- Robert Redford combined a celebrated career in film with decades of environmental advocacy, treating landscapes as characters in his movies and pushing to protect them in real life.
- From his base in Utah, he founded Sundance to support independent filmmakers and later the Redford Center with his son James, using storytelling as a tool for environmental action.
- He was instrumental in battles such as stopping a coal plant on Utah’s Kaiparowits Plateau, served on the NRDC board for nearly 50 years, and used his public platform to argue that “defense of our resources is just as important as defense abroad.”
- At the United Nations in 2015 and elsewhere, he pressed world leaders to act urgently on climate change, while urging younger generations and artists to tell stories that could “wake up the heart.”
Robert Redford never intended to be a spokesman for the environment. Acting and directing, the twin pillars of his professional life, were supposed to be enough. Yet for more than half a century he stood before cameras, senators, and students insisting that “the environment should be put in the category of our national security. Defense of our resources is just as important as defense abroad. Otherwise what is there to defend?”
That argument, delivered in his even, slightly weary tone, became the through line of a career that straddled Hollywood and conservation. When he died on September 16th, aged 89, he left behind not only films that defined American cinema but also institutions and movements that changed how Americans thought about land, water, and climate.
He grew up in Santa Monica in the 1940s, when its open coastlines and green spaces offered a boy escape from school and family strictures. The defining moment came a little later, on a road trip to Yosemite with his mother. Emerging from a long tunnel into the valley, he saw granite walls rising above forests and water. “I knew I didn’t want to just see it, I wanted to be in it—to be in nature,” he told his grandson Conor Schlosser for Orion last year. That sense of wanting to dwell in landscapes, rather than glance at them, stayed with him.
After art studies in Paris and a faltering start in theater, he achieved fame in 1969 with “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” Wealth and recognition soon followed. But he recoiled from Los Angeles sprawl, remembering the small city of his childhood turning into a haze of cement and smog. In 1963 he bought two acres from a sheepherder in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains, eventually expanding it to thousands of acres. From that base, called Sundance, he built not only a home but also a cultural enterprise: first the Sundance Institute, which nurtured independent filmmakers, then the Sundance Film Festival, which grew from 150 attendees in the late 1970s to tens of thousands. Both reflected his belief that stories ignored by the mainstream deserved a stage.
His environmentalism began in earnest in the early 1970s, when he fought to stop a coal plant on Utah’s Kaiparowits Plateau. To locals he was a Hollywood interloper; he was burned in effigy. Yet he held firm, insisting that beauty and fragility outweighed utility. Southern California Edison eventually abandoned the project, and decades later the area became part of the Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument.
The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) gave him a more formal platform. Joining its board in 1975, he pressed the group to use narrative as well as litigation. “You need to start telling your stories visually, because film is the most powerful medium,” he told trustees.
He proved his point by lending his voice to countless campaigns. After the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010, he filmed an impromptu video recalling his teenage job as a roustabout for Standard Oil. He spoke with sympathy for workers’ dependence on oil jobs but anger at the destruction and “shameless greenwashing” of the industry. The clip, shared widely online, reached audiences far beyond a policy brief.
In 2005 he and his son James founded the Redford Center to merge storytelling with environmental action. “We started The Redford Center to merge storytelling with action,” he later explained. The films it produced or supported—on coal plants, the Colorado River, clean energy—were meant as tools. He called them “environmental solutions,” insisting that narrative was not decoration but part of the work itself. After James’s death in 2020, his grandsons continued the project.
His speeches on climate carried the same plain insistence. At the United Nations in 2015, as governments prepared for the Paris talks, he told delegates: “Your mission is as simple as it is daunting: Save the world before it’s too late.” He warned that “everywhere we look, moderate weather is going extinct,” and pressed leaders to act not in half measures but immediately. He tied the argument to family, speaking “as an environmental advocate, a father, grandfather, and a concerned citizen.”
Redford routinely linked film and environment. In directing “A River Runs Through It,” based on Norman Maclean’s novella, he set the story against the threatened Blackfoot River. “Milagro Beanfield War” explored water rights in New Mexico. “Jeremiah Johnson” and “The Horse Whisperer” gave mountains and plains as much presence as human characters. He liked to say that landscapes could be characters themselves, shaping fate as much as dialogue or plot.
His activism was not without cost. Speaking against developers and coal companies in the 1970s meant risking the goodwill of financiers and studio executives. “I was seen as an outsider—Hollywood actor, what does he know?” he recalled. But the risks never dissuaded him. “At the time when I realized how important the environment was for me, and how important it was to sustain it, the predominant thinking came from people who saw it in a different way. They saw the environment as something to destroy so they could build, something they could develop. So very early on, when I realized the importance of the environment, I also realized that I was going to have to play a role in protecting it, and it might not be easy.”
He compared his support for independent film to environmentalism: both gave voice to what was ignored, both sought to protect what was in danger of being lost. He had no illusion of permanence.
“Life is essentially sad. Happiness is sporadic. It comes in moments and that’s it. Extract the blood from every moment,” he told Matthew Belloni for Esquire in 2011.
His work, however, suggested a faith that stories, like rivers, could be restored. He pressed filmmakers to ask “what’s your story?” and urged activists to consider how a narrative might “wake up the heart.” His own story was of a man who believed that film could help people see a place, or a future, differently—and who spent his life trying to make that true.
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