Environmentalism runs in his family

Edward Norton is an environmentally friendly actor.

Whenever he is in town -- the 35-year-old Norton’s home base is New York -- he drives a hybrid car. His Los Angeles home is equipped with solar panels. And through a foundation started by his grandfather years ago to help families move out of poverty, Norton has persuaded a solar energy company in L.A. to donate a full system to a low-income family every time a celebrity or public figure buys one.

But Norton, an Oscar nominee for “Primal Fear” and “American History X,” didn’t just jump on the environmental bandwagon once he became a celebrity. He was born into a family of environmentalists. His attorney father is currently director of the Nature Conservancy China Project, which has been working in the country’s northwest Yunnan Province to protect the natural and cultural diversity of the area.

Norton hopes to get his environmental message out to a wider audience as host and narrator of the four-part National Geographic special, “Strange Days on Planet Earth,” which looks at a new discipline called Earth System Science.

The documentary, which begins Wednesday on KCET and concludes on April 27, looks at scientists who are traveling the world to study recent mysterious environmental transformations and discovering how seemingly disparate events are connected: vintage houses in New Orleans are crumbling due to a hungry termite that emanated from Southern China; an asthma epidemic in the Caribbean is linked to dust storms thousands of miles away in Africa.

“I think we kind of grew up on the same limited kind of format of nature and science films,” the intense actor said in a recent interview. “It was the stolid behavior-science film. I always felt in those films that they made nature exotic. I think on some levels we all love those, but on some level it sets up the gulf between, I think, people’s sense of their own lives and the natural world -- that those two things are not interrelated.”

Connecting the dots

Norton became involved with “Strange Days” because he believes the series bridges that gulf. “Fundamentally, it is making an attempt to make people see how things that they might dismiss as exotic or unrelated to them is profoundly related to them, and how to break down that whole kind of fallacy in people’s minds that what is going on in an exotic place has nothing to do with my life. It seemed like an attempt to deepen people’s sense of interconnectedness.”

He admitted he was surprised, reading the script, by the degree to which scientists can now “connect the dots between things.”

“Fundamental science has now taken something that was theoretical, almost philosophical -- the interconnectedness -- and made it demonstrative of the fact that the Earth is not made of these disparate ecosystems, but is in fact one big integrated biological piece of machinery,” he said.

Norton said that the radical changes in the ecosystem do alarm him and that the world is “realizing too slowly” what is going on.

But part of him is guardedly optimistic, “in the sense that the brilliant intellectual capacity in the mind of man that created all of the technology and industries that we are now realizing are causing these things to happen, I believe, almost by definition, has to be capable of correcting them. I think we absolutely have the capacity to grasp what it is that we are doing.”

What gives him a sense of despair and even deflation is that, “on a human historical scale, I think human culture and human society doesn’t make radical changes in a way until the pain comes. As people, we tend to deal with the needs of the day until something really significant makes us lift our heads high enough up out of our daily lives to say, this is for real.”

The series, Norton said, does demonstrate that “professional minds, scientific minds have seen through the veil. There are people who have gone around to the other side of the curtain to see how deeply interconnected this living machinery of the planet is.”