Redford's oil-lease stance bashed

Using the Sundance Film Festival as a backdrop and casting Robert Redford in a new role of "villain," a group of black ministers from around the country on Wednesday challenged the movie star and like-minded environmentalists to recognize that their efforts to prohibit tapping into more of the area's fossil fuel reserves in effect promotes real world hardships on poor Americans.

"A higher value is being placed on the landscape than the people who live on that landscape," said Niger Innis, rally organizer and national spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).

Redford, who lives in Utah, has spoken out about recent attempts by the Bush administration to sell oil leases in the eastern Utah oil shale areas and is against other leases near Arches National Park.

Redford, who a spokesman said is not unaware of the plight of the poor but didn't consider making a case for more drilling as a productive step toward alleviating poverty, was essentially booed by the ministers who claimed he is out of touch and too ensconced in his wealth to realize the connection.

Critics of CORE claim that the ministers are actually a bought-and-paid-for front for big oil, particularly Exxon-Mobile, who they say have given the organization hundreds of millions of dollars to stump for more drilling.

The ministers took offense at the assertion and said neither the trip to Salt Lake nor their ministries in any way are tethered to the political urges of any group.

Bishop Harry R. Jackson, Jr., chairman, High-Impact Leadership Coalition and senior pastor with Hope Christian Church in Beltsville, Md., called the claim an affront that amounts to an accusation that good-hearted, morally centered people have been bribed into doing what is right.

"I don't receive money from any of those groups," Jackson said. "I'm here because I'm concerned about the poor."

"The implication that somehow our integrity should be questioned on what we've been fighting for three and a half decades is outrageous," Innis said. Some groups have received funding from oil companies, he added, "but so do environmental groups. And what we receive is infinitesimal to the amounts British Petroleum and others give to them."

Phillip H. Porter, Jr., pastor of the Denver, Colo., All National Church of God in Christ, said the group is raising awareness "that there is a real life impact of 'haves' telling those who 'don't have' 'what they can't have. We are all connected, no man is an island, and no man walks alone. We're just here to remind people of that."