Robert Redford opened the Sundance Symposium on Global Climate Change on Wednesday evening at Sundance by hailing the conference as an opportunity to foster peace and take steps to heal the planet in a joint effort with the Soviet Union.
The "greenhouse/glasnost" symposium, which continues through Saturday, is being co-sponsored by the Institute for Resource Management (founded by Redford) and the Soviet Academy of Sciences.Addressing the Soviet delegation in his welcome, Redford said, "Our nations have competed for so long and so destructively, and the waste of resources has been both a human and an environmental tragedy. I myself am very honored to be part of an effort to rechannel our imaginations and our talents to a more positive end."
Sen. Bill Bradley, D-N.J., set the tone for the symposium, saying that the spirit of greenhouse/glasnost was mutual respect.
"One of the things Soviets and the Americans share is a love of the land," Bradley said. "For both of us the land is the wellspring of our greatness. It (has) steeled our people, its beauty inspires our songs, its cruelty is the source of our sorrows."
Bradley said both Americans and Soviets have been challenged and restrained by their lands.
"Now from Chernobyl to the Love Canal, from the befouled waters off Valdez, Alaska, to the desiccated salt flats around the Aral Sea, from the nuclear waste dumps of Colorado and Ohio to the grimly polluted air of the steel and coal regions of the Urals and Ukraine - we, all of us, see the land's vulnerability to abuse, and we recognize that its potential for giving us rebirth may be slipping away," Bradley said. "The people of the Soviet Union and the people of the United States need the land, not for the material wealth it provides, but for the sense of who we are both individually and as a people."
The symposium focuses on the need for taking action to protect the global environment.
Participants include: Howard P. Allen, chairman of the board of Southern California Edison Co.; Idaho Gov. Cecil Andrus; Bill G. Aldridge, executive director of the National Science Teachers Association; Stewart Udall, a former secretary of the interior; Joe Cannon, president of Geneva Steel; Devra Lee Davis of the National Academy of Sciences; Gary Trudeau, author and cartoonist; Bruce Gelb, director of the U.S. Information Agency; Gilbert Grosvenor, president of the National Geographic Society; and Jay Hair, National Wildlife Federation.
Members of the Soviet delegation include: Roald Zinnurovich Sagdeev, head of the theory division of the Space Research Institute at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow; Georgii Sergeyevich Golitsyn, a physicist at the academy; and Boris Andreyevich Grushin, a former editor of Pravda and now deputy director of the National Center for Public Opinion Research.