Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/042792/0427330.000

Text File | 1992-09-10 | 13KB | 256 lines

                                                                                ENVIRONMENT, Page 48

Endangered Species


No, not owls or elephants. Humans who fight to save the planet
are putting their lives on the line.

By ANASTASIA TOUFEXIS  -- Reported by Hannah Bloch/New York, Ian
McCluskey/Rio de Janeiro and Anita Pratap/New Delhi


    For most people interested in protecting the environment,
the costs of activism are measured by a little time and a
little money. Attend an Earth Day rally, write a check, recycle
the trash -- that's about all it takes. But for some of the
most determined defenders, the commitment -- and the costs --
can be much higher. Around the world, more and more
ecoactivists are paying with pain and peril, and sometimes their
lives.

    Chico Mendes, the Brazilian organizer who was assassinated
in 1988 by ranchers for trying to preserve the Amazon forests
for small-scale rubber tappers, remains the best known of the
ecomartyrs, but his case is far from unique. In many countries,
crusaders bring down the wrath of private interest groups,
government agencies and even fellow citizens, and endure abuse
ranging from intimidation and arrests to beatings and murder.
"It's not at all unusual to have someone threatened or harassed
in some way," says Pat Costner, director of toxics research for
Greenpeace U.S.A. "It happens more often than not."

    Costner, who testifies at public hearings on the hazards
of waste incinerators, became a target herself last year. She
returned home one night and discovered that her home and office
near Eureka Springs, Ark., had burned to the ground. Lost in
the fire were valuable reference materials and reports. At
first police ignored her request for an investigation; they got
moving after arson detectives hired by Greenpeace found an empty
fuel can in her burned-out living room. But no one has been
charged in the case.

    Stephanie McGuire has a more harrowing tale. The Florida
activist has threatened to sue Procter & Gamble, charging that
a company pulp mill has polluted the water around the town of
Perry. Two weeks ago, she was attacked at her remote fishing
camp by three men who beat her and burned her with a cigar. The
men cut her on the cheek and chest and poured water from the
contaminated river on the wounds, taunting her, she says, with
the words "This is what you get for trying to make us lose our
jobs." P&G denies any connection with the assault but has
offered a $5,000 reward for the apprehension of McGuire's
attackers.

    Judi Bari, a member of the radical group Earth First!, is
still hurting from the explosion in 1990 of a pipe bomb in her
Subaru station wagon. The Oakland blast left her with a
paralyzed right foot and a dislocated spine. Earth First! is
known for tactics that sometimes endanger the safety of loggers,
though Bari insists that she is against violence. Authorities
arrested her on suspicion that she knowingly transported the
bomb, but no charges were brought. Bari claims that officials
have failed to investigate the case seriously, and has filed a
civil rights suit against the Oakland police and the fbi.

    For Canada's Colleen McCrory, the torment has been mostly
emotional and financial. In her two decades of crusading against
the clear-cutting of forests in British Columbia, she has
endured a smear campaign by the pro-logging newsletter Red Neck
News, the beating of a friend and the vilifying of her three
children at school. A high school dropout and divorced mother,
McCrory supported her family on income from a small clothing
store she ran in her hometown of New Denver, which sits in the
shadows of the Valhalla mountains, part of a spectacular range
thickly forested by ancient trees. A three-year boycott
organized by logging advocates forced her out of business in
1985 and deep into debt. Says McCrory, who founded Canada's
Future Forests Alliance, which calls for the setting aside of
12% of the land as wilderness: "The scars remain on us, and in
the town."

    Persecution of activists appears to be worst in developing
countries, where environmentalism has become entwined with the
struggle to ensure basic rights for the underprivileged and
disenfranchised. There is new recognition that the livelihood
of millions of native people and other rural populations depends
on the protection of their environment. In Malaysia, logging
destroys the hunting and fishing of the indigenous peoples,
including the Penan and Kelabit. In Brazil, ranchers, loggers
and gold miners menace Amazon tribes. In India, the huge dams
and power plants that the government has favored to foster
industrial growth have displaced millions of peasants. The
issue, says Sunderlal Bahuguna, who is fighting to halt
construction of India's Tehri dam project, is "not development
vs. environment. It is extinction vs. survival."

    Since the environmental battle has economic and social
dimensions, ecoactivists have forged natural alliances with
political groups such as trade unions, women's organizations and
civil liberties proponents. Kenya's Wangari Maathai, creator of
the Green Belt movement, which has planted 10 million trees
worldwide, has helped found the new Forum for the Restoration
of Democracy, a group opposed to the regime of President Daniel
arap Moi. She is now leading a hunger strike by mothers who are
fasting for the release of political prisoners.

    Ecoactivists' bolder profile has led to crackdowns by
governments and their supporters, who see the agitation as a
major challenge to their power and plans. Last month the chief
minister in Sarawak, a Malaysian state, labeled logging
opponents "traitors," a charge increasingly leveled at
protesters. Another name commonly given them is "ecoterrorists."

    That may be a fair description of some activists who have
crossed the line between agitation and lawlessness. In the U.S.,
for instance, members of the radical Earth First! allegedly
poured sand in bulldozer gas tanks and drilled dangerous metal
spikes into trees marked for chopping. But most environmental
protesters endorse more traditional, nonviolent tactics.
Activists maintain that they violate laws as a last resort and
usually only when the law has been misused or formulated to
crush opposition.


