Offers insight into the camping trip that President Theodore Roosevelt and naturalist John Muir took to the redwoods of Yosemite in 1903, during which the two men had experiences and conversations that eventually contributed to the establishment of national parks in the United States.

"An urgent call to protect America's public lands, told through New York Times bestselling author David Gessner's American road trip with our greatest conservationist, Theodore Roosevelt, as his guide"--

Reveals how Edward Abbey's anarchistic spirit and riotous novels influenced and helped guide the nascent environmental movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Through interviews, archival footage and re-enactments, the film captures the outrage of Abbey's friends who were the original eco-warriors. In defense of wilderness, these early activists pioneered "monkeywrenching"--a radical blueprint for "wrenching the system." As exemplified by EarthFirst! in...

"The American people sees itself advance across the wilderness, draining swamps, straightening rivers, peopling the solitude, and subduing nature," wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835. That's largely how we still think of nineteenth-century America today: a country expanding unstoppably, bending the continent's natural bounty to the national will, heedless of consequence. A country of slavery and of Indian wars. There's much truth in that vision....

Originally perceived as a cheap and plentiful source of power, the commercial use of nuclear energy has been controversial for decades. Worries about the dangers that nuclear plants and their radioactive waste posed to nearby communities grew over time, and plant construction in the United States virtually died after the early 1980s. The 1986 disaster at Chernobyl only reinforced nuclear power's negative image. Yet in the decade prior to the Japanese...