TL: GP USA Magazine, 
SO: Greenpeace USA (GP)
DT: March/April 1990
Keywords: military magazines greenpeace  /
Subjects include Tibet, Trident missiles,
Earth Day and media coverage of environment
greenpeace us periodicals
06/02/94 95102 bytes  
GREENPEACE MAGAZINE
March/April 1990

THE AGONY OF TIBET
Why the Trident Should Rest in Peace
Earth's Day Birthday Party
The Press Misses the Environmental Beat


THE VICTORS AND THE VANQUISHED

By Andre Carothers

MY FIRST INSTINCT WAS SIMPLY TO GO THERE. In the weeks when
Prague, Bucharest, Budapest and East Berlin erupted, the capital
of the United States had never seemed more remote from the
center of the world. 

The distance, on reflection, is more than merely geographic.
While Eastern Europeans risked life and liberty to replace the
arbitrary and self-serving rule of a corrupt elite with
democracy and the rule of law, the United States conducted an
illegal, albeit popular, invasion of Panama. A few months before
hundreds of Romanians celebrated their freedom by cutting the
symbol of the hated Ceausescu's regime from the center of their
national flags, 320 U.S. representatives voted to imprison
anyone who committed the same act with a U.S. flag. And while
Romanians took to the streets in a revolution that would leave
hundreds, perhaps thousands dead at the hands of a fanatical
dictator, George Bush quietly sent an envoy to toast his "good
friend" Deng Xiaoping, the butcher of Tiananmen Square.

But Eastern Europe's revolt was as much against the failure of
the command economies as it was for the creation of a new
political order. That Americans honor their political traditions
more in words than in deeds is, under the circumstances, of
little interest. The United States, for all its contradictions,
still remains the richest country on earth, and the people in
Eastern Europe need food, shelter and heat. So, then, to the
bottom line: surely the transition to a free market system under
the guidance of the world's most "successful" economy will, in
the long run, provide a substantial return.

Perhaps. These nations must first survive the sudden transition
to a free market, which means gutting the subsidies that have
made life in Europe's least vibrant economies tolerable. This
harsh and familiar tonic, administered as the price for the
desperately needed loans and aid, means skyrocketing prices for
basic commodities as well as unemployment and homelessness. When
applied elsewhere, it has left misery and poverty, inciting food
riots in nations from the Dominican Republic and Venezuela to
Zambia and Morocco. 

Once past that gauntlet, Eastern Europe must think of long-term
economic stability. For this, what has the West to offer? So far,
the investments consist largely of the type of grimy
industries that the environmental movement in this country
spends much of its time hounding: car and chemical
manufacturing, McDonald's restaurants and toxic pesticides. At
the same moment that the industrialized world is beginning to
question the wisdom of the car culture, Fiat, General Motors, and
Suzuki are negotiating to build plants in Eastern Europe. Two
short months after the U.S. National Academy of Sciences reported
that pesticide-free agriculture was both ecologically and
economically preferable, U.S. chemical manufacturers are
clamoring to ship dangerous pesticides to Poland, a country
already devastated by pollution. While environmentalists watch
helplessly from the sidelines, more than 2,000 joint
"development" projects unfold in Eastern Europe, many of which
differ only in degree from the industries that have placed
Poland, Romania, East Germany and Czechoslovakia among the most
polluted nations on earth.

The primary victor of this revolution, then, is not the rule of
law or democratic principles, but what Jacques Delors, the
architect of Europe's common market, calls "savage capital". In
the late 20th century, democratic freedoms are tied inextricably
(and, to some, inexplicably) to the cruel calculation of the
marketplace. This peculiar moral horizon, which looks no higher
than the individual's right to enrich himself at the expense of
others and the environment, is the East's only refuge. In a few
short years, it appears, these countries will exchange the
secret dossiers of the state security organizations for the
equally secluded machinations of the multinational corporation.

No one wishes to turn back the clock. The western model, warts
and all, won this particular war of ideas, and with good reason.
But those who think that the environment can be protected
without somehow meddling in the workings of the free market are
laboring under illusions, to borrow a phrase from Michael Lemer,
"nurtured on a well-stuffed stomach." Neither the savage
capitalism practiced by the United States Britain, Japan and many
third world countries nor the repressive command economies that
governed Eastern Europe harbored much concern for the
plight of the individual, and even less for the environment. From
a purely ecological perspective, the two competing
ideologies were barely distinguishable. 

Somewhere between these systems, or perhaps in front of them,
lies a third way. Such a social order would recognize and
harness the fruits of human ingenuity while providing for the
poor and unfortunate, as well as preserving the global
environment on which hinges the future wealth of all people.
Glimmers of this possibility lurk in the rapidly evolving social
democracies of Western Europe and Scandinavia, particularly those
with strong environmental movements.

As for the leadership of the United States, if it is not lost, it
is almost certainly compromised. After all, who can say with
conviction that the future lies in the hands of a nation that
gives proportionally less foreign aid than the other six leading
industrialized nations but spends $800 million a day on its
military, 22 times more than its spends on environmental
protection and 30 times more than it spends on the homeless?
There is even less to inspire in the fact that this country, in
the words of the director of the White House's Council on
Economic Quality, is "the most wasteful on the face of this
earth." Americans release a quarter of the earth's greenhouse
gases yet block international efforts to curb them. They consume
half the world's gasoline, but ignore any significant advances in
fuel efficiency.

What exactly is the global vision of a nation so in thrall to its
skewed vision of the "marketplace" that it declines to limit the
countless layers of expensive, unnecessary and polluting
packaging, permits entrepreneurs to export toxic waste to poor
countries and gives away irreplaceable natural resources on
public lands to private companies for logging and mining? How
secure is a nation that presides over an international debt
structure that in 1988 took $50 billion away from that portion of
the planet struggling with poverty, environmental
disintegration and debt?

In 1989 Frances Fukuyama declared the end of history, and Bill
McKibben the end of nature. We should hope that they are both
wrong--Fukuyama for concluding that this earth-strangling rogue
consumerism is somehow the summit of humanity's moral evolution,
and McKibben for penning the epitaph for a natural world free of
human impact. In the best of worlds, it would be the richest
nations, this century's ideological victors, that would make the
adjustments and sacrifices necessary to ensure the ecological
survival of the planet. They would shift their priorities,
institute a tax on fossil fuels, divert the resources spent on
the military to fund protection of the global environment, and
present a plan for the sustainable evolution of an ailing
planet. The world waits. Thus far, the only sacrifices have come
from Eastern Europe. 


THE AGONY OF TIBET 

by Galen Rowell 

The Bush administration's secret mission to China betrays not
only the victims of Tiananmen Square but three decades of
cultural genocide and ecological destruction in Tibet. Galen
Rowell reports on the death of a unique culture.

THE FOLLY OF TRIDENT 

by William M. Arkin 

At a time when the rationale for aiming missiles packed with
nuclear warheads at the Soviet Union seems increasingly shaky,
why does the Navy insist on spending $23 billion on the Trident
II missile? William Arkin explains why Greenpeace "took a
licking" off Florida last December.

COVERING THE WORLD, IGNORING THE EARTH 

by Mark Hertsgaard 

Despite the press of environmental problems, the U.S. press
consistently misses the beat. The author of On Bended Knee, the
classic work on poor reporting in the Reagan era, analyzes the
media's mistreatment of ecological news.

ECONOTES: Poland craves pesticides--Soviets oppose nuclear
tests--U.S. destroys its last rainforest--India's dams--Czech
reactor faulted.

CAMPAIGNS: Sea lion's nose dive--Driftnets snagged-- Waste trade
blunted--Eco education globalized--Stello nomination stalled--
Offshore off-limits?

ACTION ACCESS: Radiation in landfills?--Ozone depletion-- Paper
tigers--Reef protection--Test site action--Saving dolphins,
oceans, Antarctica--Slide show tour--Earth Day.


ECONOTES

PLANTING A BAD SEED 

POLAND WAS THE FIRST nation to establish democracy in Eastern 
Europe, but it remains last, trailing even filthy
Czechoslovakia, in the quality of its environment. Now, with
loans and credits from the West hinging on its willingness to
abandon price supports for food and other basic commodities,
Poland is anxious to get its agricultural sector going. But the
cost may be further environmental degradation.

In December, Poland's agriculture ministry presented Washington
and the European Community with a wish list of pesticides worth
roughly $38 million and featuring some of the world's worst
environmental offenders. Among them are Du Pont's Lannate and
American Cyanamid's Counter, both dangerous enough to be
restricted by the EPA to use by certified applicators:
DowElanco's Gallant and X-Pand, which have never been registered
in the United States and so have not been reviewed for their
toxicity; and two of Rohm and Haas' EBDCs, which are severely
restricted in the United States because of the dietary risk of
cancer. Also on the list are known ground water contaminants like
Monsanto's Lasso and Rhone-Poulenc's Temik. 

Poland's request dovetails well with the future of U.S.
pesticide manufacturers, who would see their sales increase if
Eastern Europe steps up its agrochemical dependency. The
industry's main ally, U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary
Clayton Yeutter, is eager to get U.S. pesticides to Poland in a
hurry because if we don't do it, the logic runs, a European or
Japanese manufacturer will. All this comes on the heels of a
ground breaking report by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences
arguing that farming without pesticides is ecologically sound as
well as economically viable.

THE LAST AMERICAN JUNGLE 

WHILE U.S. OFFICIALS BEMOAN rain forest destruction abroad,
bulldozers have begun chewing up the last lowland tropical rain
forest in the United States. The state of Hawaii has given the
True Geothermal Energy Company the go-ahead to cut roads and
drill scores of wells to tap volcanic steam below 9,000 acres of
the 27,000-acre Wao Kele O Puna forest on the big island. 

