Earth Day Greening From the Roots Up

By PRISCILLA PAINTON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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