eastern on c-span 3 and c-span .org and c-span radio. . . remarks from actor robert redford on how he got involved with politics and environmental policy. he spoke last month with tom udall at a conference organized by project new west. this is 50 minutes. >> isn't in great have robert redford back here in colorado? bob, thank you so much for coming and thank you for being a part of the summit. we're going to carry on a little dialogue here for 30-35 minutes and take some of your questions that you are going to pass in. one of the things that i wanted to ask bob about, that i think is fascinating in light of the video, the first thing he told me after looking at the video, he said, the show was over. >> it is a tough act to follow. >> it is a tough act to follow. the idea of some months -- summits and bringing out the very best ideas and trying to move us forward, and you did that a long time ago, a long, long time ago. you started doing that in the 1980's, you teamed up with my dad and did one on global warming that we have talked about, where people did not even know what global warming was. but always start jumping and of those, the first thing that i want to ask you is -- a lot of people would say that i was reading some stuff on you, bob, and he is a movie star but he is an anomaly, a man of substance. what is it that brings you to have credentials and a caring for the west? you were born in santa monica california. the west was over here. tell us what brings you to this and what your passion is? >> starting with california, i grew up in a lower working class neighborhood, mostly hispanic. we did not have much access to recreation or any of the entertainment that existed other than the ocean. later on i got a job in yosemite national park and i went there to work, i waited on tables and worked at camp curry, and i learn to climb there. i went into the sierras, and then i would go into the desert as soon as i could get a car. i guess the natural environment appealed to mea. and i was not involved politically, i was only 15 when i went to work there, but i fell in love with yosemite. and that led to other developments. my mom was from texas, and in the early war years we would drive to austin, texas to visit my grandfather and we would drive to the indian reservations. and i was only five or six years old, and i was so fascinated with the native american communities in places like that, that i would ask my mom, can we stop? i want to get in touch these people. she said, be careful, what you talking about? and i said, look at costumes. they are different. and i made that connection with the native american community then. so by the time was a little kid, there was a connection with hispanics and native americans. so later on, when i went to school in boulder here in colorado until i was asked to leave the -- [laughter] because i was indulging too much in the west. [laughter] >> we will not probe into that. >> it was a great place to be. but i spent a lot of time climbing and to enjoin the west and so forth. boulder, and then running rivers in san juan, the green colorado, getting a vote on lake tahoe, all of these things started to multiplied over time. and my affection and interest in the well-being of the west came naturally. and in terms of your family, i think what the video showed pretty well says it. i got involved with small udall -- mo udall on the alaskan situation. i went to raise money for his candidacy in arizona. and your dad and nini got invold when i asked him if he would be the chairman of the institute of resource management. i've gotten clobbered pretty hard -- i got involved in political issues in the west in 1969 and 1970. in those days it was lonely territory because -- in the interest of what we preserve for our destiny and what we develop for our destiny, it was one- sided in those years. it was over on the side of development. a voice speaking out about preservation or balance was a small voice, and you were treated pretty roughly by gas and oil interests. and i got some rough treatment. and i -- and when i won against its coal-fired power plant in southeastern utah in 1965, what i found out is that that is pretty incredible country. i spent a lot of time their hiking and motorcycling and riding horses and so forth. i saw this incredible amount of territory and that if they got savaged by oil and gas development, it would destroy something very by a bowl of american identity. so they were not holding any public hearings. it was a consortium of energy companies, there was southern cal led, and other companies. they were privately, which means secretly, planning a power plant, 3,000 megawatts. that was at the beginning of 11 total and the west. there was only one in one area. there was one in new mexico. said -- because there were not holding any public hearings, i spent a year with a group doing research and that was pretty awesome. what was going to do to the colorado in the air quality -- and the air quality, and because we could not get any traction, in desperation i went to "60 minutes" and as the producer if they would be interestined in looking at this project. if this went through, it would destroy a valuable part of the west that could lead to further destruction. so the guy said, yes, it would do it. and i said, oh, no. i don't think i would be taken seriously because i am an actor. this is before reagan got elected. [laughter] but anyway, we went back and forth and they said we would only do it if you do it. and i said one condition, if you interview the governor of utah and other people to give them equal time. they said, ok. says state -- so they sent an rather out and i said, i don't want to stick in the room and be a talking head. let's go down and i will show you what is at stake. so we went down to lake powell and walk through the territory and i showed them the pictographs, all of these to be destroyed. it was a good interview. and when it came out, it was a very popular show. they got 6000 pieces of mail, and they advertise that. one can sit and about seventy- five cents -- one kid said in about seventy-five cents, very sweet, one in to do whatever they can so that they could go and see it. that publicized that and suddenly the group pulled out of the project. and they blame me. [laughter] the next thing i know -- [applause] it's nice now but it was not so hot band. [laughter] there were threatening letters to me and my family. that is when i said, wait a minute. what i do is one thing but i can have what i do fallout unfairly on my kids. they were saying, we will blow you away if you come down