The Hawaii Rainforest Action Group staged protests in December to
halt the project, which would export much of the energy
through underwater conduits (at depths of up to 6,000 feet) to
the island of Oahu. Opponents of the project also have
challenged the project in federal court, arguing that state
officials illegally swapped the forest, which was dedicated in
trust to use by the Hawaiian people, for an adjoining piece of
land now discovered to be over 90 percent cleared or levelled by
lava flows.

John Seed, director of the Rainforest Information Centre in
Australia, said the hazards of drilling geothermal wells in an
"active volcano" are unknown, adding, "If this development
proceeds, wells sunk into the volcano to generate steam will vent
deadly hydrogen sulfide gas, which will poison the rain forest,
and brine from the wells, which the company plans to release onto
the surface, will do additional damage." (See
Action Access.)

THE SOVIET UNION'S NEVADA MOVEMENT 

IN FEBRUARY 1989, WRITER Olzhas Suleimenov took to the airwaves
to campaign for his third term in the Supreme Soviet as delegate
from the central southern republic of Kazakhstan. But instead of
issuing the usual exhortation in the 15 minutes allotted him,
Suleimenov told a frightening tale: a nuclear explosion the week
before at Semipalatinsk, the Soviet military's test site in his
homeland, had leaked radioactive gas into the atmosphere. He
closed with an invitation. Meet me at my office at the
Kazakhstan Writer's Union in Alma-Ata, he said, and we will begin
a grassroots movement to end nuclear testing in the Soviet Union.


On February 28, more than 5,000 angry citizens showed up, and the
Nevada movement (named in solidarity with the U.S. anti-testing
protests) was born. Since then, thousands of citizens of
Kazakhstan have each paid roughly $1.60 to become members, and
the group has staged dozens of major protests, including one in
the town of Karaul last August that drew 50,000 people.
Suleimenov went on to win 97 percent of the vote from his
region, which includes thousands of military personnel. Rather
than risk their wrath, as well as that of the indigenous Kazakhs
who are among the many Soviet peoples clamoring for
independence, Gorbachev has remained encouraging, even inviting
Suleimenov to join him on a foreign trip to Britain last April. 

In the first six months of 1989, the Soviet Union exploded just
half their scheduled number of nuclear bombs although some
experts think that the cutback, if there was one, was more in the
service of public relations than a reaction to political
pressure. The Nevada movement is convening an international
conference in Kazakhstan in conjunction with International
Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War to take place in May
1990. Meanwhile, the American Peace Test and the Nevada movement
are exchanging activists for an international protest to take
place at the Nevada Test Site and Semipalatinsk March 29 through
April 2. 

INTERNATIONAL DAM FAST 

IN DECEMBER, ACTIVISTS IN Washington, D.C., joined demonstrators
in northwestern India in a fast to protest plans to build an
enormous dam complex in the Narmada Valley. The target of the
Washington protesters, led by the Environmental Defense Fund, was
the annual meeting of the dam's major funder, the World Bank. The
bank has come under withering criticism from the U.S. Congress
and the global environmental community for supporting massive
"development" projects in less industrialized countries that
ultimately serve to destroy the environment and displace poor
people. T

he Narmada Valley Project is one of the most notorious villains.
Conceived at the beginning of the decade, the massive project
includes 30 major dams, a power generation and transmission grid,
technical assistance and training and the forced
relocation of more than 300,000 villagers. When built, the dams
will flood 150,000 acres of forest.

Like all such developments, the Narmada Valley Project is
justified by an elaborate cost/ benefit analysis. Promises of
bumper crops due to better irrigation are deliberately
misleading, say critics, and the costs of the development from
lost forests, water-logged crop land and increased levels of salt
in the water are grossly underestimated. The relocation strategy
is inadequate. Not only is there insufficient land in the region
to support the "oustees," as they are known, but the few families
that have already been moved experienced a
significant decline in their standard of living and a
dramatically higher death rate.

"The Indian experience with large dams has been disastrous," says
Bharat Dogra, author of a study on India's large water projects,
"yet that experience is consistently ignored by the government.
The peasants, whose health and welfare the projects are supposed
to enhance, have generally ended up worse off
economically and demoralized socially."

CZECH SECRETS 

THE COLLAPSE OF THE Government of Czechoslovakia last December
flushed more than chagrined Stalinists out of the cavernous
statehouse in Prague. It also released a torrent of secret
information, including evidence of two accidents at a uranium-
ore-processing plant in the early '60s and a frightening six-
year-old study challenging the safety of the Temelin nuclear
power plant now under construction near the Austrian border.

The Temelin report, prepared in 1983 for the Ministry of Water
and Forestry, called for a halt to construction. Not only does
the facility lie on a major earthquake fault, it said, but the
supply of water for cooling the reactors is insufficient,
particularly in an emergency. The report was shelved as
"politically unacceptable" in 1984. Its release now may doom
nuclear power in Czechoslovakia, as it follows by six months the
release of another secret study questioning the rationale of the
entire Czech nuclear program. The author of that report, Walter
Komarek, is currently the country's deputy prime minister.

The Czech uranium-ore-processing plant at Myrdlovary near the
Austrian border released high levels of radio-activity into the
environment twice between 1962 and 1964, according to recent
reports. Water samples taken in January showed radiation levels
significantly higher than permitted under Czech regulations.
Greenpeace is collaborating with the new government in Prague on
an investigation into the impact of the accident plagued
facility.


THE AGONY OF TIBET

By Galen Rowell

Chinese occupation has destroyed a culture that lived in harmony
with nature.

(MINING TlBET'S SACRED SITES 

The hill behind the famous Trachen-Ma Temple in Riwoche, a
village in the eastern Tibetan province of Kham, is considered
sacred ground by Tibetan Buddhists. It is also rich in uranium, a
material the Chinese military wants. When miners were brought in
to dig up the hill, Tibet's leaders protested to Beijing. After
their concerns were ignored, they rioted.

A tense incident ensued, in which three surveyor's jeeps were set
on fire and Chinese soldiers occupied Riwoche and rounded up
villagers for interrogation. Their fate is unknown. The saga of
Riwoche is one of the better known clashes over Tibet's natural
resources. As deforestation and indiscriminate hunting wipe out
the region's terrestrial ecology, Tibet's occupiers are
beginning to look underground--to Tibet's rumored veins of gold
and other valuable minerals. Already, some 60,000 itinerant
Chinese gold miners have flooded into Quinghai, formerly Tibet's
Amdo province, forcing out 17,000 nomadic herds men and
destroying vast tracts of rich grazing land.

The Chinese have also tapped Tibet's coal and borax, and are
beginning to mine for the region's so-called strategic minerals:
iron, copper, lithium and tungsten. Much of the work is related
to military activities. China has built an underground nuclear
testing site in the northeastern province of Amdo and has
reportedly established five missile bases armed with at least
eight intercontinental ballistic missiles, 70 medium-range
missiles and 20 intermediate-range missiles on the Tibetan
plateau. Fifteen divisions of Chinese troops are permanently
stationed in what now constitutes the "Tibet Autonomous
Region,'' or roughly one soldier for every ten Tibetans. --John
Ackerly.)

(THE DALAI LAMA ON THE ENVIRONMENT 

Peace and the survival of life on earth as we know it are
threatened by human activities that lack a commitment to
humanitarian values. Destruction of nature and natural resources
results from ignorance, greed and lack of respect for the
earth's living things.

Our ancestors viewed the earth as rich and bountiful, which it
is. Many people in the past also saw nature as inexhaustibly
sustainable, which we know is the case only if we care for it. It
is not difficult to forgive destruction in the past that resulted
from ignorance. Today, however, we have access to more
information, and it is essential that we re-examine ethically
what we have inherited, what we are responsible for, and what we
will pass on to coming generations.

Clearly, this is a pivotal generation. Global communication is
possible, yet confrontations take place more often than
meaningful dialogue for peace.

Our marvels of science and technology are matched, if not
outweighed, by many current tragedies, including human
starvation in some parts of the world and extinction of other
life forms. Many of earth's habitats, animals and plants that we
know as rare may not be known at all by future generations. We
have the capability and the responsibility. We must act before it
is too late.)

IN 1981 I SET OFF TO LEAD THE FIRST TWO American expeditions
allowed into the back country of Tibet since the Chinese
invasion three decades earlier. For a photographer, it was the
chance of a lifetime. I thought little of politics or human
rights. I simply wanted to climb mountains and take photographs
of the mysterious land I had read so much about.

I never dreamed that I would make five visits to Tibet over the
next eight years, become the subject of diplomatic complaints, be
held by soldiers overnight against my will, and see many of my
articles go unpublished in the United States out of fear of
Chinese retribution. But if I had it to do all over again,
there's only one thing I would have done differently. I wouldn't
have compromised the story of Tibet's environmental destruction
as much as I did. Then, I was worried about going back. Now I
simply want to tell the story.

BEFORE 1981 THE REMOTE PARTS OF TIBET were shrouded in mystery.
All that modern naturalists knew about the region came from
reports at least three decades old. "I have never seen so many
varieties of birds in one place," wrote British explorer Kingdom
Ward in 1920. "One great zoological garden," Joseph Rock wrote in
a 1930 National Geographic. "Wherever I looked I saw wild animals
grazing contentedly." In the thirties, a German
traveller named Dalgleish reported sighting a herd of 10,000
chiru, a Tibetan antelope now rarely seen. In the forties,
Leonard Clark reported, "Every few minutes, we would spot a bear
or a hunting wolf, herds of musk deer, kyangs, gazelles, big horn
sheep, or foxes. This must be one of the last unspoiled big game
paradises." 

This glory was what I had come to see. For an exorbitant fee--
$50,000 to guide several naturalists for three weeks in the Anye
Machin mountains of northeast Tibet--our Chinese hosts promised
"a wealth of rare birds and animals . . . thick virgin forests
where deer, leopards, and bear thrive, while the grasslands and
gravel slopes near the snow line are alive with hordes of
gazelles, wild asses and rare musk deer." 

