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- ENVIRONMENT, Page 80EARTH DAYMore Heroes for Mother Nature
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- They may not be household names, but activists from the shores
- of the Mississippi to the plains of Kenya are making a
- difference.
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- STANDING TALL
-
- Residents of Louisiana's "cancer alley" -- the 120-km
- (75-mile) stretch of the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to
- New Orleans that is lined with 136 petrochemical plants and
- refineries -- have learned to endure choking fumes, stunted
- gardens, contaminated crayfish and abnormally high rates of
- cancer and other ills. But with help from Janice Dickerson, of
- the New Orleans-based Gulf Coast Tenants Organization, they are
- no longer suffering in silence.
-
- Since the early 1970s, Dickerson, 38, has visited bungalows
- and trailer camps, tank farms and railroad sidings trying to
- alert cancer alley's destitute inhabitants about the dangers of
- the area they live in. "Chemicals aren't racist or prejudiced,"
- she tells her listeners. "Eventually they will move into your
- community. To fight industry, all you've got to do is get
- organized."
-
- Dickerson is no stranger to the blighted area. She grew up
- in Reveilletown, a farming community that abutted a chemical
- plant until it was relocated in 1988 as the result of a class
- action she instigated. A former captain in the corrections
- department, Dickerson began working full time for Gulf Coast in
- January and helped organize this week's Second Great Louisiana
- March Against Poisons. "All we want," she says, "is for the air
- and water to get cleaner so that it doesn't pose a danger."
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- THE BATTLE TO KEEP THE BEACHES BEAUTIFUL
-
- When Linda Maraniss visited the Texas Gulf Coast four years
- ago, she expected to see pristine sand and water. Instead, she
- found rotting garbage, old diapers and discarded furniture.
- Determined to do something about the situation, Maraniss
- returned to Austin, where she serves as regional director of the
- Washington-based Center for Marine Conservation, and organized
- the first Texas Coastal Cleanup. It has since become an annual
- event; last fall more than 8,000 people bagged 158 tons of
- trash. And 24 other states now hold their own cleanups.
-
- Maraniss, 40, who worries about the damage that beach litter
- does to marine life, promotes her cause at churches, schools,
- clubs and conferences. Her message seems to be getting through.
- At least one oil company has banned Styrofoam cups on its
- drilling rigs in the Gulf. And next year Texas will require
- codes on plastic bottles to identify the type of material they
- are made of, a measure that will make recycling easier.
-
-
- PROTECTOR FOR THE AMAZON
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- Jose Lutzenberger, an ecologically oriented agronomist, is
- Brazil's most unflinching environmentalist. Lutzenberger aroused
- the anger of the administration of former President Jose Sarney
- by daring to declare publicly that the rest of the world had a
- legitimate interest in the fate of the Amazon rain forest. "If
- you set your homes on fire, it will threaten the homes of your
- neighbors," Lutzenberger noted with simple eloquence. Because
- of his reputation for outspokenness, the international
- environmental community was dumbfounded in March, when newly
- inaugurated President Fernando Collor de Mello named
- Lutzenberger Secretary of the Environment.
-
- His first priority will be to halt the destruction of the
- Amazon, but he has also vowed to protect Brazil's last remaining
- Atlantic forests and gravely threatened savannas. Some
- Brazilians are concerned that the new Secretary might be too
- inflexible and idealistic for the rough realities of government,
- but Lutzenberger, 63, calls himself a "possibilist." The Gaia
- Foundation, a private organization he set up, finances
- problem-solving environmental projects. Example: an effort to
- help poor settlers improve agricultural techniques so that they
- do not have to clear as much forest land to produce enough
- crops.
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- A WOMEN'S BRIGADE OF TREE PLANTERS
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- In 1977 Wangari Maathai took on a formidable mission:
- holding back Kenya's advancing desert. Rampant tree cutting and
- unchecked population growth have stripped much of the country's
- land, generating hunger and poverty. In response, Maathai
- organized the Green Belt Movement, a national tree-planting
- program run by women. "Because women here are responsible for
- their children, they cannot sit back, waste time and see them
- starve," explains Maathai, 49, who was the first Kenyan woman
- to earn a Ph.D. (in anatomy) and the first to become a
- professor at the University of Nairobi.
-
- With GBM's support, women establish nurseries within their
- villages and then persuade farmers to accept and raise tree
- seedlings. GBM pays the women 2 cents for each native plant they
- grow; exotic species are worth one-fifth as much. Farmers get
- the plants for free. So far, Maathai has recruited about 50,000
- women, who have spurred the planting of 10 million trees. She
- still has a long way to go toward her original goal of planting
- a tree for every Kenyan (the population is now about 24
- million), but in the meantime, her idea has inspired similar
- movements in more than a dozen other African nations.
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