Before he was a Hollywood icon Robert Redford, who died on Tuesday at the age of 89, was a teenager working on an oil field in California hoping to save up enough money to travel to Europe and study art.

It was an experience that would shape his lifelong commitment to climate action. “Even at the age of 16, it bothered me because I could see what was happening up there [was] that the propaganda of oil companies, and the lobbyists they hire, were selling the idea that it was going to be great for the economy, great for everybody. And I saw it differently," he said in a 2010 video for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

In the video, where he reflected on the Deepwater Horizon disaster that had occurred a few months earlier, Redford spoke of the oil spill’s human cost—11 peop

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