For three weeks, we walked--over 100 miles in all. We saw
virtually nothing. The wildlife had disappeared. My other trek
that year was to the Tibetan side of Mount Everest. I drove over
a thousand miles of back roads without seeing a single wild large
mammal. My negative results confirmed those of Pema
Gyalpo, who had led a delegation the previous year that
travelled 8,000 miles overland. She made the trip for the
Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamsala, India, whose head of
state is her brother, The Dalai Lama. "On long journeys," she
wrote, "you used to see more gazelles deer and antelope than
people. Now, in three months of extensive travelling in Tibet, I
did not see any of these creatures."

IN 1950 MAO'S PEOPLE'S LIBERATION ARMY invaded Tibet. Nine years
later, the Tibetan people rebelled after China's promises of
religious and personal freedom proved false. The revolt was
brutally crushed, and the Dalai Lama fled into exile in India.
More than 80,000 Tibetans were killed in the immediate
aftermath, and observers estimate 1.2 million Tibetans have died
at the hands of Chinese soldiers or as a result of imprisonment
or starvation in the last 30 years. This carnage is just a
fraction of the roughly 35 million victims of China's four
decades of Maoist rule, but it represents a fifth of the Tibetan
population. During the subsequent decade, more than 6,000
monasteries, temples and historic structures were razed.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn calls China's administration of Tibet
"more brutal and inhumane than any other communist regime in the
world." 

Before the arrival of the Chinese, Tibet had its own separate
language, religion, currency, government, and postal system. It
also had the most successful system of environmental protection
of any inhabited region in the modern world. There were no parks
or wildlife preserves in the Western sense. Formal protection of
wildlife and wild lands was unnecessary in a land where devout
Buddhist compassion for all living beings reigned supreme. 

Tibetan Buddhism essentially prohibits the killing of animals.
Children are taught from birth that all life is sacred. In his
classic work, Seven Years in Tibet, Heinrich Harrier wrote of the
frustration of working with Tibetans on the dike that to this day
protects the capital city of Lhasa from flooding.
"There were many interruptions and pauses. There was an outcry if
anyone discovered a worm on a spade. The earth was thrown aside
and the creature put in a safe place."

The Buddhist ethic pervades all aspects of Tibetan culture. "I
have never seen less evidence of hatred, envy, malice and
uncharitableness," wrote British India's Trade Consul in Tibet,
Hugh Richardson, after living in Lhasa in the 1940s. "The
Tibetan system produced a people who in the upper levels were
self-controlled, intelligent, often deeply learned, capable,
unpretentious, dignified, humane and friendly. The majority of
people made efforts to live as much as possible with nature, not
against it."

The 1950 invasion of Tibet, justified on the false grounds that
Mao's China was simply restoring historical borders, was in many
ways the consummation of China's long-standing desire to gain
control of Tibet's natural resources. The Chinese know Tibet as
Xizang, which translates as "western treasure house," a name that
was born in the ancient myth that Tibet contained gold and other
riches. Chinese infiltration into the country had already begun
at the turn of the century, when settlers began to
deforest the border regions. By 1910 the Chinese had established
schools along the border that outlawed the Tibetan language and
customs. In 1911 Tibet expelled all Chinese from its borders and
was free of foreign control for nearly four decades.

After the invasion, China set out to "liberate" Tibet by
systematically destroying its culture. Farmers were forced into
collectives and required to grow winter wheat instead of the
traditional barley. The policy produced bumper crops for a few
years, before depleting the soil and ruining the harvest. To make
matters worse, China brought much of the wheat home to feed a
population cut off from other sources of grain as a result of the
1959 break with the Soviet Union. Tibet was plunged into a
famine, the first in recorded history, which lasted through 1963.
Another period of famine followed from 1968 to 1973.

The invaders made a sport of shooting indiscriminately at
wildlife. In 1973, Dhondub Choedon, a Tibetan now in exile in
India, reported that, "Chinese soldiers go on organized hunts
using machine guns. They carry away the meat in lorries and
export the musk and furs to China." Important habitat for vast
herds of wild animals was soon overgrazed as the Chinese forced
nomadic families into communes to raise livestock for export
instead of their own subsistence. Tibetans, including the
children, were forced to kill "unnecessary animals" such as dogs,
that were considered "parasites," as well as moles and marmots
that vied with humans for grain and dug up valuable grazing land.
Children were given a quota for small animals to kill that, if
not met, resulted in beatings and other forms of punishment.

MY FIRST ATTEMPTS TO QUANTIFY ENVIRONmental conditions in Tibet
failed. Chinese officials either refused to give me statistics,
or interpreters sensed what I was up to and stopped translating.
I soon discovered, however, that if I feigned interest in
increased productivity under the communist regime, I could glean
some alarming statistics. The general secretary of a poor county
in the mountains of Amdo province dug out papers and proudly
rattled off figures that confirmed my worst suspicions about
habitat destruction. 

"Before we had communes we had just 7,000 animals. Now the same
700 square kilometers has 70,000 yaks and sheep. Since 1979, many
people own their own animals as well. Our comrades are doing very
well now. Each makes 30 to 40 yuan ($18-$24 at the time) a month,
but through personal sales many make 100 yuan a month." 

The general secretary admitted that much of the extra income came
from the slaughter of wild musk deer. When queried about this
apparent violation of Chinese law, he said that special
dispensations were granted by the commune leader.

"What happens if a musk deer is killed illegally?" I asked. Such
crimes meant a big fine, he responded, after which he admitted
that he could not remember the last time a person had been
fined. As it turned out, not one person in recent years had been
fined for poaching, but several 15-yuan bounties had been paid
for the pelts of snow leopards which are officially protected as
an endangered species in China by international agreement. Many
10-yuan bounties had been paid on wolves as well.

AT THE END OF THE FIRST TWO TRIPS IN 1981, I joined several of
the scientists who had travelled with me at a press conference in
Beijing. We laid out the facts for the reporters. "The
wildlife of this region has been decimated," said Rodney
Jackson, whose snow leopard studies formed the basis of a
National Geographic cover story in June 1986. "We came to Tibet
because of inaccurate information given us by the Chinese about
the presence of wildlife in an area they charged us dearly to
visit. This, plus attitudes that endorse irresponsible wildlife
depletion, can adversely affect China's friendship with other
nations if they are allowed to continue." 

The Associated Press (AP) bureau chief demanded exclusivity and
promised to send me copies of the story. It was never published.
An AP correspondent in the United States later told me that they
couldn't afford to run "unnecessarily negative China material"
that might put their Beijing bureau in jeopardy. When Jackson
took his story to several U.S. wildlife organizations that fund
research in China, he was again rebuffed. Criticism of China was
not allowed in this close-knit scientific community, Jackson
discovered. If he continued to threaten the relationship these
organizations had cultivated with Beijing, he could not expect to
get money for his research. 

After I returned home that year, my proposals for articles about
the difficulties facing researchers and the environmental
holocaust in Tibet were turned down. I was well connected with
many national magazines and I asked the editors why. "Our
readers want upbeat stories," came the chorus. "And besides,
China is our friend." The strongest motive, future press access,
went unspoken. I began to see how the Chinese could censor the
American press almost as successfully as their own.

MY FIRST MAJOR ARTICLE APPEARED IN THE February 1982 National
Geographic. I wanted to focus on the false promise of Tibet's
"wild life," but I didn't have the photographs to support such a
story. I had no direct documentation of the killing, except for a
picture of Rodney Jackson examining a fresh snow leopard pelt
hanging on a commune wall. The editors and I agreed that shots of
empty plains are not only inconclusive, but rather boring. The
focus of the article was thus tightened into "Nomads of China's
Wild West," a cultural profile of an armed and
surprisingly independent Tibetan tribe called the Goloks. But I
held out, bravely I thought, for at least one photo caption that
mentioned the environment. 

Beneath my photo of an overgrazed landscape ran a quote from me
about the promise of "blue sheep, gazelles, bears, wolves, and
deer--a richness of animal life touted to me by the Chinese
authorities in Beijing. The Chinese also spoke of dense virgin
forests. In fact, we saw almost no wildlife and . . . no forests
at all." 

Upon publication, the Chinese embassy lodged a formal complaint:
I was guilty of an intentional political act that jeopardized
Sino-American friendship. As I was planning to return to Tibet
the following year as climbing leader of the first American
expedition permitted to attempt Mount Everest's West Ridge, I
heeded the Chinese authorities' demand that I write a letter of
self-criticism. Beneath a haze of murky Latin-based words, I
confessed how unwise I had been to say what I did if I ever
planned to return to Tibet again. 

For the next six years, I wrote with a split personality. For my
own book, Mountains of the Middle Kingdom, published by the
Sierra Club in 1983, I wrote a tell-all account, but for
periodicals that might reach Beijing, I omitted all strong
personal observations and opinions.

Despite this self-censorship, I again incurred the wrath of the
Chinese authorities. My National Geographic assignment in 1988
was to document the Tibetan side of a proposed joint Chinese-
Nepalese national park surrounding Mount Everest. My wife
Barbara and I travelled with representatives of the Woodlands
Mountain Institute of West Virginia, which had been working with
both governments to create the park. As we left the United
States in May 1988, we were told that China would announce the
establishment of the park within days. 

We were accompanied during our three weeks in the field by Yin
Binggao, Director of Forests for Tibet, along with several of his
employees. Despite Tibet's high altitude, large forests are
nurtured by monsoon rains in parts of southeastern Tibet and also
along the Nepalese border, where river valleys cut through the
rain shadow of the Himalaya. 

One of these valleys is on the east side of Mount Everest. While
the rest of my group stayed in a 14,000-foot camp, I crossed a
high pass and hiked into the fabled Valley of Flowers,
discovered by the first British Everest expedition in 1921. Here,
amidst 20 colors of native rhododendron blossoms, I was shocked
to see trees being felled by the thousands. I
photographed a convoy of Tibetan women carrying fresh hundred-
pound beams over the pass directly through our camp. The
operation appeared to be centrally organized. Lumber was cut on
the spot and piled into four-cornered stacks that formed orderly
rows across the valley. 

