“They’re unpaid and they’re crazy and they will go the distance.” This referred to people like two 80 year old ladies who collected enough signatures for an initiative to get voted on. It referred to a guy who spent a thousand hours across five years scrutinizing litigation-worthy details that big developers weren’t following. It involved regular citizens enlivened “to get the people interested and protective.”
You can’t just be crazy. You have to be crazy like a fox, like enlisting the help of local, state, and national politicians looking for favorable visibility and reelection. You have to travel many win-win paths, like showing ranchers and dairy farmers how they can keep their land for their families as well as for multitudes and generations of Americans.
The documentary “Rebels with a Cause” unfolds a marvelous activist, environmentalist success story. It’s more than a story. It’s history. It reaches back before the 1960s when environmentalists were referred to as conservationists – and were also referred to as one rung below communists (difficult to pinpoint what rungs they ring now). It encompasses the first Earth Day in 1972 and the extension of a golden stretch of time in America that transcended an entrenched government attitude decrying “not a cent for scenery.”
“Rebels with a Cause” concentrates on the hard wrung establishment of the Point Reyes National Seashore and the incomparable stretch of saved land that became the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.
It is far from trivial that so much entrusted land sits so close to the major urban area of San Francisco. Big developers know that big money fuels the consumptive notion that growth is inevitable and growth is good. Big developers know that paving the way for one massive project churns the concrete for the next one.
“Rebels with a Cause” recognizes not only decades of perseverance, but also a substantive amount of luck in the timing and tenor of riding a wave of sense behind the scenery. Do you want to better appreciate how citizens can shape the luck around an issue? See “Rebels with a Cause.” It’s an engaging, well-constructed example.