In “Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid” he went out in a blaze of bullets. Now, more than four decades later, since he joined Paul Newman to film one of the globe’s most memorable classics, Robert Redford fights a different antagonist stealing our future, climate change. If you recall the film, Butch and Sundance keep repeating the question about the posse in the distance that is chasing them: “who are those guys?” Well, it is us, all of us whose carbon footprint is bigger than the Earth can sustain.
Robert Redford immersed himself in the task of diplomat-artist as he came to speak to the UN General Assembly High-Level Meeting on Climate Change: “The environment, I’ve experienced over the years, gets little attention compared to other things. But I think because of what’s happened now – change is in the air, you can feel it – we’re in a period of change that’s positive with also some negative. Positive: you see what the Pope said. Positive: you see what happened this week with same-sex marriage; you see what’s happened with [US] Supreme Court decisions. From my point of view those are all pretty positive things. But what sits behind and on top of all this is the bigger problem that concerns everybody’s health – every country, every nation, every person. They’re all under the umbrella of climate. And because climate change is such a harsh topic with very little time to correct it – there’s been so much damage done over the years to the planet – that if we don’t do something sooner rather than later, then I don’t know what kind of planet we’re going to have to live on.” (See Full Video: “Climate change is in everybody’s backyard – Robert Redford“)