into this area. so that led to -- the tag on as, to get back in a minute -- but that led to meet the sighting and me being out there alone was a mixed bag. -- but that led to the idea of me being out there alone was a mixed bag. that could be countered pretty strongly on the other side by the media are what have you. i decided to go behind the scenes and create an organization, because i felt that education was the way to go, and training. if he could educate people coming into the field, maybe older people are already lost her whatever, but if you could educate young people coming into positions where management decisions will be made regarding the environment, that might be a good thing. >> tell us how my dad joined up with the you came together, and what you are really focusing their -- on their. and one of the things that is most interesting, you did global warming before anybody really knew what a big powerful issue it was. you get the soviet union involved. you had their scientists and our scientists up at sundance. >> the way that that happen, with your dad, i was well away -- well aware of him since he was secretary of the interior. he was involved in the wilderness bill and some pretty major legislation in the 1960's. he was a close friend of one of my heroes. i met wallace dedicating of mountain in yosemite. he and i became very close and i made a small documentary against it -- about his life. stewart and i came together naturally and i asked him if he would be willing to chair this new organization. and he did. but by this time he was retired from public office but he carried so much weight and experience with him, and he has such a wonderful way of expressing it, white mo did, that i thought would be wonderful. he also listened to both sides. so he became the chairman and when we put together a group, he said you got have industry and you've got have the environmental group. you got to have the top. so the guy shows up from the industry, the head of southern cal edison, the chief component of that power plant deal. >> he was the guy that wanted to build it and bring the power over, right. >> stewart said, now you've got to work with both sides. anyway, howard comes in there and i am waiting for it. and he says, bob, it is just great to see you. and i said, what, are you kidding? no, i have to tell you, i have to thank you. when that project came up there, to tell you frankly, if you saved as a lot because the truth is it was getting so expensive i was looking for a way to pull out and you made it easy. >> you gave as the skis. >> you became the scapegoat and so i wanted to thank you. i thought that was an ironic touch. from that point on, stewart and i got really close. he did it like he did everything. and he was so persuasive because he knew the environmental leaders, obviously, but he also knew industry because he had to work both sides in politics. so for 10 years, we would work on it. we would take top environmental leaders from audubon and informal defense and so on, and then we would take top industry leaders, and we would pick a particular issue and tried have a conflict resolution on the assumption that if you bring two sides together, there is something that they can agree on. but you can build from there. if you can build from there using compassion and respect, using an open mind and understanding of the problem from either side, you might get somewhere that we will might get. even though i was probably -- my personal view was more radical by nature but i felt that i did not get anywhere with that, despite being better. so what happened was on the fourth conference that we had, it started out with issues on native american lands, issues of electricity and so forth, and then it went to the denver, the jewish hospital here in denver. we had a conference on western -- one error in the extreme west. the mayor of phoenix was there, he wanted help and so forth. in that conference that we were holding, two guys from a center for research came up to make a slide presentation at lunch. it is usually one of those things were seen -- someone comes up and sings to have people happy while they are eating. these guys, the two scientist put up a slight about global warming, and nobody heard about that in 1985. they showed signs of what happened in the year intervals over the last 30 years. and then they showed slides of what was going to happen in 10 and 20 year intervals. and they showed slides of mountaintops with snow white kilimanjaro. you look at it and you cannot grasp it. the ice caps will melt and here is the danger. it will affect climate. when it was over, it was so powerful that it diverted the attention of the conference. later i was in the soviet union on the film -- that window of perestroika. the scientists were having a conference and i went there on a conference on global warming and i said, wait a minute, if you were talking about something, we're talking about it, but nobody else is. where i can play a role he is adding you to come to sundance. once i said that, but died there was with me, my associates sundance, with my coat off. what, are you crazy? anyway, a year later they came in we had the conference. stewart ran the conference. he was so good because he was a moderator to balance the conference. almost the entire academy of sciences game. head of the space program, cross i got on our side -- carl sagan on our side. we were getting the word out that this was happening in 1989. greenhouse glasnost, it was called. i made the assumption, which was wrong, that it was so verifiable you could not dispute the findings of the two scientific communities of what had been dead most advanced countries of the world. and so i had made the night mistake politically of sending this to bush, senior who was president and gorbachev and that will appreciated and word will get out to the public. that was a mistake. he got shelved, thank you very much, and i will see you. that was the end of that. it was naive of me not to understand the relationship between this and oil and gorbachev spoke as. when that went by the wayside, nobody ever heard about it. >> one of the things that my father has told me, and in order to talk with you today, i spent a bit of time with him interviewing him about the irn days. this is one of the remarkable things about bob redford, is that my dad said, the whole time he was doing the summits with you, he said, his approach was not to bring publicity to himself, it was to bring publicity to the issues. and i think you heard that today in terms of what you are talking about. that is why you are