Yin Binggao said he knew nothing about the timber operation. He
suggested it must be Tibetans cutting wood on their own. A day
later, we saw Chinese trucks in the village of Kharta loaded with
the same wood bound for towns on the treeless plains to the
North. There, virtually all new construction is undertaken by
Chinese residents or officials. Embarrassed now, Yin Binggao
promised to report the situation immediately to the closest
forest official. I later found out the nearest office was in
Shigatse, hundreds of miles from any forest. 

The entire forestry department of Tibet employs just 13 people.
According to official documents, $54 billion of timber has been
cut within the borders of old Tibet since 1959. As Tibetans do
not use much wood for fuel or to frame ordinary houses, the
majority of this timber is destined for China. The deforestation
is aided by the forced labor of thousands of Tibetan prisoners in
the southeastern part of the country. In Amdo, nearly 50 million
trees have been felled since 1955, and millions of acres at least
70 percent cleared, according to the Dalai Lam a's exiled
government in India. Roughly 70,000 Chinese workers have been
brought to the region or have travelled there voluntarily, in
large part to cut down the rich stands of trees. 

My colleague assigned to cover the Nepalese side of Everest and I
reached the same conclusion: the environment on both sides of the
mountain was being destroyed. Neither government indicated they
were planning to declare a joint park, although the
Nepalese had long maintained the rather ineffectual Sagarmatha
National Park at the core of the proposed area.

National Geographic had hoped for an upbeat story, but instead of
killing it entirely, they ran it as "Heavy Hands on the
Land," a litany of wildlife and land-use problems surrounding a
seemingly immutable mountain. Soon after publication, the
Woodlands Institute informed me that, according to the Chinese
government, my article was in error. I had stated that the park
would not be created in the near future, but a document
contradicting my claim had been forwarded to National Geographic
by the institute. 

In typically vague phrases, a Chinese official stated it was
indeed the government's intention to proceed toward the goal of
creating a natural preserve near Mount Everest, someday. I was
surprised, since I had been present at meetings with the top two
officials in the Tibetan government, both of whom refused to sign
any letter of intent. Scanning the letter, I noticed that their
names were indeed absent. It was signed by Yin Binggao. As of
this writing, the intent to create the park remains on paper
only. 

But that was not the end. Upon my return to the United States, I
was notified that I had been tried and convicted in absentia for
"sedition." During my trip I had given a picture of the Dalai
Lama to the patriarch of a nomad family that gave us
splendid hospitality for three days and opened up his family's
lives for us to photograph. This was, using phrases that
commonly issue from Beijing, "wanton intrusion in China's
internal affairs, and overt support for the separatist Dalai-
clique."

As I had become accustomed to doing, I sat down and wrote the
obligatory letter to the Chinese Embassy explaining that I had no
political motivation in giving the photo, and apologizing for any
trouble I might have caused. It was simply a gift, I
explained, to a man who invited me into his home and allowed me
to photograph his family. But as I did this, I felt humiliated
and compromised in a way I never had before. Something inside me
finally snapped. Whatever the consequences, I vowed then that I
would no longer just stand by and watch the power of my work be
diluted.

SINCE MY LAST JOURNEY TO TIBET IN 1988, much has happened. There
are fewer wild animals and trees, more prisoners and paper
promises, but still no parks or real progress toward
environmental protection. Peaceful demonstrations for Tibetan
independence in Lhasa in 1987 became riots after Chinese
soldiers fired into unarmed crowds, killing Buddhist monks and
nuns. Observers estimate that at least 600 Tibetans have been
killed and thousands of Tibetans imprisoned and tortured in the
subsequent crackdown. The Chinese government instituted martial
law in Tibet in March 1989, and as of this writing it has not
been lifted. Three months later, the government in Beijing
unleashed its tanks on the students occupying Tiananmen Square.
And in December, the Dalai Lama was awarded the Nobel Peace
Prize.

The most bizarre manifestations of China's ideological rule, such
as the killing of all "unnecessary" animals, have
disappeared. What remains is a steady consolidation of China's
domination of the country, aided by naked political oppression.
As Tibet's animal and plant resources are destroyed, Beijing is
now gearing up to extract gold and minerals, including uranium.
China's armed forces have established nuclear missile bases on
Tibet's high plateau, and are now rumored to be preparing a high-
level nuclear waste dump that would accept spent nuclear reactor
fuel from China as well as Western Europe.

Despite the attention focused on the plight of Tibet in the last
year, no country has gone on record as supporting Tibet's right
to independence for fear of angering Beijing. In the wake of the
Nobel Committee's decision to award its peace prize to the Dalai
Lama, China has made it as difficult as possible for any nation
extending support to the exiled leader. The government in
Beijing even threatened to cut all economic ties to Norway if its
king attended the prize ceremony. Although the United States
Congress passed a resolution condemning China's treatment of
Tibet, President Bush refused to meet with the Dalai Lama,
preferring instead to send emissaries on a secret mission to
China. To this date, no U.S. President has ever shaken hands with
the exiled head of state.

In May 1989, I travelled to Dharamsala with my wife to meet the
Dalai Lama and discuss a book we are preparing together called My
Tibet, to be published in late 1990 by the University of
California Press. After several hours of interviews about the
past present and future of Tibet's environment we found him to be
deeply concerned, well versed in the natural history of his
country, and surprisingly hopeful and compassionate in his
outlook. The Dalai Lama believes that behind every apparently bad
event lurks some hidden goodness. With the right attitude, he
avows, one's worst enemies aid us in becoming clear and
strong. Despite the desperate situation in his country, the Dalai
Lama consistently argues against taking up arms against the
Chinese. He remains confident that Tibet will emerge from Chinese
oppression with greater compassion and unity than ever before.

It came as no surprise to us that a few months later, the Nobel
Committee made special mention of the Dalai Lama's commitment to
the environment, the first time a Nobel citation has made
specific reference to the ecological crisis. As he looked at some
of my pictures of Tibet's last remaining wildlife that I planned
to include in the book, he commented on the way his people used
to coexist with humans and animals before the
invasion. "Some of that harmony remains in Tibet today," he told
me, "and because it happened in the past, we have some genuine
hope for the future."

Galen Rowell, America's pre-eminent nature/adventure
photographer, is the author of several books on the earth's wild
places.


THE FOLLY OF TRIDENT

By William M. Arkin

For many people, the Trident II is known only as the missile that
nearly sent Greenpeace to the ocean floor. But there's a lot more
to the story.

IN 1989 THE WORLD WAS TURNED UPSIDE down. From the East, the
Berlin Wall was breached. Street protests toppled the government
in Czechoslovakia, while the regimes in Poland, Hungary and
Bulgaria quietly and wisely stepped aside. In Romania, an
explosion of human suffering threw out a cruel dictator.
Meanwhile President Mikhail Gorbachev wrestled with a crumbling
and backward country, mired in economic disarray and internal
unrest. A half-century of Cold War thawed, releasing a wave of
hope for a less militarized, less tense, kinder and gentler
global stability.

Yet the thaw did not reach the U.S. nuclear weapons production
complex. Tomahawk sea launched cruise missiles continued to come
off the production lines in Amarillo, Texas. And the first
Trident II nuclear warheads were manufactured. Despite the
dramatic change, no one had thought to pull the plug on nuclear
weapons. 

No nuclear weapon better symbolizes the madness of the arms race
than the new Trident II missile. Conceived in the 1970s, the 
missile contains more explosive power than any previous U.S.
submarine weapon. Compared to the Trident I C4 that it is slated
to replace, Trident II is three times more accurate and packs
five times the explosive yield. Each Trident II missile will
equal almost 300 of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima. And each
Trident submarine will potentially carry 24 of these missiles-
-7,200 Hiroshimas.

Trident II represents the logical extreme of decades of nuclear-
weapons designers' gruesome ambitions. First they worked to see
how little plutonium and uranium they could use to get a huge
explosion. Then they sought to make their nuclear weapons as
small as possible. After that, the goal was to see how many
warheads they could place atop a missile; how many they could
stuff into a submarine; how far they could fire the missile; and
finally, how accurate they could make it.

Congressional support for the Trident II missile, which has cost
$13 billion even before the weapon has gone to sea, has been
consistent. It rested on a traditional argument about submarine-
launched weapons: they are "good" nuclear weapons because they
are relatively inaccurate and are invulnerable when placed
aboard the quiet, nuclear powered Trident submarines. These
attributes, the argument goes, make the Trident less threatening
to the Soviet Union than other weapons because it is not a
"first strike" N weapon and thus would not provoke a rash action
in a crisis. Once it was in the pipeline, however, designers had
refined the Trident's accuracy to the point where it is equal to
the best land-based missiles in the U.S. arsenal. It can no
longer be considered benign by any stretch of strategy. 

Since the United States is supposed to have nuclear weapons to
deter a Soviet strike rather than fulfil scientific whimsy, one
must ask whether a new missile, whose main attribute is its
ability to place eight warheads with an additional 375,000 tons
of explosives 100 yards closer to a missile silo, is needed.


The Navy justifies the Trident II to Congress as having "the
capability to hold at risk the full spectrum of Soviet targets,
including those. ..which the Soviets value most," meaning
underground missile silos and command bunkers. But will
deterrence in coming decades depend on the United States having
such a capability? Does deterrence demand further improvements,
particularly since the MX, Minuteman III and cruise missiles
presently in the arsenal already can do this job? Is the Trident
II needed because there is no alternative? Is it worth the
price?

