A mother feeding her baby turns to camera. She tells us: “look, I’ve heard a lot about it. But I just don’t have time to do anything”. At the end of the film we see the same mother standing up as a representative of the local chapter of the general federation of women’s club. She’s photographed speaking at a public hearing about air pollution. Her picture is printed in the local newspaper with the headline “Citizens Sound Off for Clean Air”.

Don’t Leave it all to the Experts is a public health service film produced to in order to drive forward public engagement in the U.S. Clean Air Act. We witness a staged public hearing on April 22 1969 - precisely one year before the first Earth Day. The film shows how the efforts to increase civic and regional engagement in clean air, with a narrator telling us that the act alone won’t be able to do the work.

The film invites civilians to do their own research and question medical experts, technologists, industry and accountants who will be present in these public hearings, advocating for participatory democracy as the correct mode of environmental protection. However, the film also drives forward messages of optimism: that the work is already being done and that the land is beginning to come back. 50 years later, we can better scrutinise this message, as public forums around climate have expanded beyond town halls and into every communication channel available to us.