TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/042991/0429330.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 9.0 KB | 198 lines

                                                                                ENVIRONMENT, Page 66

Saviors Of the Planet


On Earth Day, seven grass-roots heroes win the esteemed Goldman
Prize


    "Think globally, act locally" has become environmentalists'
motto. To reward individuals who take this principle to heart,
the Goldman Environmental Foundation in San Francisco last year
created a kind of Nobel Prize for the green movement. The
$60,000 awards are given annually to representatives from six
continents for "their grass-roots efforts to preserve and
enhance the environment." The awards have already been put to
good use. Harrison Ngau used his 1990 prize money to campaign
for and win a more exalted platform for his efforts to save
Malaysia's forests: a seat in that nation's Parliament.


    Rain-Forest Caretaker


    Everybody wants to save the exotic plants and animals of
the Amazon. But until quite recently, nobody seemed to notice
that the rain forest is also filled with people -- more than a
million native Indians who have been hunting, fishing and
gardening there for thousands of years.

    That perception has started to change, thanks in large
part to Evaristo Nugkuag, 41, a Peruvian who has emerged as the
leading spokesman for the indigenous people of the Amazon. Born
of the Aguaruna tribe and educated by missionaries, he watched
firsthand the encroachment of loggers, miners and now drug
traffickers on traditional Indian lands. Today, as president of
a group representing 229 tribes, he argues persuasively that the
best way to save the rain forest is to make the Indians its
caretakers.


    A Candid Cameraman of the High Seas


    Environmentalists have traditionally used confrontation to
call attention to their cause, but Sam LaBudde, a San Francisco
biologist, chose a more subtle tactic: he became a spy. His
mission was to document the indiscriminate slaughter of dolphins
by fishermen using mile-long purse seines to catch tuna in the
Pacific.

    In October 1987, LaBudde, now 34, persuaded the owner of
a Panamanian tuna boat to hire him as a deckhand. For the next
five months he drove speedboats, cooked for the crew -- and
surreptitiously filmed the hundreds of dolphins trapped and
drowned in the Maria Luisa's nets. The resulting 11-minute
video, aired on network news shows, not only triggered a
nationwide boycott of tuna in 1988 but also forced canners to
change their ways. Last year H.J. Heinz, Van Camp Seafood and
Bumble Bee Seafoods announced that they would no longer buy tuna
caught in the dolphin-killing nets.

    Since his exploits on the Maria Luisa, LaBudde, under the
auspices of the Earth Island Institute, has filmed Asian
drift-net vessels catching dolphins, turtles and sea birds 2,415
km (1,500 miles) north of Hawaii; investigated the illegal sale
of walrus ivory in Alaska; and documented the decline of river
dolphins in China's Yangtze River. "At times, I feel like the
coroner of the environment," says LaBudde, who hopes that one
day a cadre of camera-toting environmental investigators will
share his mission.


    Babes for the Woods


    Sweden's Roland Tiensuu, 12, thinks that preserving the
earth is too important to be left to grownups. Three years ago,
the boy learned from his teacher, Eha Kern (who shares the
Goldman with him), about the relentless destruction of the rain
forests in Latin America. Tiensuu was worried that by the time
he and his classmates grew up, there would be no rain forests
left to save. "I thought, `There must be something we can do,'
" he recalls. "I saw a television program where people planted
trees to replace some of those that had been cut down. But, of
course, we couldn't do that because we lived far away in Sweden.
Then I thought that instead we could buy the rain forest."

    Under Kern's energetic guidance, Tiensuu and the rest of
the class organized a bake sale in their small village of
Fagervik and raised enough money to buy four hectares (10 acres)
of rain forest in Costa Rica's spectacular Monteverde Reserve.
Their campaign gave birth to Barnens Regnskog, or the Children's
Rain Forest, a nonprofit organization whose young supporters in
several thousand Swedish schools have bought 7,000 hectares
(17,300 acres) of jungle with the $1.5 million they have raised
so far. Schoolchildren in Germany, Japan and the U.S. have
followed suit. In appreciation, the Monteverde Conservation
League, which maintains the reserve, has named part of the rain
forest the Bosque Eterno de los Ninos, or Children's Eternal
Forest.


