Before a single movie screened at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, the message that this was the "green" Sundance was clear. Literally clear, as the water in the pitchers on the table where Robert Redford and Geoffrey Gilmore sat for the pre-festival press conference.

The pitchers were paid for by a festival sponsor, Brita water filters, who collaborated with Nalgene to provide free reusable water bottles and refill stations around Park City venues -- to replace the 50,000 single-use water bottles used and discarded at last year's festival. If that wasn't enough of a sign, there was the Insight Hybrid (from new Sundance sponsor Honda) strategically parked outside the front door of festival headquarters.

Then there were the movies, particularly the documentaries, which illuminated environmental problems:

» "Crude," which detailed a never-ending class-action lawsuit filed by Ecuadorean locals against Chevron over decades of pollution.

» "No Impact Man," a humorous look at a family's efforts to reduce its carbon footprint.

» "Dirt! The Movie," which extolled the importance of topsoil to human existence -- and the threats to dirt from extraction industries, factory farming and asphalt.

» "The Cove," an activist expose of a secret dolphin slaughter in a Japanese coastal town.

» "Big River Man," about a Slovenian endurance swimmer who spotlights pollution issues by swimming the world's major rivers.

» "The End of the Line," which warns of the dangers of overfishing the world's oceans.

» "Earth Days," the festival's closing-night film, a profile of pioneers in the environmental movement.

Filmmakers worked the festival hard to promote their causes. The producers of "The End of the Line" asked actor Robert DeNiro to take bluefin tuna off the menu of his Nobu restaurants. Dolphin crusader Ric O'Barry, featured in "The Cove," appealed at the Awards Night ceremony for Japanese broadcaster NHK (a Sundance supporter) to break a media blackout of dolphin-related stories.

Surely there were skeptics who thought this emphasis on the environment was just another case of leftie Hollywood types preaching to the choir. But if you doubted the perils facing our globe, you only had to do one thing during Sundance: Drive back into Salt Lake City.

After a week in the high mountain air, I came home for a day and was dismayed by the pollution in the Salt Lake Valley. Don't call it "haze," or an "inversion." This was smog, caused by humans and slowly killing humans.

The hopeful part of the "green" Sundance is that the movies didn't just spotlight problems, but suggested solutions. We made this mess, and we can still fix it. But we have to act now.

Sean P. Means is a pop culture columnist. Reach him at vulture@sltrib.com