There is no immutable law of nuclear deterrence that can answer
these questions. We already have in our arsenal more than 3,000
Trident I nuclear warheads on submarines, a number that itself
violates provisions of the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks
(START) agreement scheduled to be concluded this year. The "old"
Trident I was introduced in 1979, barely a decade ago. It came
off the production lines until the mid'80s, when the Navy pushed
to develop a newer weapon to keep the wheels of nuclear
"progress" moving forward. At a time when our nuclear arsenal
contains 12,000 nuclear weapons that can strike the Soviet
Union, when the new MX missile and the new B-1 bombers are being
deployed, when the Tomahawk sea-launched cruise missile is in
production, and when the B-2 Stealth bomber and an "advanced
cruise missile" are finishing their test runs, Trident II is
clearly superfluous. The increasingly shaky rationale for
Trident has left Congress and the administration arguing lamely
that the $22.8 billion earmarked for the missile in the five year
defense plan should be spent because it is already too late to
reverse the decision.

The same criticisms levelled at Trident could apply to the B-2
bomber or the advanced cruise missile, but there is one
difference. This spring, the Trident II missile will go to sea
for the first time. The other two won't be deployed for years.
The juxtaposition of its imminent deployment, blithely coming
after the most significant year of change in the Cold War era,
and after Presidents Bush and Gorbachev heralded a new, more
peaceful period in superpower relations at Malta, is tragic.

ON JULY 28,1989, AFTER TWO EARLIER TRIDENT II tests had failed
because of technical problems (at a cost of roughly $30 million
each), Greenpeace decided to focus public attention on the folly
of the Trident Il program. The vessels MV Greenpeace and the SV
Monticivitano entered the testing area off Florida and refused to
leave. During the protest, the Greenpeace crew attached a
"nuclear free seas" banner to the mast of the submarine USS
Tennessee.

As two ships and several inflatable boats were in the water at
launch time, the Navy decided to cancel the test. It was the
first time that the Navy had experienced a nonviolent
demonstration on the high seas. The Navy later admitted to the
news media that since the test site is located outside of U.S.
territorial waters, there was little they could do to stop the
action.

The practice of cordoning off large expanses of ocean for
military purposes, while rarely challenged, is not enforceable
under international law. And under no circumstances does the U.S.
Navy, or any other Navy, have the right to use force
against an unarmed merchant vessel on the high seas. Preserving
the principle of freedom of the seas is a centerpiece of U.S.
foreign policy, as Navy manuals on law of the sea confirm.

Between July and December 1989, the Cold War ended. As prospects
for an enduring peace and an end to the arms race drastically
improved, it seemed imperative that the Trident 11 program be
pushed to the top of the national agenda. Buoyed by the success
of the July action, the MV Greenpeace set sail again in
Decemberto protest the second series of Trident missile tests in
international waters off Florida.

But December 4 turned out to be very different from July 28. The
Navy was waiting for our 30-year-old sea tug. Starting at dawn on
the day of the test, two U.S. warships, which were brought in
specifically to turn back the ship, harassed and repeatedly
rammed the MV Green peace. For four hours, the Navy vessels
continued the attack, aiming water cannons down the smokestack of
the vessel and directly at Greenpeace crew members. Two
Greenpeace inflatable boats were boarded and disabled by Navy
commandos. The damage to the MV Greenpeace was extensive,
including two large holes, one on each side of the boat.

In the ensuing press uproar, the history of our series of
protests, as well as the rationale behind them, was lost. The
rash of headlines turned December 4 into a one-time "confron-
tation" between the U.S. Navy and Green peace. Green peace did
not seek collision or confrontation. We sought to conduct a non-
violent protest against nuclear weapons, a protest waged during
extraordinary changing times.

Some people have said that Greenpeace got what it deserved: if
you go up against the U.S. Navy, against a test that had been
approved by Congress, against a missile that is nearing
deployment, then you shouldn't complain when you provoke a
violent response. What the Navy did--ram an unarmed ship in
international waters--was wrong, but clearing up the legalities
will be left to the lawyers. What matters to Greenpeace is the
Trident II missile, and the lunacy of a nuclear weapons complex
that hums along in isolation, oblivious of the changes occurring
in the world.

The presence of the vast nuclear arsenals on either side of the
Berlin Wall played no role in the forces and sentiments that
brought it down. What possible role could the Trident program
play in helping to establish a just and safe world in the wake of
the collapse of the Cold War? We oppose the overt and
provocative testing and deployment of new nuclear weapons at a
time of rapid and delicate change. Continuation of the nuclear
status quo will blind us to the desperate problems of poverty,
development and environmental degradation that face the
post-nuclear world. 

William M. Arkin is Director of the Nuclear Information Unit at
Greenpeace and author of several books on nuclear weapons and
strategy.


COVERING THE WORLD: IGNORING THE EARTH

By Mark Hertsgaard

(GREENSPEAK 

A major challenge for environmentalists and the press in the
l990s will be to cut through the growing forest of environmental
doublespeak from politicians, polluters and others who see the
advent of concern for the planet as nothing more than a nifty
marketing tool. So far, the media's track record is mixed at
best.

The preelection George Bush, unlike his predecessor, found that
environmental rhetoric was indispensable to his campaign: he
effectively bludgeoned Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis on
the filthy state of Boston Harbor despite the federal
government's role as the major obstacle to the harbor's cleanup.
He also promised that the United States would lead an
international effort to head off the greenhouse effect with the
"White House effect." Bush's anguish over Boston Harbor
dissipated on Election Day, and as of this writing, the "White
House effect" has been to stonewall on timetables and emission
limits for greenhouse gases. Although newspapers and both ABC and
NBC news reports focused on the change of sentiment, George Bush
largely escaped the criticism he deserved when his newfound
greenness turned out to be Astroturf.

Also eager to cast themselves in a benign green light are
American corporations, some of which have reprehensible
environmental records. Waste Management Inc. (WMI), a frequent
Greenpeace target that was the 1980s' leading recipient of U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency fines, wraps itself in a public
relations (PR) cloak of airy TV spots in which it's "helping the
world dispose of its problems." WMI has been a generous
contributor to "environmental" programming on public television
and National Public Radio in an effort to "green wash" its
reputation.

Du Pont, a world leader in the production of ozone-depleting
CFCs, has put up a smoke screen of vague phase out schedules for
its CFCs, citing other ozone-depleting chemicals as possible
replacements. A Du Pont subsidiary signed on as a corporate
sponsor of Will Steger's Trans-Antarctica expedition, earning Du
Pont some good PR by backing a dogsled trip beneath the ozone
hole it helped to create.

Not content to rely on ad buys to keep its name clean, General
Electric (GE) bought itself a network in 1986 when it took over
RCA and its subsidiary, NBC. Shortly after the deal went down,
NBC aired a documentary called, "Nuclear Power--In France It
Works." If nothing else, the piece provided a morale booster for
GE's most beleaguered product line.

The most Orwellian application of greenspeak has been the
embrace of greenhouse-effect politics by elements of the nuclear
industry. Some have viewed the greenhouse phenomenon as nuclear
power's last and best marketing tool. Others in the press,
notably syndicated columnist Warren Brookes and Washington Post
science writer William Booth, have spared no effort to portray
greenhouse proponents as shadowy eco-conspirators. Booth took
cheap shots at the environmental community twice this summer with
front page stories: the first portrayed environmentalists as
covertly wishing for a dry scorching summer to press their claims
on the greenhouse effect; the second implied a growing movement
among environmentalists to reexamine nuclear power (the principal
source cited, an Audubon Society scientist, angrily denied
Booth's version of the story).

The biggest example of ball dropping on the part of the press
concerned the Exxon Valdez The spill provided an almost
irresistible showcase for public presentation of the
environmental "big picture." Instead, the public got reports on
drunken sea captains, soiled wildlife, and the need for double
hulled tankers. No one asked the question, "Why do we need all
this oil in the first place?" It was taken for granted that we
did. No one asked what environmental damage is caused by the
"safe" transport of oil.

In fact, the only substantial media debate on record of energy
consumption had no link to environmental problems. The energy
crisis of 1973, and its encore in 1978-79, sparked a fleeting
national interest in energy conservation. But it was long gas
lines and high prices, as well as the dubious specter of a
country in hock to overseas oil producers, that prompted the
debate and the attendant flurry of conservation measures. With
the "crisis" now a distant memory, the efficiency improvements
have disappeared from both national policy and the front pages.
The personal inconvenience of long gas lines was able to raise
the debate in the press to a level of environmental
sophistication that eluded even the Valdez tragedy.

While news organizations shouldn't shoulder all the blame for a
short national attention span, the public is sold short when
environmental news coverage devotes more energy to chasing
ambulances than to reporting on real problems--and real
solutions. --Peter Dykstra

HOW TO COVER THE EARTH

Here are some specific steps that journalists and news
organizations could take to improve coverage.     

1. Make the environment a priority. Now that the cold war is
over, the struggle to save the planet figures to be the biggest
news story of the next twenty years. The environment clearly
deserves as much attention as the drug issue, another story that
offers no daily news pegs but still gets saturation coverage.

2. Make the environment a high-prestige beat, not a training
ground or exile post, and make it worth a reporter's while to
stay on it. Educate reporters on all beats, be they national
security, finance or local politics, to recognize the
environmental aspects of their stories.

3. Take the initiative. Good environmental reporting is often
investigative. Give journalists time and freedom from daily
stories to pursue ambitious topics.

4. Analyze the political economy of environmental change and
expose obstacles to reform. One story idea: research the
campaign contributions of those members of Congress serving on
the committees considering the Clean Air Act to see how much
money from the oil, auto and electric-utility industries they've
received.

5. Cover America's dissidents, too. Broaden the range of
"quotable" sources to include such experts as Barry Commoner. And
pay attention to the environmental movement, especially the
grassroots groups on the front lines of the struggle.

6. Remember above all else how little time there is. At this late
date, to cover the world while ignoring the earth is
sheer folly.)

