Cheerful Sabotage

Under the cover of night on April 21, 1970, five Miamians, calling themselves the "Eco-Commando Force '70," sneaked into six sewage-treatment plants and threw packets of yellow dye into the works. The next day half of Dade County's canals turned bright yellow, graphically illustrating that Miami's inadequately treated sewage does not get far from home.

This week, in recognition of the pertinence of such antipollution tactics, the Eco-Commandos are being declared first-prize winners of a national "ecotage" contest. The word is not yet in any lexicon. Coined by Environmental Action, the activist organization in Washington, D.C., that sponsored the contest, it was most emphatically defined in a warning from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as "sabotage done in the name of ecology."

The winner's prize is a statuette called the Golden Fox, in honor of the enterprising mystery man of Kane County, Ill., who began the whole movement with his one-man campaign against local polluters--capping spewing chimneys in the dead of night, plugging sewage outlets of illegal polluters. But unlike the Eco-Commandos and the Fox, contestants had not necessarily acted out their ideas; all they were asked to suggest were projects that caused no serious harm. In fact, of all the entries, published this week in a paperback book, by far the most violent comes from a fourth-grade class in Wilmette, Ill.: "Kidnap the presidents of the big car companies and put them in a room and for 30 seconds turn their car pollution on them." It did not win a prize.

Among those that did:

> A suggestion to protest the use of approved commercial poisons by mailing "a coyote poisoned by 1080 or the like to the Wildlife Service."

> A "chain letter" scheme to deluge a prime polluter with 40,000 packages of garbage within eight weeks.

-- A classified ad form to be put in Sunday papers: "Polluted air need not worry you. We can keep your air clean for pennies. Call (insert appropriate polluter's phone number)."

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