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…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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