here today, because you love the west, you love what it is, you are in sundance and you are a residence of utah and you really love the west. one of the parts of the west that i think is so different, and you know this from your visits to santa fe, is that the landscape but it is also the people, the native americans, the hispanics. you have done a wonderful thing with our governor, bill richardson, to expand and native people and hispanics and work with communities. can you talk a little bit about -- people are wondering what happened after irn? you have continued and you will continue at sundance to have a conference center and do things. and i think you are also going to focus on native people and some of their problems and also the rich history that hispanics have with the west. >> yes. that is true, i do of the west. it is instilled. i love is so much -- before the irn, one of the things i forgot to mention was in 1975, i came across an incredible piece of history on the outlaw trail. i came across this almost by accident, after "butch cassidy." i spent time with his sister who was still living. one thing led to another and i started connecting some dots, and she said, there -- she showed me letters that he had written and she said, there are some hideout things that are buried away the problem still exist. that led to further research which led to the university of utah historian who knew a lot, which led to this discovery of something called the a lot trail. it was a stretch of trail that winds from montana down to almost mexico. it had three intersecting trails, but oregon trail, the california trail, it was developed by bridge cassidy and had three settlements along the trail. one was hole on the wall, and brown's park, where utah and colorado and wyoming are. and that history was so amazing, i said, nobody knows about this. they used to travel at the pony express and it would rob bank and we get to their next tied out. anyway, i found it so fascinating, i went to national geographic in 1975 and said, look, if you guys ought to check this out. this is great history. it was like that of a " 60 minutes" deal, we will do it if you do it. and i said, wait a minute. i bet the national geographic does not like profanity, and i cannot imagine going out on the trails and that not being a big part of it. they said, it is as simple as this, if you will do it, we will do it. if not, we won. i said, let me think about it. and then i thought, what if i pull some people together that did not know which it did that well but were connected by a love all -- a love of the west, could ride a horse, and we rode the trail why the outlaws. and i would talk to make the stories. that happened -- and i would document the stories. that happened and we spent about over a month riding of most of the trail, documenting it, and turning it into a book -- an article in the "national geographic." and the book came out of it. in that trip, i think that is where it really hit hard of the real value of the west. what i could see was that agriculture was being threatened by development. and some of the development was necessary. some of it was probably help. a lot of it was not. and the part that was not was replacing something that i thought was, the role of agriculture in the west and a lot to do with our history, ranchers and farmers and agriculture and the land being used in that way. i could see that the red riding the outlaw trail. it hit me so hard that that turned me more and more political. which led to the irn and so forth. one no. and, because of my background -- on your thing, because of my background was obviously very attached to that. i started sundance and the flap, and we had a native american lab and a hispanic lab. i wanted to use those labs to create filmmaking capability. in those years, 1980's, there were no native american filmmakers and native americans were simply focused on handcrafts, weaving, and so forth. maybe we will be there to help. and with hispanics, i could see the population increase, particularly in california. and so i wrote a letter to a gabrielle garcia marquez, and he thought it would be good to help. those two labs were at sundance. recently, was we worked "smoke signals, through the lab, i saw that it would happen. and then this government -- and this project with government -- with governor richardson came third. that lange goes back to 79, -- that when it goes up through tonight -- that land goes back to 1709. he wanted to put a festival there. i cannot put the festival there but i think we can bring the native american lab here and hispanic part of it because it is more appropriate here. the history is deeper and longer. they were the first americans. let's focus on them. so, anyway, so we really have two points of access. >> one of the things, and now like to shift now, we have done a lot of the history, to talk a little bit -- what are the challenges facing the west now? i like to jump into that, because i think we're here about today, what are the challenges and how do we forged a coalition to get things done? i know that you have been involved in all of the western issues come up with our water, climate change, tribal issues -- all of those. my opinion is that we have to do two things on burning coal. number one, we better find out in a short period of time with intensive research whether or not we can do it cleanly in any respect. and that should be the federal government investing with energy -- with the industry. if we cannot do it, then we know that we cannot use that. i was like to put a five-year timeline on that kind of a research project. and then we should not build any other conventional coal-fired plants. [applause] and you were there, you were there -- you were there on that power plant leading out on that. and so i am wondering, what you think the biggest challenges that we face? is it a global warming and a coal-fired plants, or is it water, the booming populations? george wilkinson, who teaches here -- >> it is great. >> he is talking about a doubling of population in the generation. what is the biggest challenge? what should this group, what should we all gather around and say go and do? >> i think first of all of the above. they are interconnected. on colal, it is a tough shot because kohl has been such a mainstay of the american sustainability for so long. it's pretty hard for someone -- speak to someone who runs a coal company or who are dependent on coal or in industry to support them. ending it that that argument against the future of our planet. that is a very destructive element for the futur