A FEW YEARS AGO, ONE OF THE WASHINGTON Post's senior editors
walked into the paper's daily news meeting with what he thought
was a pretty big story. Reputable scientists had concluded that
there appeared to be a hole in the ozone layer. Wide-spread use
of aerosols, refrigerants and air conditioners had released so
many chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) into the heavens that the
stratospheric coating that protects the earth from the full force
of the sun's ultraviolet rays had been damaged, perhaps
irreparably.

The editor pitched the story for page one, but Post executive
editor Ben Bradlee was not impressed. According to one source at
the paper, "Bradlee just sat back in his chair, raised his arm
and squirted--psst, psst-- under his arm and laughed. It was
inconceivable to Ben that using his Right Guard in the morning
could have any environmental effect.

"If you're the national editor," the source continues, "and you
know the executive editor is going to raise his arm and act like
he's spraying underarm deodorant when you pitch an ozone story,
you're not going to give it a real hard push."

Bradlee says he now tells this story on himself and adds: "I did
say once that if you sprayed your underarms in the basement of a
New York apartment house, I had trouble seeing how that could
hurt the ozone layer. I'm not sure I understand it to this day."

Though clearly one of the great newspaper editors of his time,
Ben Bradlee was, on the issue of the environment, typical of his
profession. "Even five years ago, the environment was not in the
forefront of our minds at any of the big papers," says the
Post's national editor, Karen DeYoung. "Certainly it is now. l
think people started getting really scared. When people began to
realize that this was real stuff and concerned us now--not 10
generations down the road--it made a difference."

Clearly, the summer of 1988 deserves much of the credit for this
shift in journalistic, and public, consciousness. It was a
hellish season. If you were a farmer, you watched your land bake
hard as stone. If you lived in the city, you boiled like a
turnip in a pot. But the summer did have one salutary result: it
woke people up to the dangers of the greenhouse effect, to the
probability that the earth is gradually overheating from all the
smoke and soot Industrial Man has spewed into the atmosphere.
Scientists had long feared such a prospect. They theorized that
global warming might bring widespread drought and famine,
unleashing Genesis-like floods the world over, as ice caps
melted and oceans submerged their shores. But because few people
in positions of influence paid much attention, the public was not
alerted.

Not until a top National Aeronautics and Space Administration
scientist, James Hansen, testified before Congress in June of
last year that the greenhouse effect was no longer merely theory
but fact, did the media really take notice. The New York Times
put the story above the fold on page one and gave the subject
extensive play the rest of the summer. So, to lesser degrees, did
other news organizations. Finally, the greenhouse effect had made
it onto the national agenda.

Technically speaking, the media's sudden interest in the
greenhouse effect rested on shaky science. The heat of 1988 could
not be blamed directly on the greenhouse effect; weather is the
result of too many variables to draw any single
cause-and-effect conclusion. Hansen, who works at the Goddard
Institute for Space Studies, was careful to make this point, his
worry was the weather in the year 2020, not one hot summer in
1988. Nevertheless, had the weather a year and a half ago not
been so ghastly, it's doubtful journalists, politicians or the
public would have listened any more closely to Hansen, than they
had to previous warnings. After all, Hansen himself had given
much the same congressional testimony two years earlier with no
apparent effect. Major reports by the National Academy of
Sciences, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology dating back as far as 1971
likewise had failed to attract sustained media coverage or
engage the interest of more than a few lawmakers.

Of course, 1988 was also the year when forest fires ravaged
Yellowstone, the Mississippi dried up, garbage and medical
wastes soiled East Coast beaches and pollution weakened seals
died en masse in the North Sea. Along with such recurrent
dangers as acid rain, toxic wastes and ozone depletion, these
disasters further concentrated the collective journalistic mind
on the gathering environmental crisis.

As a result, the environment moved onto the front page last year
as never before. The New York Times sounded the alarm about the
health hazards posed by the breakdown of federal nuclear-weapons
production plants; "60 Minutes" sparked a national uproar with
its report on the cancer risks for children eating apples
sprayed with Alar. Most striking of all, Time, in a rare
departure, chose Endangered Earth as its "Man of the Year,"
devoting nearly an entire issue to the plight of the planet.

Certainly, over the last eighteen months, the press has begun
doing a better job of covering the environment. But as
heartening as the media's newfound interest is, it is not
enough. If our children, to say nothing of their children, are to
inhabit a survivable world, some very fundamental changes must
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOHN HERSEY be made. The success of this
transformation will depend in no small measure on the news
media. Because of their enormous power to shape public opinion,
the men and women who are in charge of the media have an immense
responsibility in the struggle to avert ecological catastrophe
(see side bar).

"We don't have time for the traditional approach to education--
training new generations of teachers to train new generations of
students--because we don't have generations, we have years," says
Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute. "The
communications industry is the only instrument that has the
capacity to educate on the scale needed and in the time
available."

Why didn't the press trumpet the urgency of the greenhouse
problem earlier?

The simple fact is that the environment has traditionally not
been seen as a very important news story by reporters or by their
editorial and executive superiors. Neither CBS nor NBC News has
even one full-time environmental correspondent; ABC News only
named its first two earlier this year. All this stands in marked
contrast to CNN, where owner Ted Turner's strong
personal interest has ensured extensive and continuing coverage.
Turner's eight-member environmental unit, established in 1980, is
expected to produce a story a day for the network, according to
environmental editor Barbara Pyle.


CNN notwithstanding, when it comes to getting their work on the
air or in the paper, environmental reporters often find
themselves victims of a journalistic value system that
underplays ecological issues. "Particularly in Washington the big
beats are the White House, the State Department, the
Pentagon and the related issues on Capitol Hill," says David
Goeller, who covered environmental issues for the Associated
Press for four years before joining Environmental Action, an
advocacy group, in 1988. "I think the greenhouse effect and CFCs
are a hell of a lot more important to the future of the world
than the U.S. budget deficit. I don't want to say the Times and
the Post aren't doing a good job, though I'd say the Times is
doing a better job. But at both papers the environmental
reporters are competing for space against whatever this week's
diplomatic crisis is."

The Times and the Post are the two most politically powerful
newspapers in the country, not simply because they are read by
the movers and shakers in Washington, but because their coverage
tends to shape the news agenda of the networks and the rest of
the press as well. Stories the Times and the Post downplay have
little chance of reaching a national audience.

Nevertheless, even those distressed by Ben Bradlee's previous
attitude say he has "turned around a lot in the last year,"
following a trip to Brazil with a group of U.S. senators.
National editor DeYoung stresses that the Post recently beefed up
its environmental staff to three people and, for the first time,
hired a full-time reporter on energy policy. "There's much
greater receptivity now to putting those stories on the front
page," she says.

Despite these reforms, environmentalists consistently rate the
Times as superior to the Post, singling out the Times' Phillip
Shabecoff as the main reason. Shabecoff modestly explains that he
enjoys one major advantage over his competitors: he's been
working this beat for more than ten years now. "These are
complicated issues," he says. "But the turnover of environmental
reporters at most news organizations is very rapid. Except for
Mary Hager at Newsweek, there's nobody who's been on the beat
more than three or four years. You really can't do it that way.
You have to build up a storehouse of knowledge."

Shabecoff's career at the Times has not been without
frustrations, however. One of them was Abe Rosenthal, the editor
who ran the paper for seventeen years prior to his retirement in
1986. Shabecoff, while declining to comment on Rosenthal
directly, acknowledges that during Rosenthal's tenure the
environment "quite obviously was not treated as an issue of equal
import to national security or the economy, and it did take a
quantum leap in coverage after Max (Frankel) became
editor."

It was under Frankel in 1988 that the Times published its long-
running expose of the nuclear-weapons industry. The
investigative pieces revealed that production facilities run by
Du Pont and other corporate contractors for the Department of
Energy had leaked ruinous amounts of radioactive waste into
surrounding land and water supplies. Certainly, no one could
complain that this story was underplayed. Keith Schneider, the
principal reporter on the investigations, notes that in the three
months following the initial four-part, front-page series, he and
five other Times reporters "wrote over 100 stories on this, and
we still are, and it's still getting on our front page."
Schneider does admit, however, that what accounted for the
story's big play was not so much the health and
environmental hazards as "the fact that this had a national
security angle."

The troubling question is, why did it take the national press so
long to recognize this story in the first place? As Peter
Dykstra of Greenpeace observes: "Nobody in the press paid any
attention to the weapons plants until the Times made something of
a crusade about it. I'm glad they did, but why couldn't that
story stand on its own? All those problems existed ten years ago,
but nobody knew about it except about 200,000
environmentalists, who couldn't get anyone in the press to
listen to them."

Now that the environment is a hot topic, the favorite new
buzzword within the press seems to be "green." It's a word that
reporters and headline writers have appropriated from the
ecologically minded political parties that have sprung up in
Europe and elsewhere over the past decade. As it happens, the
green parties espouse some pretty radical political ideas. Not
only do they unconditionally oppose nuclear power plants and
armaments, but they also challenge the entire ideology of modern
industrial society. They strongly reject the conventional
equation of economic growth with prosperity and regard
technological progress as an oxymoron. They advocate a complete
reordering of the economy in deference to the environment. In
short, although they often work within the system, they are
revolutionaries.

Yet now that it's smart politics to do so, any politician who
pays lip service to environmental concerns gets labelled a green
by the press. Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times and many other news
organizations heralded the meeting of the world's seven biggest
industrial powers in Paris this July as "The Green
Summit," despite the fact that the assembled heads of government
stood for everything real greens oppose and produced an
environmental agreement woefully short on concrete action.

The New York Times Magazine used the same gimmick a few weeks
later in a cover story on the EPA administrator, William Reilly,
titled "Greening the White House." Proclaiming that "the courtly
new environmental chief speaks softly--but he obviously has the
president's ear," the Times piece was but one of many mainstream
news stories in recent months to accept the absurd notion that
George Bush is an environmentalist. This is the same Bush who, as
vice president, served in the most environmentally hostile
administration of the modern era. In fact, Bush was a key player
in Ronald Reagan's egregious assaults on the environment.