    Whatever their tactics, the crusaders often find
themselves in serious trouble. Some examples:

    -- Kenya's Maathai is facing trial on charges of
publishing "a false rumor which is likely to alarm the public,"
namely that the Moi government was planning to hand over power
to the military. Last month, during a protest by fasting mothers
of political prisoners, she was tear-gassed and clubbed
unconscious by police. In January more than 100 police officers
swarmed her house in Nairobi and arrested her. A night in jail
with no mattress or blankets so aggravated her rheumatism that
she was hospitalized for several days after her release.

    A winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize last year,
Maathai interweaves her new political activities with her old
fight to preserve Kenya's land. Her opposition to a plan by the
ruling party and the late Robert Maxwell to build a 62-story
office building on the site of Nairobi's Uhuru Park frightened
away other foreign investors and scuttled the project. She also
led the outcry against destruction of 20 hectares (50 acres) of
forest on Nairobi's outskirts so that roses could be grown for
export. Maathai countered official claims that the site
contained no indigenous trees with a photograph of herself in
the cleared forest, clinging to the stump of a recently felled
giant hardwood.

    -- Malaysia's Anderson Mutang, founder of the Sarawak
Indigenous People's Alliance, is scheduled to go on trial in
September for operating an illegal organization. In the past six
years, Mutang, a native Kelabit who grew up in Sarawak's
forests, has directed six blockades of logging roads. Arrested
in February, he was released on bail after four weeks, including
10 days in solitary confinement in a windowless room. During his
imprisonment, he says, three pairs of police officers questioned
him for seven or eight hours a day, sometimes until 4 a.m. His
interrogators, who threatened him with torture, demanded the
names of associates and explanations of notes in his confiscated
files.

    -- India's Medha Patkar is a passionate critic of big dam
projects, especially the one scheduled for the Narmada Valley,
which will submerge 245 villages and uproot 100,000 people.
Taking a leaf from Mahatma Gandhi's book, she has organized
hunger strikes, demonstrations, sit-ins, roadblocks and rallies.
A measure of her success: the World Bank has ordered an
independent review of the environmental impact of the Narmada
dam and plans for resettling villagers, prompting foreign
investors to delay releasing fresh funds.

    For her protests, Patkar has been beaten, arrested and
banned from several villages. The former Bombay social worker
faces 10 or so trials on offenses ranging from arson to
kidnapping government officials. Patkar claims that the charges
are trumped up and that she advocates only nonviolent civil
disobedience.

    -- In Brazil, dozens of activists, including rural labor
leaders, native Indians and priests, have been beaten and shot,
allegedly by the hirelings of ranchers, logging companies, gold
miners and other interests. On top of all this, activists
contend, the justice system serves only the interests of the
rich and powerful. In February a state appeals court in Acre
overturned -- on grounds of insufficient evidence -- the
conviction of rancher Darly Alves da Silva for his participation
in the Chico Mendes murder and ordered a retrial. "The
conviction was the first time an executor of a crime against an
activist was brought to justice," says Sueli Bellato, one of the
prosecuting attorneys in the Mendes case. "The reversal is an
incentive to continue the killing."

    Many activists contend that they are on freely circulating
"hit lists." Gumercindo Rodrigues, an adviser to Mendes'
National Council of Rubber Tappers, is recovering from two
gunshot wounds he suffered last September. Gumercindo was shot
on a main street in Rio Branco, the Acre state capital. One shot
in the back at point-blank range came from a police officer.
Press accounts have also implicated Camilo Yunes Junior, a
lumber baron, in the shooting. Yunes denies any involvement. No
charges have been filed in what the courts have dismissed as a
crime of passion because Gumercindo was involved with the timber
merchant's wife. Gumercindo points out that the woman had been
separated from her husband for several months.

    In another incident last September, Antonio Batista de
Macedo, who has been organizing Indians and rural workers into
cooperatives and trade unions in western Acre, escaped death
only when an assassin's gun failed to fire. Last December, Joao
Bosco dos Santos Freire, who had been mobilizing rubber tappers
in Tarauaca, Acre, was ambushed and killed, allegedly by the son
of a landowner, who has not been charged. In January the
president of the Tarauaca rural workers union was almost killed
when two gunmen invaded his home.

    Is there a way to prevent abuses? The best method may be
to arouse global indignation. To that end, Amnesty
International publishes regular notices of outrages against
environmental activists. "The only kind of protection that these
people have is for their enemies to be made aware that if they
commit a crime, there will be a big repercussion that will
embarrass the government," observes Marcio Santilli, executive
secretary of the Nucleus for Indigenous Rights in Brasilia. U.S.
Senator Albert Gore this month introduced a congressional
resolution that calls on the U.S. government to apply pressure
on Malaysia to uphold the human rights of indigenous peoples.
New Zealand has gone further: it has said it will stop importing
tropical woods from places where there is uncontrolled logging.

    "We feel we have the international community with us,"
says Malaysia's Mutang. That is some small comfort when he is
alone in a dark cell. But the real satisfaction will come when
his efforts -- and those of hundreds of courageous men and
women like him -- begin to turn back the forces destroying
earth's irreplaceable natural resources.