Louise Rubacky's Climate Chronicles

In the fight to save Earth from climate change and its other man-made woes, there are many who dedicate themselves to studying, educating, inventing, investing, recruiting, reporting, litigating, legislating, lobbying, blogging, conserving, writing, modeling and reviewing scientific studies.

But how many heroes of the environment are equally committed to cracking you up with laughter? There’s at least one, a high priest of the tragicomic: Stephen Colbert.

Colbert has a hidden agenda, to destroy the collective unconscious calm about Planet Home’s peril. And his signature laser pointer is absurdity. (SC, before introducing Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy: “I wonder if clean coal gives clean lung?”) There’s such a surplus to draw from — absurdity, that is; maybe he’s just gone enviro-mental.

As the globe heats up, so does the world of green business conferences. For October 2009 alone, a web search shows almost 50 conferences and forums related to sustainability and the clean economy in the United States.

The environmental angle is of course a hovering presence at such events, but financial potential is generally the main focus.

Yet the recent Always On/GoingGreen event in Sausalito, Calif., was notable for the number of participants who used their stature and time to ramp up dramatic tension around the climate crisis as the key issue of our time — and to insist it must be central to all our business endeavors until it is solved.

The early moments of the ambitious new documentary EARTH DAYS, directed by Robert Stone, replay excerpts of environmental warnings and prescriptions of eight presidents, from JFK in 1963 to George W. Bush in 2006. Though the film goes on to braid the stories of nine members of the movement to save Earth from its most destructive inhabitants, those flares of passion ironically sum up our nation’s long U-turn from progress to paralysis. The history that follows, leading to the first Earth Day in 1970 and beyond, is remarkable in many ways, but the string of rhetoric highlights a political process that, despite its victories and potential, too often amounts to fiery talk. It’s a sad reality the pre-title sequence personifies from the outset.

The activists and participants are then introduced, without their names at first, but with labels for their respective eco-roles, as Vanity Fair has done in its green issues of the recent past: The Conservationist (Stewart Udall,) The Futurist (Stewart Brand,) The Forecaster (Dennis Meadows,) The Biologist (Paul Erlich,) The Motivator (Hunter Lovins,) The Politician (Pete McCloskey,) The Organizer (Denis Hayes,) The Radical (Stephanie Mills,) and The Astronaut (Russell Schweickart.)