Despite all this, the White House has managed to portray George
Bush as an environmentally sensitive president. "It's called the
law of relativity," says Ralph Nader. "He's being compared with
Reagan, and all he can do is go up. Show the press a trend, and
they'll write [about] it." And not just the press. The
Washington environmental lobbyists and policy experts to whom
reporters turn for balancing remarks to the administration line
have given Bush, in Nader's words, "a long honeymoon." Norman
Dean of the National Wildlife Federation agrees that "a lot of
the positive press has to do with a reflection of how
environmental groups view Bush. We're trying to be politically
realistic." In other words, environmentalists are unwilling--so
far--to offend Bush with too much criticism.

Other environmentalists complain that when they do dispute
presidential policy, their comments get buried deep inside news
stories and sometimes shut out altogether. "The typical White
House story will quote the administration at length and then have
one paragraph at the bottom saying environmental groups were
unhappy, the gist being that it's important to know what Bush
thinks and less important to know what the environmental movement
thinks," says Diane MacEachern, president of a
Washington public-relations firm that has represented several
environmental groups.

Giving the president top--and often sole-- billing is a
time-honored if misguided convention of mainstream journalism. A
second convention that distorts environmental coverage is the
media's a historical, crisis-driven approach. News is defined as
what's happening today, not what might happen tomorrow. As a
result, the media's favorite environmental stories are disaster
stories, preferably ones boasting gripping TV visuals: The Exxon
Alaska oil spill, with its oozing shorelines and sad-faced sea
otters, is but the most recent case in point.

Of course, such events deserve comprehensive coverage. But the
overriding fixation on the immediate and the spectacular
compromises responsible coverage of the environment. Pegging news
coverage only to events means that reporters don't arrive on the
scene until after the damage is done: the problem at hand is
therefore never exposed until it is too late to do much but (try
to) clean up the mess. Moreover, some of the most ominous hazards
we face--such as global warming and ozone depletion--have been
decades in the making and will be years in manifesting themselves
fully. That they are gradual rather than sudden
processes makes them no less deadly. They just don't yield daily
photo opportunities tailored to the eye blinking attention span
of the media. How do you take a picture of the earth getting
hotter?

"There isn't a 'Stop the presses!' kind of development on the
environment story every day," declares Tom Winship, former
editor of the Boston Globe. "This is not event coverage. We need
to persuade the media to cover the environmental story
consistently. Sure, it's a slow story, but they've got to change
their attitudes about what makes a story."

Winship's point is well taken. In one respect, though, I think
the media would do well to adopt even more of a crisis
mentality. Just as Walter Cronkite used to make a point of
reminding viewers at the end of every broadcast of "The CBS
Evening News" about the American citizens being held hostage in
Iran--"And that's the way it is, the twenty third day of
American hostages in captivity," the anchorman would intone--so
today's journalists could make a point of reminding people about
the environmental crisis that in effect holds each one of us
hostage.

Rather than bore us with the ups and downs of the stock market
every night, why couldn't newscasts occasionally lead into
commercials with graphics depicting that day's smog levels in
major world cities, or number of acres of rain forest destroyed,
or tons of topsoil eroded, or plant and animal species wiped out?


Of course, news organizations could make such changes easily
enough; the obstacles are not technical but ideological. To many
in the American press, such journalism smacks of advocacy,
partisanship, editorializing--all the sins an objective
professional is supposed to resist. Yet even within the
parameters of mainstream journalism, argues Tom Winship, "there
are legitimate ways to do advocacy journalism--how prominently
you display a given story, how often you cover it, how much
editorial support you offer." Winship points to Time's "Planet of
the Year" issue as a model. "Nothing had a greater impact on
establishment journalism's treatment of the environment than that
piece. It was useful, crusading journalism such as we
haven't seen in years."

What was remarkable about the "Planet of the Year" issue was not
only the apocalyptic fervor with which Time described the earths
problems but also its enumeration of specific cures. Each
section of the report included a box headlined "What Nations
Should Do," which listed four or five concrete steps to counter
global warming, the extinction of species and other
environmental threats. At the end of the report was a full page
titled "What The US Should Do." Some proposals were
insufficiently bold, such as the call for automobile fuel
efficiencies of forty-five miles per gallon by the year 2000
(rather than, say, phasing out our gasoline altogether); others
were wrong headed, such as the dubious notion of developing safer
designs for nuclear reactors. But most were steps in the right
direction. Besides, one need not endorse all of Time's
suggestions to appreciate the value of journalism that does not
merely describe problems but also prescribes solutions. Call it
advocacy journalism, but at this late date we need as much of it
as possible. 

Nader argues that the press should do more reporting of
environmental success stories. "There's lots happening around the
country with solar energy they could be reporting," says Nader,
"but it's not a graphic story, and there's no official support
for solar from the Department of Energy. Plus, it's : easier to
cover conflict at the end source,  when pollution is exposing
itself to human beings, than to cover the emerging displacement
technologies....The press is not up to reporting horizons."

It's true the press generally shuns playing a leadership role,
though that's not the only reason aggressive coverage of
environmental alternatives is rare. Another impediment is that
meaningful solutions to these problems will require challenging
some of America's most powerful institutions and interest
groups.  

"What's needed now is an analysis of what it's going to take to
act," says environmentalist and writer Barry Commoner. "If you go
back to its origin, the environmental problem originates in the
means of production. We build the wrong kind of cars, so we have
smog. We use chemicals to raise our food, so we get water
pollution....ln our capitalist system the owner of the means of
production is free to produce whatever he wants, however he
wants. So the quest to improve the environment immediately
raises a very fundamental--in fact, taboo--question: Does
society have the right to intervene in the rights of property
owners? Until the necessity for this action is made clear, the
will to do so will not develop."

But as central pillars of the American establishment themselves,
the nation's leading news organizations are decidedly
unreceptive to ideas challenging capitalist orthodoxy. Nor do
they tend to do much tough coverage of their fellow corporate
giants. As Nader observes, "Look at all the stories on the
destruction of the Amazon rain forest. Do you ever see the names
of any multinational corporations mentioned?"

The question facing us may well be, as Daniel Zwerdling, the
former environmental reporter for National Public Radio phrases
it, "Can we survive with the automobile?" But what newspaper or
network will press this issue and risk alienating companies
responsible for tens of millions of dollars' worth of
advertising? Left to their own devices, journalists will instead
content themselves with simply relaying the debate on Capitol
Hill, where all sides assume the automobile is here to stay and
argue only over how efficient its engine must be. (One
brilliant, if fatalistic, exception to this rule was a recent
column by Russell Baker arguing that America can't survive its
auto dependence, but it's too late to do much about it).

It may be utopian to urge the news media to lead the charge on
the environmental issue. As New York Times columnist Tom Wicker
one of the few mainstream commentators to champion ecological
concerns, says, "It's not in the nature of institutions like the
Times or Post to stir up the community on very broad social
questions."

But saving the environment is hardly a controversial cause.
Indeed, the public may well be ahead of the so-called opinion
leaders in government and the press on this issue just as it was
a few years ago when there was clear support for a bilateral
nuclear-weapons freeze. In any case, the press has an obligation
to illuminate the dimensions and roots of the environmental
crisis and identify and analyze potential solutions. 


(page missing - unscannable)


To stop Stello, Schwartz enlisted the Greenpeace canvass in
states with nuclear weapons plants, asking them to take the issue
door to door. Ohio Canvass Director Orson Moon said that the
Stello nomination angered many residents of Cincinnati, a city
only 15 miles from the Fernald plant, which for decades has
contaminated the area with uranium. "Canvassers asked area
residents to write Senator John Glenn, telling him to oppose the
nomination," Moon said. "One canvasser, Sven Johnson, inspired
nearly 50 people to write letters."

According to Glenn's staff, the senator received 250 letters
against and only one letter for Stello during the fall campaign.
Glenn has since said he would oppose the nomination.
"Our efforts forced Congress to pay attention to the Stello
nomination and to the environmental, safety and management
problems at DOE weapons plants, which have not received much
scrutiny in the past," said Schwartz.

The DOE was forced to give Stello a lower job while the Armed
Services Committee considered and then delayed a vote on his
nomination in December. The Senate is expected to vote on him
early in the new year.--RS

OIL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELLS 

THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT'S attempt to develop oil and gas on the
outer continental shelf is penny-wise and pound foolish. The
exploitation of small amounts of as-yet-undiscovered oil and gas
supplies would put the coastal ecosystem at risk and make a
paltry contribution to U.S. energy needs. More could be gained by
conservation than exploration. People in places from North
Carolina to Congress have become increasingly dissatisfied with
this poor tradeoff.

At Department of the Interior (DOI) hearings in December, for
instance, North Carolina residents and state officials
criticized DOI's attempt to let Mobil Oil begin exploration for
oil and gas in waters off Cape Hatteras, saying the hastily
prepared environmental report was inadequate and biased.
Greenpeace campaigner Dorrie Smith told hundreds of people
across the state that "the five trillion cubic feet of gas Mobil
hopes to find would only provide a four-month supply to the
nation."

Local opposition is being augmented by national legislative
efforts. In November, Barbara Boxer (D-CA) introduced the Ocean
Protection Act of 1990, which would block the govemment's
continual attempts to permit oil exploration and development
along the nation's coasts. (See Action Access.)

For the last seven years, a series of one-year congressional
moratoriums on offshore exploration have kept the federal
government and the oil industry at bay. But Boxer's bill would
make permanent a ban on offshore development outside the central
and western Gulf of Mexico.

