America the Befouled

Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson is convinced that the hottest growth stock in U.S. protest is conservation. In fact, Nelson himself is toiling to make the nation's campuses erupt next spring--in a giant, peaceful teach-in about environmental evils. As he has been telling audiences across the country for the past month: "The new generation is not satisfied with coming out on the losing end of man's drive for progress and profit."

Youth is not alone. In Missoula, Mont., for example, housewives outraged by the foul smells from a local pulp plant have organized GASP (Gals Against Smoke and Pollution). Similar groups have used the same acronym in other cities including Washington, where GASP stands for Greater Alliance to Stop Pollution. In Berkeley, a group called Ecology Action has developed a kind of street theater to dramatize pollution protests. To celebrate "Smog-Free Locomotion Day," the members recently took to pogo sticks, stilts, bicycles, unicycles, roller skates--any and every alternative to the internal combustion engine. Later they symbolically buried an auto engine painted black and splattered with mock blood.

Last week the ecoactivists staged a "Damn DDT Day" in San Francisco's Union Square. The movement has its own songs including a cutting eco-version of America the Beautiful. The lyrics:

Oh, Cancerous for smoggy skies, for

pesticided grain . . . Irradiated mountains rise above

an asphalt plain.

America, America, thy birds have fled

from thee; Thy fish lie dead by poisoned streams

from sea to fetid sea . . .

America, America, thy sins prepare

thy doom: Monoxide cloud shall be thy shroud

. . . thy cities be thy tomb.

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