TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/042390/0423336.000

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                                                                                ENVIRONMENT, Page 78

EARTH DAY

Defenders of the Planet


From around the world, six "grass-roots heroes" have been
chosen as the first winners of the Goldman Environmental Prize
"for men and women of vision and courage who take great risks
for the environment." Each will receive $60,000. The six:


    WALKS ON THE WILD SIDE

    A long-distance walk for a worthy cause is hardly a new
idea, but Kenyan Michael Werikhe has taken the concept to new
lengths. Over the past eight years, Werikhe, 33, has trekked
thousands of miles across Africa and Europe to raise money to
save the black rhino, one of the world's most endangered
species.

    Elephant tusks, rhino horns and leopard skins confiscated
from poachers were a common sight in the "ivory room" of the
Kenyan Game Department's Mombasa office, where Werikhe used to
work. But a pair of 50-kg (110-lb.) tusks brought in one day by
a game warden induced him to start his one-man crusade. "Being
an African, I see wildlife as part of my heritage," Werikhe
says. "If wildlife goes, then part of me is dead. I wanted to
campaign for wildlife in my own private way."

    On his first wildlife walk, in 1982, Werikhe traveled 2,400
km (1,500 miles), from Kampala, Uganda, through Kenya to Dar es
Salaam, Tanzania, and back to Mombasa, with only a pet python
named Survival for company. Lecturing to villagers and
schoolchildren, he raised about $30,000 for conservation groups.
In 1988 Werikhe went to Europe, covering 2,900 km (1,800 miles)
in 135 days, and collected almost $1 million for rhino
sanctuaries. Partly as a result of Werikhe's efforts, Kenya's
black rhino population -- once as low as 400 animals -- has
been slowly increasing since 1988. When Werikhe is not on one
of his journeys, he works as superintendent of security at an
auto plant. He plans to walk across the U.S. later this year and
hopes to eventually visit the Far East, where most rhino horn
and elephant ivory are sold.


    BLOCKING BULLDOZERS IN TASMANIA

    Like St. Paul on the road to Damascus, Dr. Bob Brown had a
sudden and irrevocable conversion. The Australian general
practitioner had traveled for twelve days on the Franklin River,
a beautifully remote waterway in western Tasmania, without sign
of civilization. Suddenly, near the river's headwaters, he heard
the racket of construction equipment -- jackhammers, drilling
barges, bulldozers and helicopters. They were about to build a
dam that would have destroyed everything Brown had just seen.
"I decided on the spot that the preventive medicine I should be
involved in was the conservation movement," says Brown, 45. He
dropped his medical practice and joined the Tasmanian Wilderness
Society, which had taken on the state power commission in what
became Australia's biggest environmental battle.

    "Saint Brown," as he is known by his opponents, became
Australia's most notorious environmentalist. During the
seven-year battle to save the river, he was robbed, shot at and
set upon by thugs. The mailbox of his spartan weatherboard
cottage was stuffed with animal entrails. But his soft-spoken
message of peace and planetary conservation prevailed, and the
dam was scuttled in 1983. Briefly jailed for barring the path
of a bulldozer, Brown was elected to the Tasmanian parliament
the day after his release -- one of five "green" M.P.s who hold
the balance of power in Australia's smallest state. Today he
speaks out regularly on such issues as nuclear disarmament and
the dangers of a runaway greenhouse effect. "This is an
intellectual and emotional revolution," says Brown. "If we don't
have a future, then we haven't got a present."


    SNORKELER SAVES A RARE REEF

    To marine biologists, the barrier reef that stretches 242
km (150 miles) along the coast of Belize is one of the seven
underwater wonders of the world, a diver's paradise replete with
about 45 kinds of coral and hundreds of species of fish. But by
the mid-1980s, fishermen, shell collectors, tourists,
construction and pollution were endangering the reef's fragile
ecosystem. Today, thanks to a two-year-long campaign headed by
Janet Patricia Gibson, 37, a Belizean botanist and zoologist, 13
sq. km (5 sq. mi.) of the reef have been set aside as the Hol
Chan (Mayan for little channel) Marine Reserve.

    Gibson, an avid snorkeler, first became interested in the
reef's fate in 1985, when she was working as a volunteer for the
Belize Audubon Society. After drawing up a plan to create the
marine reserve, she gradually gained the support of local
fishermen, developers, business owners and government officials
and then obtained the necessary funding from the World Wildlife
Fund and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

    The Hol Chan reserve -- the first of its kind in Central
America -- includes beds of sea grass, which prevent silt from
settling on the reef, and seven mangrove cays that serve as
nursery areas for many of the species living there. "Reef,
mangroves, sea grass -- they're all linked," Gibson notes. "If
you touch one part, it affects the whole." The area appears to
be sufficiently guarded against further damage: it is well
patrolled, all regulations are being enforced, and fishing and
collecting in the area have ceased. "We've seen an incredible
rise in the diversity of fish life," Gibson says. "If you dive
in a similar area that is not protected, you can see the
difference."


