Filmmaker Mark Kitchell/First Run Features

“It makes the 60’s and the anti-war and civil rights movements look easy,” he provocatively stated. “There has never been a movement like this in all of history.”

Long gone is the era when environmental action meant promoting recycling and working to save the local swamp. The hard-fought local victories by the likes of Lois Gibbs may do little to prepare us for the planet-sized challenge of bringing CO₂ levels under control. And yet, with the future still so uncertain, it helps to know where we’ve been. If there’s reason for hope going forward, it’s in the commitment to opposing dams and containing chemicals that activists have shown before. If there’s a source for continued resolve, then the same kind of ardor that enabled those earlier triumphs will have to inflame people’s spirits now.

“It’s a very difficult thing to do — to make an optimistic film about the environment,” says Kitchell.

In A Fierce Green Fire, he seems to have half-succeeded. The screen goes dark just as the stakes are highest and the drama is heating up. Now it’s up to us to determine how optimistic a film about the next 50 years of the environmental movement will end up being.