    Japan's Green Gadfly


    Just a few years ago, Japan loomed as an
environmentalist's nightmare. While the rest of the world was
awakening to an unfolding ecological calamity, Japan was
defiantly importing such environmentally sensitive items as
ivory and tropical timbers without apparent regard for the
consequences. More recently, however, Japan has begun to turn
around. The nation imposed a moratorium on ivory imports,
altered fishing practices that threaten sea life, and has begun
to discuss reducing its consumption of tropical woods. Part of
the credit for the change must go to Yoichi Kuroda, a Japanese
environmental activist who exposed the mayhem wrought by Japan's
hunger for timber.

    Japan had only a tiny environmental movement when Kuroda
founded the Japan Tropical Action Network in 1987. One of his
first projects was to document Japan's huge role in the
tropical-timber trade in a study published by the World Wildlife
Fund. To make sure the message hit home, Kuroda staged a series
of publicity stunts in Tokyo. In 1989, he marshaled the press
in front of Marubeni, a timber importer, and presented
bewildered officials with a giant cardboard chainsaw as a grand
prize for rain-forest destruction.

    Cheerful and cherubic, Kuroda still leads the life of an
ascetic. A fellow environmentalist observed, "If the
high-powered conservationists out of Washington had to live in
his apartment with his income, they would quit in five minutes."
Kuroda is pleased that his government has begun to respond to
his campaign, but he shows no sign of quitting. "Japanese people
have a responsibility for the destruction of Sarawak's forests,"
he says. "If they can understand that, the forests can be
saved."


    Planting Trees -- and Hope


    As Kenya's leading environmentalist, Wangari Maathai has
been honored as a hero and denounced as a subversive. Maathai,
51, is the founder and director of the Green Belt Movement, a
14-year-old tree-planting project staffed primarily by women.
The internationally acclaimed movement, which has spread to a
dozen African nations, has planted 10 million trees. The goal:
to counter rampant tree clearing and the advance of the African
desert, which contribute to poverty and hunger. To date, 50,000
Kenyan women have worked in 1,500 GBM nurseries, earning 4 cents
for each tree they tend; funds come from benefactors on four
continents.

    Maathai, the first woman in Kenya to earn a Ph.D. (in
anatomy) and to become a professor at the University of Nairobi,
has at times crossed swords with the Kenyan government for
questioning aspects of modernization. In 1989 she was thrown out
of her state-owned offices when she opposed construction of a
62-story skyscraper -- the tallest on the continent -- in a
public park in Nairobi. Maathai simply moved her headquarters
into her home, and triumphed as investors withdrew their support
from the project. Maathai is philosophical about such battles:
"You cannot fight for the environment without eventually getting
into conflict with politicians."


    An Ardent Advocate for Antarctica


    With a marine biologist mother, agricultural scientist
father and relatives who variously helped create the British
Labour Party and served in the French Resistance, how could
Catherine Wallace of New Zealand turn out to be anything but an
ecological crusader? She got the call to action 12 years ago,
when she learned that a mining company had obtained exploration
rights from the government for the forest lands on her family's
sheep ranch on the North Island's rugged Coromandel peninsula
and was about to excavate. "I thought this was outrageous and
unjust," recalls Wallace, now 39 and a lecturer in resource
economics at Victoria University in Wellington. "I began to
protest strongly not only about people marching onto private
property but possibly destroying it as well."

    Wallace managed to halt the project, and has been battling
other acts of "environmental vandalism" ever since. Her fiercest
and most ambitious campaign is not quite so close to home: the
preservation of Antarctica. She wants it declared a world park,
with limited tourism and a ban on industry and mining.
Otherwise, she fears, "people will behave like junkies, drilling
and digging until there's nothing left." So far, a dozen
countries, including Wallace's own, have endorsed a world park,
but ecological gluttons, like the U.S. and Britain, have yet to
sign on.