    A HUNGARIAN GREEN FOR A BLUE DANUBE

    When Janos Vargha took a job at the scientific journal Buvar
in Budapest, one of his first assignments was to study a dam
being built on the Danube near the Hungarian village of
Nagymaros. Vargha's article, critical of the
Czechoslovak-Hungarian project in those pre-glasnost days, was
spiked. "That was my first experience with censorship," he says.

    It was not his last. To find out why his article was killed,
Vargha began a more thorough investigation. He immersed himself
in subjects such as irrigation and geology and was named to a
commission of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences to assess the
dam's impact. One area at risk: the Danube Bend, a graceful
curve of the river near the historic residence of Hungarian
kings. Though the government banned public debate on the
project, Vargha persisted. He helped publish a newsletter about
the dam and circulated a petition against it that drew 10,000
signatures -- an action that, at the time, was the largest
public protest in Eastern Europe since 1981. Vargha was
harassed by the secret police, censured for "green anarchism"
and fired from his job.

    But the tide of history was turning his way. The Nagymaros
dam became a focal point for the budding political opposition,
and when the government began loosening its policies, he
published his original article -- in a much tougher version.
Public protests against the dam intensified, and last year
Hungary finally terminated the project. Vargha, meanwhile, has
emerged as a powerful voice of political reform. A founder of
the Alliance of Free Democrats, now the leading opposition
party, he was offered an official post within the group. But
Vargha, 40, declined. Says he: "I am first and foremost an
environmentalist."


    FIGHTER FOR BORNEO'S HIDDEN PEOPLE

    Harrison Ngau, a Kayan tribesman in Malaysian Borneo, has
endured imprisonment, house arrest and government harassment
over the past three years. His "crime": helping Borneo's
indigenous people try to halt the rampant logging that is
destroying their way of life and some of earth's most ancient
tropical forests.

    When timber interests first came to Ngau's area in the state
of Sarawak in 1977, several thousand natives lived entirely off
the forests. But logging and settlement plans have reduced that
number to fewer than 500 Penan tribesmen, who still cling to
nomadic ways. Even these remaining nomadic clans are threatened
by a powerful alliance of Japanese trading companies, merchants
and local politicians, who continue to push logging operations
ever deeper into the interior.

    Ngau, now 30, became concerned about logging in the late
1970s when its devastating effects began to become apparent. In
1982 he set up a branch of Friends of the Earth in Sarawak to
help preserve the forests the Penans call "our bank and our
shops." Ngau and his colleagues became investigators, exposing
links between logging companies and politicians. Later, when the
Penans found the courts stacked in favor of timber interests,
they took the desperate step of blockading logging roads. Ngau
and Friends of the Earth provided legal help and made the
Penans' plight the focus of international protests. "It is our
time to look after our place so that it will have a future,"
says Ngau, who spent 60 days in prison for his efforts to help
the natives.

    In the face of indomitable natives and pressure from foreign
environmentalists, the Sarawak government has begun a dialogue
with the Penans, and Malaysians have begun to respect those
natives who choose to live in the forests. Thanks to Ngau and
his colleagues, there is a sliver of hope that the grim sacking
of Sarawak may be halted.


    LOVE CANAL'S FEISTY MUCKRAKER

    She was a storybook Niagara Falls housewife, baking homemade
bread, keeping a spotless kitchen and raising her family in the
neighborhood known locally as Love Canal. But in 1978 Lois
Gibbs' life took an abrupt turn. That was when she became
convinced that the toxic goo seeping from an abandoned
chemical-waste dump three blocks from her home was making her
children -- and those of her neighbors -- sick. Stymied by
stonewalling corporate and government bureaucrats, she summoned
strengths and talents she did not know she had. Over a period of
two years, Gibbs knocked on doors, passed out petitions, gave
speeches, hounded public officials, picketed, sat in, got
arrested and, finally, took hostage a couple of EPA agents until
the FBI ordered her to release them. That got President Carter's
attention and ultimately forced the Government to evacuate the
neighborhood.

    The woman who transformed Love Canal into an international
symbol of the dangers of toxic waste has become a role model for
a generation of homemaking ecocrusaders. With part of the
$30,000 that New York State paid for her home, she packed her
children and her belongings into a U-Haul and headed for
Washington and a career as a professional lobbyist. Today she
runs the Citizens Clearinghouse for Hazardous Wastes, a
consulting service based in Arlington, Va., for communities in
Love Canal-like situations. "The only way to make change is to
do it on the local level and move up," says Gibbs, 38. Two of
her biggest battles at the moment: protecting some 250 members
of the mining community of Kellogg, Idaho, where lead has been
leaching from an old Gulf Resources smelter, and trying to help
400 families living near five toxic lagoons at the Mill Service
dump site in Yukon, Pa.