By MARTA HEPLER DRAHOS
TRAVERSE CITY -- Before Al Gore there were Stewart Udall, Paul Ehrlich, Hunter Lovins -- and Stephanie Mills.
The Maple City author, lecturer and bioregionalist is among early leaders of the modern environmental movement that began with the first Earth Day in April 1970, and is chronicled in the feature documentary "Earth Days."
The film will be shown at noon and 9 p.m. Saturday as part of the Traverse City Film Festival and recounts the moment in history when several forces came together to prompt a new awareness of the problems that resulted from the industrial revolution, director Robert Stone said.
"There've been a lot of environmental movies, a lot of renewed interest in the environment recently, largely because of the alarm bells going off about global climate change," said Stone, an Oscar- and Emmy-nominated filmmaker on American history, pop-culture and the mass media. "But there's been next to nothing about how we came to this and what allowed us to perceive the problems in a whole new light. Younger people think it started with Al Gore."
The film premiered at this year's Sundance Film Festival and tells the story of the modern environmental movement through the eyes of nine divergent witnesses. They include Mills, then labeled a "radical"; Udall, a secretary of the interior under presidents Kennedy and Johnson; Ehrlich, a biologist; and Lovins, a promoter of sustainable development.
"When you see the film you see what a huge movement was engendered by Earth Day," said Mills, who made national headlines in 1969 when she predicted in a Mills College commencement address that overpopulation and overuse of natural resources would result in humanity's self-- destruction. "There were thousands and thousands of people in the streets and the media was covering issues like population and the Limits to Growth study, which is in the film. What amazes me is how quick the denial and amnesia about all these issues became almost total."
Now 60, Mills said the Reagan and subsequent administrations inaugurated a period of policies "that I think have really worked to the detriment of the planet."
It's only now, she said, that the world is trying to make up for lost time with regard to food, water, energy and other predicaments.
"We lost 30 years, and it's a critical 30 years," she said. "It's not like we can take up where we left off because the population has doubled and the pollution sinks have been used up."
Mills and Stone will answer audience questions following both film screenings. Mills also will be at Horizon Books after the noon showing to sign copies of her newly reprinted book, "Whatever Happened to Ecology."
