When do we want it?

HAWKEN

If we haven't learned yet, then we should get it now. This is not going to be top-down. It goes back to the millions of people who are trying to create solutions every single day. The very word "movement," I think, is too small to describe it. No one started this worldview, no one is in charge of it. There is no orthodoxy. It is global, classless, unquenchable, and tireless. La gente de...

Cheering

HAWKEN

Going around the country and other countries, as well, I encountered nonprofit organizations that I'd never heard of. And that's when I thought, gee, how many are there? And I started to count. I got to about 30,000 and I thought, "Okay, this is big." This is bigger than the Catholic Church. There are literally 2 million organizations in the world that are working on these issues of social justice and the environment, because they're inseparable. It's growing, it's growing, it's growing, because it's not a movement. It's, in a sense, humanity's immune response to the despoliation of the environment, to the degradation of living systems, to the corruption we see in economic systems, and the pollution of the industrial system. There's no Hispanic air, there's no African-American air, there's air! And if you breathe air -- and most people I know do breathe air -- then that makes you part of the environment. And if you're concerned about that clean air, that air and it being clean, I would consider you an environmentalist. If you drink water -- and most people I know drink water -- and if you're concerned about what's in the water, I would consider you an environmentalist. And if you eat food -- and most people I know eat food -- and if you're concerned about what's in the food, I would consider you an environmentalist. If you answered 2 out of 3, I'd say you're an environmentalist, you just may not know it. Stop blasting our homes.

"Time" plays

HAWKEN

And if there's one thing the rites of Mother Earth is waking us to is, we are all connected.

And we... CROWD

And we... -will end... -will end... -the tyranny! -the tyranny!

WOMAN

Deep cuts, now. Get it done.

Whistle blows

WOMAN

Let's stop fueling our society based on death and start using living things. Let's start using living things. Time! Time! It's not easy bein' green But it's the color of Mother Nature And I'll fight... To learn more about "A Fierce Green Fire" and other "American Masters" programs, visit pbs.org/americanmasters of find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. "A Fierce Green Fire" is available for $24.95 plus shipping. To order, call 1-800-336-1917 or write to the address on your screen. Fighting for the future of a fierce green planet Ripple of hope dancing 'cross the sky While there's still time...