Robert Redford's green streak runs deep
CAUSE CÉLÈBRE
At Ron Burkle's mansion, the actor regales officials from Pitzer College, a leader in environmentally proactive planning, of his own early interest in ecology, as it was known then.
ON A BALMY evening this week, the crowd at billionaire Ron Burkle's Beverly Hills estate was a mixture of high-level academia and high-level Hollywood, none higher than Robert Redford, actor, director, Sundance guru and the industry's über-environmental activist.
Serious gatherings like this at Burkle's begin with a Champagne reception in the foyer, an intimately lavish space where presidents, generals, senators and Los Angeles' moneyed elite mingle and discuss the pressing issues of the day. (Half the town has portraits of themselves with former President Bill Clinton there.)
When Redford entered the foyer from the inner sanctum of Burkle's library (call it America's best-appointed green room), members of Pitzer College's presidents' council had been chatting for an hour, munching on the estate's trademark mini-cheese burgers and bite-sized salads on a cracker.
Like all real stars, there is a space around Redford even when he is in a crowd -- an envelope of fascination and regard that seems to follow him everywhere.
A whisper went through the room when Redford appeared. He was swarmed by adoring Pitzer board members -- they don't get to see many celebs, after all. The topic du jour was sustainable environmentalism, and Redford is the elder statesman of green Hollywood. He was using solar panels at his Utah mountain refuge back when everyone else thought environmentalism involved granola for breakfast.
Not long ago, when Redford visited the Pitzer campus in Claremont to film parts of “Lions for Lambs,” he was welcomed by a kindred spirit, college President Laura Skandera Trombley, who had spent the 1980s as an English teacher trying to interest her students in Henry David Thoreau's "Walden." ("They just didn't get it," she recalled.)
But now the students do. The world's environmental strife has become a part of their cultural vocabulary. Global warming is the new Cold War. Recently, the college embarked, under Trombley's direction, on an ambitious project: building dorms entirely of materials from sustainable sources.
Redford, while filming there, was intrigued and impressed. He assigned a crew from his Sundance Channel to document the school's progress in becoming one of America's first campuses to make green an important part of its physical plan.
