TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/042390/0423337.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 9.8 KB | 186 lines

                                                                                ENVIRONMENT, Page 76

EARTH DAY

Greening From the Roots Up


The fanfare masks a quiet revolution: millions of ordinary
Americans are leading the environmental movement from their
homes and town halls.

By PRISCILLA PAINTON


    Bette Midler will play Mother Earth, and Madonna will shimmy
for the rain forest. Tennesseans will ring bells across their
state; Oregonians will bang drums. Elephants will crush aluminum
cans at Washington's National Zoo in a jungle version of
recycling. Manhattan will display the world's largest
energy-efficient light bulb. And the Walt Disney Co. will
distribute a video about water pollution, starring the Little
Mermaid.

    Earth Day 1990 is destined to follow the new tradition of
Live Aid, Sport Aid and Band Aid: it will appeal to the
abbreviated American attention span with a huge 24-hour dose of
stunts, palaver and celebrity hoo-ha. But the environmental
movement will be able to survive its commercial mugging, dust
itself off and plod forward toward its goal of a cleaner planet.
For Earth Day is merely marginal, a loud fashion statement for
a quiet revolution in American life. From East Los Angeles to
Taylor, N.Y., the morning after Earth Day will find millions of
ordinary environmentalists returning to their self-appointed
tasks in one of the boldest and most tenacious political
movements of the 20th century.

    Unlike America's first environmental awakening 20 years ago,
touched off in 1970 by the vast bucolic gambol of the first
Earth Day, this one is not defined by young idealists in
ponytails and Birkenstocks. Nor is the movement focused
primarily on developing a body of national environmental laws.
Earth Day 1990 is driven from below by a wide assortment of
Americans -- from housewives to chemical-plant workers and
fishermen -- whose impatience with their fouled neighborhoods
has forced cities and states to become legislative trendsetters
and pass laws far stricter than the Federal Government's. "The
environmental movement of the '60s was relatively elite and
focused on national lawmaking," says former Arizona Governor
Bruce Babbitt. "Today the power is being regenerated through the
grass roots. Just as the civil rights movement began at the
neighborhood lunch counter, this new environmental movement is
beginning at the neighborhood pond."

    There, and near national parks, nuclear power plants, dumps
and even freshly fertilized lawns, Americans with nothing in
common but an urge to protect their habitat have formed groups
with names like Wyoming's Pollution Posse or acronyms such as
SAVE, RESCUE and PANIC. The proliferation of environmental
vigilantes took off in the mid-1980s at an astonishing rate. In
1984, 250 names were on the list of community groups regularly
in contact with the National Toxics Campaign, a Boston-based
organization that offers technical assistance to homegrown
environmentalists. That list now has 1,200 names. The Citizens
Clearinghouse for Hazardous Wastes, in Arlington, Va., which
four years ago was helping 1,700 local groups fight
contamination problems, is now in touch with about 7,000.

    In many ways this explosion of environmental populism comes
late to the U.S. The veteran West German Green movement is ten
years old and, along with similar movements in other West
European countries, has moved from fringe agitation to national
electoral politics. The Greens now have 41 members of parliament
in West Germany, 20 in Sweden, 13 in Italy, 9 in Belgium and
Austria, and 2 in Luxembourg. In Eastern Europe, which is barely
percolating with democracy but stuck at the center of the
world's worst swath of industrial pollution, anxiety over the
environment has quickly moved to the surface. A poll released
this month on Czechoslovak television showed that 83% of
respondents considered the environment the "first priority" for
the new government. In Cracow, Poland, residents last month
elected the first Green Party mayor of any large city in Europe
and forced the local Nowa Huta steel mill to agree to shut down
six of its most polluting chimneys and furnaces.

    Across the world, Brazil's democratization has also fueled
an indigenous growth in local Green groups, 900 of which have
sprung up in the past ten years. But perhaps the best example
of the movement's infectious power is that it has even touched
Japan, where the intimacy between business and government has
kept environmentalism from penetrating far into the nation's
legal and political fabric. Even there, bands of
environmentalists have formed to protest Japan's frenetic
construction of golf courses, successfully stopping the
destruction of woodlands in about 20 cases.