Sponsors of the bill estimate that it would place only one-
quarter of the undiscovered but recoverable offshore oil and gas
off limits. "Energy conservation--for example, raising fuel
efficiency standards for cars and trucks to 38 and 30 miles per
gallon by the year 2000--could provide 14 billion barrels of oil,
three times as much as the oil placed off-limits by the Boxer
bill," says ocean ecology lobbyist Gerry Leape. "It makes more
sense to conserve than to drill in environmentally
sensitive areas offshore."--RS

UN SNAGS DRIFTNETS 

THE U.N.GENERAL ASSEMBLY adopted a resolution in December
calling for a July 1991 ban on drift netting in the South
Pacific, leading to a global moratorium on high seas drift nets
starting on June 30, 1992. The United Nations acted because the
use of 30-mile-long drift nets has stripped fish, mammals and sea
birds from huge swaths of ocean.

Gerry Leape, ocean ecology lobbyist for Greenpeace, welcomed the
resolution as a "step in the right direction," but noted that it
failed to ask for an immediate halt to drift netting in the South
Pacific, where a thousand-ship drift net fleet from Japan, Taiwan
and South Korea threatens dolphins and stocks of tuna and North
Pacific salmon. The 15 nations in the South Pacific Forum
announced in November that they would ban large-scale drift nets,
prohibit transshipment of driftnet-caught fish, and refuse to
service ships engaging in driftnetting.

"Because the U.N. resolution leaves the door open for this
destructive fishery to continue, we're going to take action to
stop it," said Mike Hagler, who leads an expedition that will use
the Rainbow Warrior to intercept driftnetters in waters around
New Zealand.

The Rainbow Warrior's crew will track down driftnetters, film
fishing operations, conduct an underwater survey of nets to
determine what non-target species (dolphins, sea turtles, sea
birds, sharks, even perhaps whales) are caught, and take non-
violent action to halt fishing. "Information about the
environmental damage done by drift nets will add weight to calls
for a global ban," said Hagler. "Every country that has used
drift nets in their own waters has eventually banned them. Now
it's time to ban them in international waters."--RS


ACTION ACCESS

WASTE ALERT 

THE NUCLEAR REGULAtory Commission will soon reclassify certain
low level radioactive wastes. They will be listed as "Below
Regulatory Concern," allowing the industry to dispose of them
like everyday garbage. Write to your national representatives and
urge them to protect people from radioactive trash. For
information on local ordinances, contact the Nuclear Information
and Resource Service at 1424 16th Street, NW, Suite 601,
Washington DC 20036; 202-328-0002.

TO LOBBY YOUR REPREsentatives and senators in Washington, write
them c/o U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, DC 20515 or
U.S. Senate, Washington, DC 20510.

OZONE DEPLETION 

GREENPEACE CONTINUES TO support legislation to phase out ozone-
depleting chemicals and to ensure that their replacements are not
toxic or damaging to the atmosphere. Ask your national
representatives to join the 140 cosponsors of the Stratospheric
Ozone Protection Act (H.R.2699). This bill would rapidly phase
out major ozone depleting chemicals (CFCs and halons), limit
production of lesser ozone depleters (HCFCs), and create the Safe
Alternative Program to ensure that replacement substances are not
toxic.

GREENPEACE ON PAPER 

FOR A BROCHURE THAT discusses the environmental impact of the
paper making process and gives consumers instruction in
responsible home and workplace paper use, send $3.00 to Green
peace,4649 Sunnyside Avenue N., Seattle, WA 98103, in Canada to
Greenpeace,2623 West 4th Avenue, Vancouver, BC, V6K lP8, Canada.
Ask for The Greenpeace Guide to Paper.

WINNING ANTARCTICA 

IN 1989 WE SUCCESSFULLY raised opposition in Congress to the
ratification of the Antarctic minerals treaty and saw the United
Nations support our position for a World Park. To ensure the same
type of success for 1990, urge your national
representatives to support Sen. Al Gore's (D-TN) Senate
resolution S.J.R.206 and Rep. Wayne Ow en's (D-UT) identical
House resolution H.J.R.418 denouncing the minerals treaty and
calling for strong environmental protection of the Antarctic.

PROTECT OUR REEFS 

NOT ONCE, NOT TWICE, BUT three times in three weeks late last
year, ships ran aground on Florida's coral reefs. In response,
Rep. Dante Fascell (D-FL) introduced legislation that would
designate the entire Florida reef tract--the largest coral reef
ecosystem in the United States--a National Marine Sanctuary. Rep.
Fascell's bill would prohibit deep-draft ships from
crossing the sanctuary boundary. Let your national
representatives know that you support H.R. 3719, the Florida Keys
National Marine Sanctuary Act.

TEST SITE ACTION 

THE AMERICAN PEACE TEST (APT) is planning a peace encampment and
nonviolent direct action to stop nuclear weapons testing and
production at the Nevada Test Site from March 29 to April 2,
1990. For information write: APT, P.O. Box 26725, Las Vegas, NV
89126.

KEEPING ECO SCORE 

CAN YOU DISTINGUISH between the hypocrites and the real
environmentalists in Congress? To know how your representatives
voted on planet-saving issues in 1989, send $5 for the National
Environmental Scorecard to League of Conservation Voters,1150
Connecticut Avenue NW, Suite 201, Washington, DC 20036.

RAINFORESTS CLOSE TO HOME 


HOW CAN THE UNITED STATES expect Brazil and Malaysia to protect
their rain forests when it is not willing to do the same? The Big
Island Geothermal Project, designed to harness geothermal energy
from the active volcano Kilauea, would destroy the last lowland
tropical rain forest in the United States. To protest write
Governor John Waihe'e, State Capitol, Honolulu, HI 96813, Senator
Daniel Inouye, U.S. Senate, Washington, DC 20510; and your
members of Congress.

OCEANS OF WORK 

SEVERAL PIECES OF LEGISLAtion that would benefit the planet's
oceans and their ecosystems need your backing. Please solicit
congressional support for:

the Dolphin Protection Consumer Information Act of 1989
(H.R.2926), sponsored by Rep. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), and Sen.
Joseph Bid en's (D-DE) identical Senate bill. This legislation
would require all tuna fished in large scale drift nets to be
labelled "Caught with technologies or methods that are known to
kill dolphins."

the Ocean Protection Act of 1990 (H.R.3751), also introduced by
Rep. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), which seeks to provide permanent
protection for America's coast from offshore oil and gas
development.

legislation introduced by Rep. Wayne Owen (D-UT) to strengthen
the Pelly Amendment, enabling President Bush to impose economic
sanctions against Japanese industry in response to Japan's
refusal to stop its so-called "research whaling."

HOME COMPOSTING 

EVERYONE CAN HELP SOLVE the problem of overflowing landfills by
composting. Some 20 percent of household garbage is made up of
materials that can be composted. For a free pamphlet on how to
start a compost pile, send a self addressed stamped envelope to
Five Steps to Quick Compost, Organic Gardening, 33 E. Minor
Street, Emmaus, PA 18098.

PROTEST VELSICOL 

THE CHICAGO-BASED VOLUNteer organization Terra has joined
Greenpeace to stop Velsicol Chemical from producing chlordane and
heptachlor. Terra welcomes new members to participate in its
subway poster campaign, lectures and videos on alternatives to
pesticide abuse, and legislative campaign to support upcoming
Congressional restrictions on pesticide exports. Contact Terra:
3751 N. Sawyer, Chicago, IL 60618, 312-509-1808.


EARTH DAY 1990 

REGIONAL AND LOCAL CELEbrations are planned in every state for
the 20th anniversary of Earth Day, April 22,1990. Events include
community cleanup and recycling campaigns, teach-ins, concerts,
fairs, parades, rallies, and religious observations. Cities can
participate in the Global Cities Project, which encourages local
celebrations and the development of environmentally sound
programs such as ride sharing, recycling and energy
conservation. To get a packet of calendars, fact sheets and
activity lists, contact Earth Day 1990, P.O. Box AA, Stanford
University, CA 94309; 415-321-1990.

ECO FILM FEST 

COLORADO SPRINGS WILL host the first U.S. Environmental Film
Festival, April 27-29,1990, bringing filmmakers and
environmentalists together to confront the ecological dilemmas of
the '90s and beyond. Shorts, animation, features and videos will
cover air and water pollution, toxics, nuclear power, rain
forests, endangered species, overpopulation and more. For
details, write the U.S. Environmental Film Festival,1026 West
Colorado Avenue, Colorado Springs, CO 80904.

MOBILIZE AGAINST POLLUTION 

THERE'S A NEW TOOL FOR community activist groups working on
pollution issues developed by Greenpeace, National Toxics
Campaign, U.S. Public Interest Research Group, Citizen's
Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste and Clean Water Action
Project. The Pollution Prevention Action Plan highlights four
areas-- toxics, garbage, pesticides and ozone destruction--and
describes potential solutions, specific demands activists can
make on local governments and polluters, and a time line for
coordinated action. Earth Day 1990 will be used as leverage for
grassroots demands. For more information, contact the group
nearest you, or Greenpeace,1436 U Street, NW, Washington, DC
20009, Attn: Pollution Prevention Action Plan.

STUDENTS, TOO 

CREATING OUR FUTURE, A group of California students working with
environmental and social activists, offers a manual entitled, How
to Organize Earth Day Observations at Your School.The manual
includes information on recycling, tree planting, boycotts, and
celebrations and is available for $5 (less in bulk) from
Creating Our Future,398 North Ferndale, Mill Valley, CA 94941.

SEE DOLPHINS 

ON APRIL 22, THE DISCOVERY channel will screen a new documentary
titled, Where Have All The Dolphins Gone, narrated by George C.
Scott, 1 and 9 p.m. everywhere.

EARTH DAY TEACHES.. . 

. . . RECYCLE, EAT LOW ON THE food chain, plant trees to shade
your home, save water, don't buy products made of tropical
hardwoods, use public transport, bike or walk, avoid plastics,
use mugs, not disposable cups, know how your representatives
vote, mend and repair rather than discard and replace . . .