    In the U.S. the surprise is the breadth and depth with which
the nation has reasserted its greenspiritedness less than a
decade after electing Ronald Reagan, a President clearly hostile
to environmental interests. In one recent poll some 80% of
Americans said they would support more strenuous environmental
efforts regardless of cost. But better measures of the nation's
sense of urgency about preserving the planet are the stories of
people like Lynda Draper, 40, whose fight against
ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbon emissions began in the
kitchen of her Ellicott City, Md., home early last year. "I was
basically a PTA volunteer," says Draper, until the day a
General Electric repairman came to install a new compressor in
her refrigerator. He asked her to open the window, and then she
heard the whooshing sound of CFCs venting into the atmosphere.
Draper raised such a fuss with the Environmental Protection
Agency, the newspapers and local and state officials that GE
agreed to offset the CFC discharges in its
compressor-replacement program by recapturing an equal amount
elsewhere in its operations. Draper has since stalked the halls
of Congress urging more controls on CFCs and has become one of
Maryland's environmental watchdogs, taking everything from
reforestation to recycling before the general assembly.

    Eco-guerrilla groups have grabbed headlines by pouring sand
in the fuel tanks of logging machinery and destroying
oil-exploration gear. But it is law-abiding citizens, stung by
a threat to their livelihood, their recreation or their family's
health, who are giving the nation's environmental movement its
daily, stubborn edge. In Kansas two years ago, a housewife who
lived near Wichita's Vulcan Chemical plant and whose family had
been beset with health problems handcuffed herself to a chair
outside Governor Mike Hayden's office until she could see him.
Last year a Louisiana group brought cancer-stricken children to
an environmental hearing in Baton Rouge, and protesters of a
Conoco Inc. refinery in Ponca City, Okla., set up a tent city
on state capitol grounds in 1988. Two weeks ago, in one of the
largest settlements of its kind, Conoco offered the families up
to $27 million to relocate.

    Although self-preservation motivates these backyard
ecologists, they often take their cause well beyond the
backyard, in many cases joining the loose environmental
coalitions that have become major lobbying forces in state
capitals. When her second son was born with a breathing
disorder, Marylee Orr roused her Baton Rouge neighborhood and
founded Mothers Against Air Pollution to stop a nearby
incinerator from releasing toxic polychlorinated biphenyls, or
PCBs. Now the 38-year-old housewife heads the Louisiana
Environmental Action Network, an umbrella for about 50 local
environmental hell raisers, which lobbied successfully last year
for the passage of the state's first air-quality law. In New
Jersey the social-studies class of teacher Karl Stehle at West
Milford High School scored its first environmental victory last
year when it persuaded the school board to switch from Styrofoam
trays to old-fashioned washable dishes; since then the students
have joined nationwide groups like Kids Against Pollution, have
protested McDonald's recycling practices, and are raising money
to buy 300 acres of rain forest in Belize. Says Senator Albert
Gore of Tennessee: "Just in the past few years, people are
suddenly seeing the whole picture, and they are no longer
content to just stop a landfill."

    Part of this sense of mission is the unintended legacy of
the Reagan Administration. By cutting the EPA's regulatory clout
and budget, the Administration forced the states to take up the
nation's environmental business. Says Talbot Page, an
environmental-studies professor at Brown University: "The Reagan
era created a climate in which grass-roots organizations began
to think they were needed and could be effective."

    Under this new bottom-up pressure, states and cities have
led the way in setting more stringent rules for pollution
control. While Washington is formally committed to only a 50%
reduction in CFC production by the end of the century,
governments from the state of Vermont to the city of Irvine,
Calif., have moved toward a complete prohibition. And this
November, in the best illustration of the power of kitchen
ecologists, Californians will have a chance to vote on the most
ambitious environmental package of any state in the country --
a ballot initiative that aims at nothing less than protecting
all food, air and water from chemical contamination. Says Aurora
Castillo, a member of the environmental group Mothers of East
Los Angeles: "We used to say we can't fight the government. But
we are the government."

    That political declaration is the bittersweet legacy of an
environmental degradation so sweeping that it has touched the
smallest corners of the world. It is in just such places that
people like Castillo have come to rediscover -- in votes,
petitions and protests at the county courthouse -- the
effectiveness of the most basic forms of democracy.